Who “plays” with the climate?

Andrea Segrè teaches Circular Economy and Sustainable Development Policies at the University of Bologna. He is known for his pioneering research and projects on food waste, and in his fiction he loves to blend science, science fiction, intrigue, and suspense to prompt readers to reflect on the limits, possibilities, and dangers of science. The same scientific discovery can, in fact, be used for good or evil. It depends on how it is used and the conscience of those who use it.

Giorgio Pani, a young researcher specializing in nutrition studies, knows this well. In Andrea Segrè's first novel, Globesity. The Hunger for Power (2024), he had to deal with a particular flour specifically developed to unleash a global bulimia epidemic and thus enrich the producers of this "leech" flour, since instead of satisfying hunger, it provokes an ever-increasing appetite. In Deep Frost. The New Ice Age (Edizioni Minerva, 2025, €18.00, 304 pages), Segrè brings us back to Pani about a year after his adventure with the "modified" flour . He is about to discuss his doctoral thesis when a strange character appears in his life. He is a stranger and mockingly brings Pani greetings from Dr. Elif Demir. That name reawakens in Pani fears that our protagonist hoped to have relegated forever to the past. Because Elif Demir is the one who created the infamous bulimic flour and is thought by everyone to be dead!

Giorgio Pani understands that the Demir game and his fearsome organization of researchers and scientists operating outside the official rules are only just beginning. They face the threat of a revolutionary new scientific discovery: an innovative plant capable of capturing enormous quantities of carbon dioxide, causing global cooling. A secret scientific organization, with branches across the globe, is poised to bring the planet into a new ice age.

Engaging and well-paced in its narrative, Deep Freeze is a descent into the most hidden underworld of science, the underworld where research and technology seem to open the most incredible avenues and the temptation to feel superior to everything and everyone is almost a siren song to which one can only surrender. Segrè's book therefore appears as a warning to be vigilant, to acquire awareness, to learn. Today we sometimes find ourselves wondering whether science is going too far in its desire to transcend the limits of the known. We therefore ask ourselves what the limits of genetic engineering might be, a knowledge that can enable cures for many serious diseases but at the same time can lead to dangerous deviations that stray dangerously close to human selection. A selection that could privilege only individuals with certain characteristics. The same dilemma has always accompanied the topic of human cloning, a practice that simultaneously opens up extraordinary possibilities in medicine and paints nightmarish horizons with humans created solely to provide "spare parts" for other individuals. The same concerns accompany genetically modified products or robotics with the search for artificial intelligence capable of making human beings seem obsolete.

Never before has scientific knowledge required consciousness, the ability to understand what we are doing and what is happening around us. It is futile, in fact, to think that progress can be halted by prohibitions alone. It must be accompanied and managed by a consciousness understood in the modern sense. A consciousness that is the capacity for judgment and therefore for distinguishing between good and evil, between right and wrong. A consciousness that is alert within us and judges what we too do, and is able to listen to external influences without being dominated by them. In short, what the great twentieth-century physicist Max Planck said in this regard applies: "We cannot go beyond consciousness. Everything we discuss, everything we consider to exist, requires consciousness." Because, as Cicero argued, consciousness is the most divine thing that has been granted to humanity.