The parallels between the coronavirus and the climate crisis
You could just as easily replace the words ‘climate change’ with ‘COVID-19’; it is truly the tale of two pandemics deferred, denied, and distorted.
By John F. Kerry April 21, 2020, 2:20 p.m.
Excerpts: On the first Earth Day 50 years ago, I was one of 20 million Americans who took to the streets to demand that leaders protect our environment. We were activists — many reluctant, others accidental, and some dyed-in-the-wool purists — united as unlikely allies. We had different agendas, but one common purpose: to make powerful people listen. And we did. Before that first Earth Day, there was no Environmental Protection Agency, no Clean Water Act, no Clean Air Act. Citizens acted — and politicians followed. That day saved lives.
A half-century later, on Earth Day 2020, we can’t march, rally, or fill the streets because of stay-at-home orders to fight the coronavirus pandemic. But COVID-19 has given us greater reason than ever to organize and fight to connect the fragility of our planet to the fragility of life itself.
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We will be at the “nine years left” mark to take the long-term significant steps recommended in a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change three years ago. Time is running out: less than nine years to avoid climate catastrophe.
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Climate Tipping Points date back to at least 1864
“As early as 1864 George Perkins Marsh, sometimes said to be the father of American ecology, warned that the earth was ‘fast becoming an unfit home for its “noblest inhabitant,”’ and that unless men changed their ways it would be reduced ‘to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.’” —MIT professor Leo Marx
Earth “Serially Doomed”
Perhaps the best summary of the tipping-point phenomenon comes from UK scientist Philip Stott. “In essence, the Earth has been given a 10-year survival warning regularly for the last fifty or so years. We have been serially doomed,” Stott explained. “Our post-modern period of climate change angst can probably be traced back to the late-1960s, if not earlier. By 1973, and the ‘global cooling’ scare, it was in full swing, with predictions of the imminent collapse of the world within ten to twenty years, exacerbated by the impacts of a nuclear winter.”
2020: The Prince of Wales warns that humans have just ten years left to save planet – ‘We really do have to pull our fingers out now because the theory is we have got this decade left,’ he declared.
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2019: Prince Charles at it again: Issues new 18-month climate tipping point after previous ‘100 month’ deadline expires– The Prince of Wales has warned global leaders that if we don’t tackle climate change in 18 months the human race will go extinct in a speech in London yesterday to foreign ministers from the Commonwealth. “I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival,” Prince Charles said.
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Flashback: 2015: Prince Charles gives world reprieve: Extends ‘100-Month’ climate ‘tipping point’ to 35 more years– Prince Charles had previously issued a 100-month climate tipping point deadline in 2009.
