It seems to me that we have an accelerated time experiment on the realities and effects of government reactions to a major problem. Governments’ around the world handling of COVID 19 is a microcosm of the handling of Global warming.
Both are considered to be disasters of epic proportions by some and a tempest in a teapot by others. Some consider massive government intervention to be absolutely critical to controlling and solving the problem. While others see no reason for government interference at all.
COVID 19 is an issue that is working on the time scale of days and weeks while global warming is working on the scale of years and decades. My thought is that watching how governments and populations interpret and handle COVID 19 across the next year is a fair indication of how global warming will be handled across the next century.
So I suggest that people of many viewpoints should track the reactions, truths, and lies of the current epidemic with an eye to how global warming will be played out. the relevant timescale is about 100 to 1. Are the leaders of the various countries operating in the best interests of their people, or just using a crisis to gain more power and wealth? Are they creating a crisis for their own manipulative needs. Or are they doing everything right. Let’s all keep an eye on this with the long view.
johnhare
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never let a good crisis go to waste. this is how authoritarian regimes (and radical democrats) work.
Here’s a very thoughtful article that seems to address many of your points…
https://mikehulme.org/mobilising-for-war-why-covid-19-is-not-a-dress-rehearsal-for-dealing-with-climate-change/#
…and I tend to agree with it’s conclusions.
Excellent article. I also agree with the conclusions. Thanks Dave.
If you have never gotten the flu, than maybe you will not get COVID 19.
But otherwise, everyone will get COVID 19, the issue is not having a lot people showing up at hospital in the same month- and to combat that you “flatten the curve”, you do things to prevent this disease from spreading as fast as it does, so it doesn’t overwhelm the healthcare system.
Btw, it’s not impossible to have a “healthcare system” that doesn’t get overwhelm by something like COVID 19 or far worse. But we don’t have such a healthcare system- but my point is it’s not impossible in the future to make it.
The other problem is finding out what treatments work, and developing a vaccine- and doing that faster is also possible {we already found some treatments for COVID 19 and likely to find more}.
In terms of Global Warming, the simplest answer or point about that, is we are living in an Ice Age. And we have been is this Ice Age for millions of year. And we in the interglacial period of the Ice Age {have been in our present interglacial period for more than 10,000 years]. So we in Ice Age and we aren’t leaving it, any time soon- it’s impossible to leave it, anytime soon {unless we have impactor which incinerates the planet or things like that].
We in Ice Age because the average temperature of the entire ocean is cold and has been cold for millions of years- and will remain cold for thousands of years.
They say, that 90% of all global warming is warming this cold ocean- and it’s doing much in terms of warming our entire ocean which has average temperature of about 3.5 C. Btw, this average ocean temperature has been staying in the range of about 1 C to 5 C during our millions of years of current Ice Age. And generally it seems to take more than 10,000 years to warm or cool the ocean by 1 C.
An Icehouse climate or ice age, has cold ocean and polar ice caps. Which we have. And during glaciation period one get ice sheets forming in temperate zone, and this seems to take a long time to do, and we don’t appear to be heading towards glacial period at time soon- and left it more 10,000 years ago.
A few centuries ago, we in the Little Ice Ice {temperate zone glaciers were growing] during that time, one could argue we might be entering a glaciation period, but recent conditions would refute that argument. But had been entering a glaciation period it would taken many centuries to be in a glaciation period.
Some people assume that “CO2 enrichment” prevented us from going into glacial period. I don’t accept the idea. Many others assume our present levels of CO2 prevent us from entering glacial period. I don’t accept that either.
I do accept that higher CO2 levels probably increase global average air surface temperature.
And present global average air surface temperature is about 15 C {59 F} and that is pretty cold. What is warm is country like India {mostly in tropics} which has average yearly temperature of about 24 C which has comfortable “room temperature”.
And US average is about 12 C, which not a comfortable “room temperature”, and human without the technology needed, can’t live in such cold conditions. Such technology includes clothes and “housing”.
One way in which they are similar – they both rely on models to suggest political action, and the models have all been falsified.
Now, I’m sure that there is a model somewhere on COVID where they kept the error bars wide enough to not be falsified yet – but if you still believe that we should trust models made about things that have never happened before, involving human responses, you are crazy.
Predictions are hard, especially about the future.
The difference is that this pandemic is real, based upon well-established epidemiological principles and we will be able to shortly know the truth of most all aspects of this epidemic. However, the CO2 theory of global warming hasn’t been turning out like the predictions had it, it has been and will take a very long time to find out if it is at the level that the alarmist have predicted, there are all sorts of reasons for why it didn’t happen the way it was predicted, and most importantly, Climate Change is significantly more politicized than this pandemic. So, I doubt that we are going to learn very much from this pandemic.
One lesson we could learn is that when we are in the middle of an unfolding situation it’s hard to model it to try to calculate exactly what will happen. So instead, we could do something more like scenario analysis where you focus on listing things that plausibly could happen, evaluate them in terms of likelihood and severity of consequences, and look for ways to hedge your bets.