There are many lessons we are learning from the coronavirus pandemic. A crucial one is that we should listen to experts who spend their lives studying the sciences. We all should know by now that the US. preparedness for this emergency was abysmal.
Communications from our leaders encouraged laissez-faire attitudes that allowed thousands to party in Mardi Gras parades in late February. Now Louisiana is an emerging epicenter of the American epidemic.
U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, R-North Carolina, was so concerned after receiving briefings about the COVID-19 threat in early February, that he sold his stock holdings the next day but failed to take action to prepare us.
All the while, public health experts and leaders who took the experts seriously were shouting at us that we needed widespread testing, equipment to protect healthcare workers, more ventilators and hospital capacity to save lives. They were labeled alarmist or accused of exploiting the epidemic for political purposes.
People complain that South Korea is coping with the epidemic without bringing their economy to a virtual standstill. South Korea is successfully coping because they listened to experts all along. They had a public health infrastructure that could rapidly develop and deploy tests. Widespread testing identified infected people and effectively isolated them, which slowed the spread of COVID.
At first, we had no tests and the first ones were unreliable. Tests are still not widely available to track the spread of the coronavirus. We are forced to rely on testing at the tip of iceberg, symptomatic cases and deaths.
From China’s initial suppression of information about an emerging epidemic to our President’s dismissal of the threat, this is a lesson for the ages. President Donald Trump said that the 15 cases “within a couple of days is going to be close to zero.” Now we have 143,532 confirmed cases and 2,572 deaths with many more to come. The scale of this catastrophe is because leaders ignored science or worse yet suppressed it.
So now as we are living with the consequences of willful ignorance and denial, can we stop acting like climate change is not a threat? One in many ways more dire than the coronavirus pandemic.
Millions will die from COVID-19, but our species will survive. Epidemics do end. Most of us will survive albeit with much suffering and grief.
The same is not true about climate change, the earth will survive but we may not. It would not be the first time that most life on earth became extinct. There have been 5 mass extinctions — 444 million 375 million, 251 million, 200 million and 66 million years ago. These extinctions resulted in dramatic losses of life. Ninety-six percent of all species were lost 251 million years ago when global temperatures surged and oceans became acidified and died. The earth survived but not life on earth.
We are foolish to think the forces of nature don’t apply to us in a modern age. The coronavirus should be a lesson in humility, nature does not bow to baseless prognostications.
I ask naysayers to examine the evidence supporting their beliefs. What justification is there for cherry-picking a few studies from the overwhelming body evidence of a warming climate? Remember the decades that leaders of tobacco companies used pseudo-science to dismiss the harmful effects of cigarettes.
Greta Thunberg is a celebrity now, but she began as a teenager protesting alone every Friday. She caught our attention because she is speaking truth to power.
What are the consequence of ignoring the consensus of the world’s scientists? For COVID, ignoring experts will likely cost millions of lives and much wealth. For climate change, it may mean billions of lives and wealth will likely be meaningless. Is it really worth the gamble?
