Covid-19 is a gift

Covid-19 is a gift.

I know, it doesn’t sound like a great gift, or a gift at all. Maybe “Gift” as the German word for “poison”.

No. It’s a gift. Covid-19 is the signpost, the rainbow, the cloud in the desert and the pillar of fire at night, the Google Maps pointing us in the right direction, to help us understand what it is that we don’t understand about Climate Change.

It is a living, and dying, metaphor for Climate Change and humanity.

It is a gift because it moves so fast, where Climate Change moves so much more slowly.

The first awareness the world seems to have had of Covid-19 was 31 December, 2019; three months ago at this writing.

It has now infected people in 209 countries and territories. It has infected the world. If is a pandemic.

On March 1, there was 1 death per day in the US. By April 7, it was nearly 2000 per day, and Covid-19 was the greatest killer of people in the US on a daily basis.

We, most of us in the country, are restricted to our homes, told to wear face masks whenever we go anywhere, told not to go anywhere but out for groceries and toilet paper (not necessarily in that order), to maintain a 6-foot space between us and the rest of the human world, and not to go to the doctor if we showed symptoms unless it was life-threatening. The rest of the world is doing likewise, except in places led by idiots like Brazil, Mexico, and tragically, the United States, the latter having finally, partially caught on.

It’s a bit hard to deny at this point, but just because rational people find it hard, others do not. Only last week (first week of April), the head of the GOP in my country (El Paso county in Colorado) called it a “pysop, a psychological operation by, well, who knows? Our president seems to think, or to have thought, that it was the Democrats trying to unseat him in the November elections.

So Covid-19, or at least the response to it, is in microcosm what our response to Climate Change has been, or at least the response of many.

It’s a hoax, a fraud, a gross over-reaction to a minor disease, to one more variant of the flu. Many more people have died of the annual flu so far, so what is the big deal? Is this worth destroying the world’s economy over? Is this worth the unemployment, the suffering of millions or billions? Is this worth tanking my IRA and/or 401K for? I don’t think so. The flu kills 30-40,000 annually. Heck, this thing is not even at 10,000 yet. Calm the heck down.

Science predicted it. Science is responding to it. Science is the only hope we have of defeating it.

Buit we no longer believe in science’s ability to predict or defeat anything, and many of us won’t, until the dark demon creeps under the door and begins to devour our friends and family. As it has already. It is now the number one killer in America, and it has surpassed the annual flu death total in one month.

So here’s what we need to learn:

Many rejected the threat of Covid-19, and many still do, even though the rate at which it has moved has been the very definition of the word “exponential”. Slow at first, then it takes off like it was launched on a rocket in the US. There are other countries that reacted quickly, decisively, and wisely, and have found a way to manage it.

Many reject the threat of Climate Change (CC), and since CC takes place over decades rather than months, it is easy to maintain the pretense that CC is no threat, or that humans aren’t causing it, or whatever. By the time CC goes exponential, it will be far too late to do the CC equivalent of sheltering in place or quarantining. Covid-19 is the metaphor for CC that we need to heed now, and not later. Waiting even days or weeks to react on a broad front to CV-19 has proven to be devastating economically and in loss of life. That’s your metaphor.

Much of our reaction to CV-19 has been based on computer models, and as we all know about computer models, it’s GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage out. But when the computer models turn out to be true, then it was not GIGO at all. It was a reasonable and, as it turned out, accurate prediction of what would happen under different sets of reactive circumstances; if we didn’t do this, then that would be likely to happen. And if we did this, then we might prevent that from being so devastating. We are still looking at computer projections of what the future might hold, but we also have the examples of other countries to look out, against which to measure our models - China, Italy, Spain, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and so on. And we have the evidence of our own eyes, watching deaths in the US from CV-19 go from none to the most per day of any other cause of death in America in about a month.

Most of the projections with regard to Climate Change were based on computer models. Time Magazine had a CC issue in 2006 basing its predictions of what might happen on those models. They had a second CC issue in January 2020 comparing what happened in the intervening years with the models. 75% of the models were not only accurate, but on a broad front, CC is happening more rapidly, more dramatically than anticipated.

We all see it happening, as well. Farmers are watching the impact on the growing season, on rain and drought. The Pentagon is moving bases to higher ground and changing its plans for the future. Droughts are getting longer, summer temps hotter, wildfires hotter and deadlier, permafrost is melting at an alarming rate, releasing even more hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, along with potentially deadly bacterial pathogens that have been frozen for centuries, against which we have no immunities. Hurricanes are fiercer and less predictable, cities have been destroyed, lives lost, economies destroyed, climate refugees driven away from their homes into safer climes. The polar ice is melting at a stunning, terrifying rate.

But many are still denying CV-19 even as they watch it happen. You gotta wonder, is there a time when they will say, whoa, a LOT of people have died in a short amount of time. There’s something going on here that is really threatening to all of us. Maybe I should stay at home and wear a mask when I go out?

I suspect that moment will not happen corporately, but only inside a family. When CV-19 slips inside and sickens or takes our friends and families, then we will take it seriously, but I also suspect that those who are still unaffected will remain unmoved.

The tragedy is that Climate Change can be similarly brushed aside, until it is too late. And like CV-19, it will affect all of us, but it will and already has hit the poor and vulnerable people and countries much, much harder.

I once watched a video taken by a man watching an avalanche come down. He was safely up on the other side of the valley, up the hill, comfortably filming the massive beast destroy everything in its path. It was scenic, almost beautiful in its power.

Until it came up the other side of the valley and got him, too.

Don’t be that guy. We are all that guy.

And if all that we do to mitigate CV-19 works and we can knock it down, return to life as normal, you probably should not be the guy who says, see, I told you so! It was not a big deal. Can’t believe we had to go through all of that nonsense.

Remember. If you can say that, if you can think those thoughts, you are one of the ones who did not die, who are not here to say that, to think those thoughts.

Climate change might not be so discriminating.

11Bill Tibert, Vivien Clements and 9 others

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