#weather #ClimateChange #coronavirus #COVID-19 #FlattenTheCurve
Last winter, Texas froze.
This past winter, Alaska temperatures were in the 60s (December) and other places with normally cooler temperatures are in the 70s and 80s.
Tornadoes and wildfires erupt more frequently. This past winter, wildfires occurred in Colorado, which is normally covered in snow. (The snow came AFTER the fire).
The climate is changing. Inconvenient as that sounds, it’s happening. COVID-19 is inconvenient, too, but the virus isn’t going away.
Yes, we need to act, as a nation, a world, a community and as individuals to combat these phenomena. Unlike a common cold, which eventually goes away with rest, fluids and medication, we can’t rest and wait for the climate to get back to more normal, or for the coronavirus to disappear.
We have to do things to help create that disappearance. We have to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Then, we have to wear face coverings in confined public spaces where lots of people you may not know congregate.
We have to curtail our use of fossil fuels, and work toward the day we can eliminate them entirely. We can’t do that yet, as we have to wait for the technology to catch up. And it will. We are just not there yet.
Our individual mitigating activities are inconvenient. Most of us hate wearing masks. But, if we ALL do, and we ALL (who are eligible) get vaccinated, we can do our individual parts.
If we ALL curtail our use of fossil fuels – today’s high gasoline prices may help us do that — we can buy time for technology to allow us to eliminate them. That’s a tall order now, as electric cars and other clean energy innovations are being developed, but are either not quite perfected or are lacking the infrastructure to allow their widespread use.
Still, we can stop neither the virus nor climate change. The coronavirus may be here for the foreseeable future, but our individual actions – collectively – can help us live with it much easier.
Climate change is a bit different. We can’t stop severe weather or fires, but we can help by NOT living in the most vulnerable places. It’s nice to have a forest view out your back yard, but it may make your house a sitting duck for wildfire.
The same may go for houses on the beach. As nice as they are, as sea levels rise, they could get flooded to the point of no return.
The lesson here is not to blow off these things as inconveniences, and believe they will go away on their own.
After all, in the case of climate change, we, as humans, created it with our “progress.” The coronavirus, on the other hand, is a force of nature we have to fight.
Meanwhile, it’s urgent that we fight these phenomena and get our world back to somewhat normal ASAP. It won’t happen simply because we complain about inconveniences. It will happen by acting resiliently, collectively and individually to do the right thing.
Peter