Diego Corrochano Fernández: “Understanding how the climate has changed in the past and how it is currently changing, from a scientific perspective, helps us lay the foundations to comprehend the great challenge we face and successfully tackle the future”

Before focusing on your actual job, tell us about your trajectory, we’re sure that it will help us to get to know you better.

I have a degree and a PhD in Geology and my PhD focused on studying, among other things, the climate changes that took place during the Carboniferous, studying limestone rocks in the Cantabrian Mountains. During this time, I also had the opportunity to work in the High Atlas of Morocco, studying a fossilized coral reef and how the climatic cycles had affected in their evolution. When I finished, I started working in Ecuador thanks to a PROMETEO scholarship, in the geological and mining Institute, helping with the cartographic sheets of the country, mostly the zone of Sierra and in the Amazonia, and afterwards I was lucky to join as an associated professor in the University of Salamanca and work in other of my passions, which is education. Since then, I’ve been training future teachers of different educational levels about how to teach natural science.

Let’s jump into the pairing Climate Change and education, since education is one of the main tools of mitigation and adaptation that we have. For decades, we walk a path that tries to bring us closer to the best version of this alliance, and a key concept appears: the Climate Change competences. Tell us about them

I’m absolutely convinced that education is key and fundamental in order to react to the problem as a society. A lot of different sectors have noticed that too, but the problem is that currently it is not clear which is the most effective way to do so. An idea that we have been working on in our research group is to introduce the concept of “climate competence” (that can receive different names within the competences of sustainability) in order to align with the current framework of our educational systems.

And what does it consist of?

It is a guide of common reference for students and teachers, that provides a base of everything that should imply the climate change education. Not only we have to teach conceptual contents, theory, but also to train people in certain abilities, values and attitudes that promote different ways of critical thinking, planning and acting with empathy, responsibility and caring of our planet. All of that is necessary in order to change our behavior and way of acting to achieve a more sustainable life.

In a process that fights for including this contents in schools, and out of them, every look focuses on the key agent, teachers. And that’s what you do, their formation, general and specific. What role do they play and why do you think that dedicating every effort to its capacitation is necessary in a context of Education for Sustainability and Climate Change?

It is a matter that really worries me. In order to achieve an improvement in students formation, in any subject, is necessary to have good, involved, compromised teachers that are motivated by their jobs. In fact, it is proven that the success of any educational system depends mainly on the teachers job. More than any other factor that can be named on public debates. In the specific case of climate change education, throughout the years I could prove that my students, future teachers, lack of a solid base in order to teach this subject, and that, inevitably, I’m afraid it will affect on their professional work. If we manage to empower them by increasing their knowledge we will achieve that they face this matters with their students successfully. Moreover, we can’t forget the multiplying effect of the future of teachers in the next years, so the challenge is double.

The truth is that the difficulties are different when trying to achieve an adequate climate alphabetization. About this topic exist a series of wrong ideas, widely extended and persistent, within the society and in the educational context specially. And some of them are related to the origin of the current Climate Change

Yes, there are alternative or wrong ideas about the climate change that can arise from misinformation, incorrect interpretation of scientifical data, unknowledge or economical or political interest. Some of these ideas, even though they are common within a lot of people, are not supported by scientific prove. For example, it’s surprising that some people keep putting in doubt the anthropogenic origin of the current climate change. Unequivocal data prove that it is us, with our activities and our way of life, the ones that have altered the climate on Earth.

Indeed, on one hand, we know that life on Earth is determined by the climate, it depends on it, and on the other hand, we have scientifical prove of its natural fluctuations in different scales of geological time and also of how these changes of environmental conditions have affected to human society. What do we know about this connection?

Since the formation of our planet, the climate has changed in multiple occasions, with changes bigger than the ones that human civilization has faced. That is, climate changes have been a constant evolution of our planet. Since the origin of the first hominids, nearly 4 million years ago, these changes were one of the factors that caused the migratory process around the world in search of food and better conditions for life. Due to this, our ancestors came from the African continent and, later, they conquered Eurasia and America.

However, if we get closer to modern societies, since the ending of the last glaciation the Earth has entered a period characterized by a cool and stable climate, in which the medium global temperature hasn’t changed more than 1ºC. These conditions, next to the increase of the population, have permitted big progress in human civilization, for example, the development of agriculture, the domestication of animals and the construction of permanent settlements.

But there have been other climate changes after, right?

Yes, despite this relative climate stability, some climate changes on a small scale and relatively abrupt have been registered to influence on human activity and have caused the rise and fall of big civilizations. Some classical examples are the crisis of the ancient kingdoms in Egypt, that depended on the floods of the Nile, the collapse of the Maya civilization because of a long period of drought, or the Small Ice Age, that affected on the XIV and XIX centuries’ agricultural production in Europe, contributing to hunger and migrations.

And another crucial moment would be the current one?

Of course, we’re seeing how the rise of the temperatures affects every human’s life aspect, from health, with heat waves or spread of tropical diseases, to social and economic instability. Although its impacts are global, the poorer and more vulnerable regions are the ones that suffer the worst consequences, and it is everyone’s responsibility to take action in order to mitigate and adapt to its effects.

So, the climate determines life’s conditions on Earth, but also humans are capable of changing it. That is, we depend on climate, but also we can alter it and science has evidence to prove it. Is the climate system of the Earth key to understand what’s happening and why?

To comprehend how the climate has changed in the past and how is changing now, from a scientific perspective, helps us to create the bases in order to understand the big challenge that we are facing and to be able to succeed in the future. I think that the current climate change is just the tip of the iceberg of the big global crisis that we are facing and will face the next generations.

We can say that to a scientific level there is a general consensus that the climate is changing and it is due to human activity, associated mainly to the mode of production of goods and food and energetical consume, that started 175 years ago with the Industrial Revolution and the fossil fuel era. It is unequivocal that our activity has heated the atmosphere, the ocean and the ground. We are responsible and it is in our hands to fix it.

The study of climate, both past and present as well as the future (with every uncertainties that this implies) is very important in order to comprehend events of the earth system like current Climate Change. So, do we need a correct perception of geological time in order to comprehend and examine the interrelationship between the current Climate Change and human society?

Of course, I understand that, if we don’t have a minimum conception of what geological time means, we can’t understand the problematic of the current climate change and come up with an adequate solution of the end of the fossil fuel era. It is true that they allowed us the advanced technological development that we enjoy now, but we must be aware that burning them alters the composition of the atmosphere and, in addition, they are limited resources that sooner or later will run out. We must find efficient substitutes.

Like I said, climate changes have been a constant in the evolution of the planet and thanks to the paleoclimatology we have documented changes so abrupt that generated big massive extinctions. But never, until now, it has been registered a heating so fast as the one we are living. If we aren’t capable of distinguishing between natural climate changes and the ones we are causing, we’ll hardly understand the problem. Therefore, it will be more difficult to act in a responsible way.

What do we know about past’s climate?

We have a considerable wide knowledge. In broad terms, throughout Earth’s history we can distinguish warm and humid periods (greenhouse periods), in which temperatures were relatively similar in every latitude, that are more common and lasting in Earth’s history and cold periods (icehouse), in which big masses of ice covered the continents, changing the weather between of extreme cold (glacial periods) and more cool and moderate temperatures (interglacial).

Nowadays, we are in the Holocene, with polar ice caps at both poles and a continent permanently frozen, the Antarctica and, in an interglacial period within the great Quaternary glaciation. During this period the average temperature of the planet’s surface has always been very close to 14ºC or 15ºC, except some short periods of abrupt quenching, but now we are seeing that in the last decades it is rising in a worrying way.

This is in reference to the last years that you talk about, but what about the next?

If everything follows the patterns we know, the most probable thing is that in the future, in 20.000 years, we will enter a new glacial period. Global temperatures will start to drop again, ice caps will expand in the oceans that surround the Antarctica and will descend to the Artic to cover part of the septentrional continents. However, the human action has heated the Earth to a point where we could have modified this natural tendency. We could be facing an uncertain future with several different scenarios.

How or why do we know how was the past climate?

The methods that are used to monitor the climate and the climate change are very diverse and can belong to two major types: direct and indirect. The direct or instrumental measures are used since 1850 approximately. With them we have made systematic registers of the named “essential variables of the climate”, that are used to know the climate of the planet. Since then, the quantity and quality of the observations we make of our planet have increased exponentially.

However, not having direct data on past conditions is very relevant, because it would help us understand the present and better predict the future. To do this, we use indirect measures, through climatic and paleoclimatic indicators. These indicators are and provide us with reliable data and models of a global and interdisciplinary nature. These include ice cores, sediment cores obtained from the ocean floor, sedimentary sediments and rocks, minerals, fossils and microfossils, dendrology, palynology (pollen) and crystallographic and geochemical analysis of speleothems. Of all of them, without a doubt, the ice (ice cores) of the polar ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica have provided paleoclimatology with the most relevant information regarding the latest glaciations that occurred on our planet. These are the “fossil” air bubbles accumulated in the ice, which allow us to have an almost perfect snapshot of the atmospheric composition of the past and temperature.

And have you worked with any of those?

In my doctoral dissertation, based on the study of the cyclicity of strata and isotopic analyses in rocks and fossils, I studied the climate changes that took place during the Carboniferous.

In the comprehension of the climate system, observation and modelling are very important. What models are used in order to know the past climate and what do these models say?

In science, to know the past climate we use paleoclimatic models next to a series of empirical data provided by different natural registers. With this we can reconstruct how the climate of the Earth has changed over time, providing information about the factors that affect it and, most importantly, how it could evolve in the future. The models are very diverse: some simulate atmospheric, oceanic and land-ocean-atmosphere interaction processes, and others are statistic models, that analyze how the climate system related to different variables changed. For example, the past temperatures and the variations on the levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite the uncertainty that trying to predict the future climate implies, understanding future as the next decades or centuries, what can we predict that will happen?

Unfortunately, the scenarios that we see are not very encouraging, but it seems that humans are reluctant to change our way of life in order to solve the problem. Even though we know that everything depends on our decisions, as climate change poses a variety of future scenarios depending on the actions that we take today to mitigate its effects.

The scenarios are based on models that value how different levels of emissions of greenhouse gas emissions will influence on the climate, ecosystems and human societies. It seems that we will keep suffering, with more intensity, a lot of the consequences that we are already suffering, like the rise in temperatures, the frequency and intensity of extreme meteorological phenomenon or the loss of biodiversity (let’s remind that in research we talk about the present as the sixth massive extinction).

However, you say that being in one scenario or the other will depend on our actions

Yes, because we still got time to try to improve the tendencies that are being drawn. The main challenge is to limit our emissions while we adapt our societies to some of the changes that are already inevitable. Each degree of heat that we can avoid will make a big difference in the quality of life of the future generations. I am convinced that we will take the right direction. Little by little we can see some improvements where people combine mitigation, adaptation and technological innovation, like for example, with solutions based on nature or a sustainable urbanization with green cities and energetically efficient.

Let’s go back to the educational approach. To improve the comprehension about the climate system and the interactions between Climate Change and society in the context of time and geological space is a need in these moments. What do you consider to be the most adequate form or what would you recommend to make this subject an objective in the formation of the future science teachers?

Education about climate change is essential in order to train conscious, responsible, able to act in the face of this global challenge, trained and informed citizens. The fundamental aspects include both scientific knowledge and development of abilities, values and attitudes that allow the participation in solutions in a more critical and responsible way. We need to try to make our students contemplate the problem globally, but to act locally. We know that the solution is in our hands. We are the ones that have to act.

I believe that a good way to accomplish all these objectives within the training of future teachers is to use an active and participative education, oriented to action, in which the purpose is to enable and empower students into being agents of change and to be motivated to talk about this matter in their classes.

I don’t want to finish this interview without asking what is it that you love the most about your job and which are the challenges or difficulties that worry you the most

Without a doubt, what I like the most about my job is teaching. Although it is true that I often can’t devote as much time to it as I would like to due to my other daily labors. Working with future teachers, teaching how to teach science, is something that motivates me and I think that it is more demanding than any other type of teaching. But, at the same time, maybe this is the aspect that worries me the most about my job. Knowing if I’m preparing my students correctly, future teachers, so that they can be competent, ethical and innovative, able to face current educational challenges and future challenges that we don’t know about yet.