Early fallout includes canceled science missions and potential gaps in long-running climate records, while research budgets could take a hit in the long run.

Prof. Adam Frank University of Rochester: "It's time to wake up. Like this pandemic, climate change is also going to push on the networks that make up our civilization. Unlike the pandemic, its effects will be long term. The international COVID-19 pandemic is many things, but its deepest impact may be fostering a recognition that this machine of civilization that we built is a whole lot more fragile than we thought. And that is why, in the long term, the coronavirus will one day be seen as a fire drill for climate change." ...

"The pandemic has awakened us from our slumber. It is letting us see the real consequences of denial. That may be its most important lesson — allowing us the insight, strength and compassion to build a resilient and robust future."

Dr. Bendavid and Dr. Bhattacharya are professors of medicine at Stanford: "Fear of Covid-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate—2% to 4% of people with confirmed Covid-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others. So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, two million to four million could die. We believe that estimate is deeply flawed. The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases." ...

"A 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million. Given the enormous consequences of decisions around Covid-19 response, getting clear data to guide decisions now is critical."  ...

"If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic, then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible...And policy makers will need to focus on reducing risks for older adults and people with underlying medical conditions. A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health. We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns."

"If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average." - Dr John Ioannidis Professor of Medicine, of Health Research and Policy and of Biomedical Data Science, at Stanford University School of Medicine.

"Instead of ‘flattening a curve’, rational leaders (like Beijing’s) try to turn the curve into a cliff...

"If people were led to believe that 1-2 °C of warming was basically the end of the world, is it surprising that they're absolutely terrified of a new disease that has the potential to kill a few million old and sick people? ...

The existential threat posed by coronavirus – or at least, our irrationality towards it – is greater than the climate threat (though still very small). Westerners who haven't seen any real threats for a long time have developed a condition – termed "affluenflammation" by the American musician Remy –  which is a pathological habit of inflating negligible threats. Many people will conclude that the crisis was exciting, and try to kickstart a repetition. The curfew is likely to reduce CO2 emissions this year, so climate activists may try for similar results in the future.

Maybe people will realize that the reaction to the coronavirus was disproportionate."

Paul Homewood: The point is admitted that it is actually warm water at a depth of about 300m which is undercutting the glacier. But it is physically impossible for greenhouse gases to have any measurable effect at all on waters at such a depth...

In reality, the scientists who wrote this study do not have a clue whether the retreat of the Denman is anything new or not, or whether the deep ocean temperatures are any warmer than before 1979. Or whether what they are observing is just a natural process.

They claim that since 1979, 250 billion tonnes of ice has been lost, equivalent to 0.5mm of sea-level rise. In other words, 1.3mm/C, hardly cataclysmic. They then go on to talk about a potential loss of 540 trillion tonnes, raising sea levels by 5 feet. Yet at current rates, it would take 2160 years for this to occur! As always with these sorts of studies, the authors refuse to say how long all this will take to happen.

Dr. Dan Yamin of Tel Aviv University’s industrial engineering department, has developed models for predicting the spread of infectious diseases, and helped curb the Ebola epidemic. He says the coronavirus could take some 13,000 lives in Israel – but there's cause for optimism

“The actual number of people who are sick with the virus in South Korea is at least double what’s being reported, so the chance of dying is at least twice as low, standing at about 0.45 percent – very far from the World Health Organization’s [global mortality] figure of 3.4 percent. And that’s already a reason for cautious optimism.”

Rush Limbaugh: "The deep state extends very deeply. And the American people did not elect a bunch of health experts that we don’t know. We didn’t elect a president to defer to a bunch of health experts that we don’t know."

"This country is shut down. It’s just incredible. And I’ll tell you, folks, it has been scary to me, it has been frightening to me to see how easy it has been to do this...it isn’t gonna be the same country." 

On coronavirus stimulus package: "Why even have budgets? We don’t have $2 trillion to be giving away to people...We don’t have the money. We have a national debt of 22, $23 trillion. We don’t have this money. We’re printing this money."

"You remember how everybody was fit to be tied when Obama had a $787 billion stimulus? That wasn’t even $1 trillion. That led to the creation of the Tea Party." 

Now is the time for global leaders to create one world government to tackle the twin medical and economic crises caused by the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged on Thursday. ...

“This is not something that can be dealt with in one country,” he said. “There has to be a coordinated global response.” ...

Gordon Brown has urged world leaders to create a temporary form of global government to tackle the twin medical and economic crises caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Destruction of wildlife and the climate crisis is hurting humanity, with Covid-19 a ‘clear warning shot’, say experts ...

Nature is sending us a message with the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis, according to the UN’s environment chief, Inger Andersen.

Andersen said humanity was placing too many pressures on the natural world with damaging consequences, and warned that failing to take care of the planet meant not taking care of ourselves. Leading scientists also said the Covid-19 outbreak was a “clear warning shot”, given that far more deadly diseases existed in wildlife, and that today’s civilisation was “playing with fire”. They said it was almost always human behaviour that caused diseases to spill over into humans.

To prevent further outbreaks, the experts said, both global heating and the destruction of the natural world for farming, mining and housing have to end, as both drive wildlife into contact with people.

"Once we are in a crisis, we can act to do something quickly, act fast," said Thunberg, 17, whose solo school strikes for climate action helped spark a global youth climate strike movement. "Though it must be in a different way to how we have acted in this case, we can act fast and change our habits and treat a crisis like a crisis." ...

The virus crisis "doesn't mean we need to let go completely of activism," she added. "We can do it online and at home. We just need to be creative and find new ways."

Much remains uncertain as the effects of the Coronavirus ravage economies. But what seems clear is that any assumptions made about transitioning to the green economy have now been rendered obsolete. -- Dave Keating, Forbes, 24 March 2020 
 

The novel coronavirus pandemic is now the world’s top priority. Climate change will have to be put on the back burner, for now. That was the message delivered to reporters from U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, via an unprecedented online press conference he organized last week. --Scientific American, 23 March 2020

“Our people want to return to work,” Trump wrote Monday on Twitter. “They will practice Social Distancing and all else, and Seniors will be watched over protectively & lovingly. We can do two things together. THE CURE CANNOT BE WORSE (by far) THAN THE PROBLEM! Congress MUST ACT NOW. We will come back strong!” ...

“We lose thousands of people a year to the flu. We never turn the country off,” Trump said, echoing what he said Monday night at a White House briefing. “We lose much more than that to automobile accidents. We didn’t call up the automobile companies and say, ‘Stop making cars. We don’t want any cars anymore.’ We have to get back to work.” “We’ve never closed down the country from the flu.”

Brendan O’Neill: "There is something profoundly ugly in this. George Monbiot and other greens seem to view Covid-19 as a disaster that will have an upside: it might roll back the Enlightenment-era belief that humankind can exercise dominion over nature and remind us that actually we are at nature’s mercy. They hope this disaster will restore nature’s power over the humanized world."

U.N. FORCED TO PIVOT: During his virtual press conference, Guterres gave a nod to the Paris Agreement. He said the pandemic could create an opportunity to rebuild the global economy along more sustainable lines. But he made it clear the world must focus first on the coronavirus crisis. ...

The United Nations’ main climate change initiatives have been moved online or are on hold. Several planned U.N. climate action gatherings have been canceled or delayed. The offices of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have canceled all in-person meetings and foreign travel, and are working to arrange online conferences where possible.

Most recently, the U.N. International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a body based in Montreal, called off a series of regional meetings meant to roll out a new emissions trading program to begin this month. ICAO said the regional planning seminars for its carbon offsetting and reduction scheme for international aviation simply have been postponed. But no new dates have been proposed.