NYT: ‘Climate Change’ Has Lessons for Fighting the Coronavirus – Climate battle has familiar ‘disdain for science, neglecting future risk, lack of global leadership’
A study by University of Chicago researchers projected that, by 2100, climate change would kill roughly as many people as the number who die of cancer and infectious disease today. As with the European heat waves, the most vulnerable in society will bear the brunt. “Today’s poor bear a disproportionately high share of the global mortality risks of climate change,” the paper concluded.
A disdain for science, neglecting future risk, lack of global leadership: Coronavirus reveals fault lines familiar to those who have been working on climate change for years. https://t.co/2nyT4iN9MP
— NYT Climate (@nytclimate) March 23, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/climate/climate-change-coronavirus-lessons.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytclimate
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“Alarming levels of inaction.” That is what the World Health Organization said Wednesday about the global response to coronavirus.
It is a familiar refrain to anyone who works on climate change, and it is why global efforts to slow down warming offer a cautionary tale for the effort to slow down the pandemic.
“Both demand early aggressive action to minimize loss,” said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who was teaching classes remotely this week. “Only in hindsight will we really understand what we gambled on and what we lost by not acting early enough.”
Scientists like Dr. Cobb have, for years, urged world leaders to bend the curve of planet-warming emissions. Instead, emissions have raced upward. Now the consequences are being felt: a three-month-long flood in the Florida Keys, wildfires across a record hot and dry Australia, deadly heat waves in Europe.
Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University, called the virus “climate change on warp speed.”
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Why have we not taken climate risks to heart? Politics and psychology play a role.
- Thanks for reading The Times.
Change is hard when there’s a powerful industry blocking it. The fossil fuel industry has pushed climate science denial into the public consciousness. It has lobbied against policies that could rein in the emissions of planet-warming gases. And, it has succeeded: The United States, history’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, is the only country in the world to have withdrawn from the Paris accord, designed to stave off the most catastrophic effects of climate change.
