Written by: Dustin Olson

In late Dec. 2019, China reported to the World Health Organization that a highly contagious novel corona virus had emerged in Wuhan, capital city of the Hubei province. We had no idea what was coming. Throughout Jan. 2020 the infection spreads with alarming speed and by month’s end has gone global, with recorded cases on all habitable continents. This outbreak’s death toll reaches 213, with unknown numbers of infected. At the end of the month, the WHO finally declares a global health emergency.

Our virus is named in early February: covid-19. As cases begin to spike globally throughout this month, it becomes clear that the C19 outbreak is different from other recent viral scares, such as SARS or H1N1. If not treated with the utmost seriousness, C19 would overwhelm societies and not be contained. Countries that acknowledged this point, such as China and South Korea, began to successfully ‘flatten the curve’ by implementing stringent prevention measures, such as isolation enforcement, proactive testing, tracing the spread, travel restrictions, and border closures.

Many in the Western hemisphere were under-whelmed and unwilling to take C19 seriously until it was too late. Sadly, Europe was caught off guard. By late February, despite calls for social isolation, the outbreak was spreading exponentially in places like Italy, which jumped from four confirmed cases to 1,577 in just over a week. North Americans, meanwhile, were encouraged to wash their hands and cough into their elbows.

C19 reached pandemic status on Mar. 11, with Europe the new epicentre. Projections suggest that it is only a matter of time before the U.S. adopts that title. Despite significant outbreaks along the West and East Coasts, it is mid-March before North American countries began taking C19 with a modicum of seriousness. Professional sports leagues suspend seasons; large public gatherings are strongly discouraged, with many being cancelled outright; universities outlaw face-to-face instruction; limitations on travel are put into place; and people are encouraged to practice social distancing and self-isolation.

While these measures are important, C19 transmission is already communal throughout the continent and we are woefully under prepared for the level of testing and tracking necessary to prevent our own systems from being overwhelmed. For perspective, between Feb. 23 and Mar. 6, Italy went from 155 confirmed cases to 4,636. Within the same timeframe, the U.S. went from 159 confirmed cases (03.05) to 7,764 (03.17). C19 fatalities in Italy have now surpassed those in China. So, despite more extreme steps being recently announced in North America, such as border closures, travel bans, financial assistance, and debt freezing, we can legitimately worry that it’s ‘too-little-too-late’. Time will tell but prospects aren’t encouraging.

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In 1988, James Hansen, director at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, reports to the U.S. Senate the environmental effects human produced greenhouse gasses were having on global temperatures. He explained that “global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.” That CO2 emissions would raise the global temperature was not a novel hypothesis. Indeed, Eunice Newton Foote (1856) and John Tyndale (1861) predicted this possibility well over a century earlier. In 1896, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius calculated that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere would raise the average global temperature 5-6 degrees Celsius. “A conclusion,” Isabel Hilton notes, “that millions of dollars worth of research over the ensuing century hardly changed at all.”

Since the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric CO2 levels have increased by nearly 50 per cent, with no slowdown in sight. In fact, there has been a staggering 11 per cent increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations since 2000, where they were at 370 ppm compared to the roughly 414 ppm today. We now have higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere than at any point in the past 800,000 years. Unsurprisingly, for climate scientists at least, things are heating up. Of the 20 hottest years on record, 19 have occurred since 2001, the past decade has been the hottest, and five of the ten hottest years have occurred since 2015. This temperature rise is a straightforward implication of the greenhouse effect and was recognized as inevitable, if not understated, by Hansen and his colleagues. Such prescience is even more alarming when considering our failure to heed Hansen’s further warning: “greenhouse effect is real, it is coming soon, and it will have major effects on all peoples.”

Unfortunately, we didn’t realize just how soon it would be here. We are already observing the global by-products of this sustained heating and they are not good. Increasing numbers of heatwaves over have taken a significant toll globally. In 2010, they killed in the tens of thousands, with 14,000 deaths in Moscow alone. India required mass graves in 2015 because morgues were overrun from the number of heat deaths. Wildfires and droughts have increased in number and intensity, with economic costs in the trillions, and immeasurable environmental tolls. Californian wildfires razed 1.8 million hectares of forest in 2018. The nearly 1 million hectares of the Amazon rainforest were torched in 2019.

The world watched in shock and awe recently, as prolonged drought and sustained record-breaking temperatures in Australia resulted in wildfires scorching 17 million hectares of forest, killing 24 humans and nearly 1 billion animals in the process. All this with only a roughly 1 degree Celsius average increase to pre-industrial global temperatures. Moreover, global CO2 emissions have increased every year since 2000, meaning things are going to continue getting hotter, exacerbating the already catastrophic heatwaves, fires, floods, and super storms. In turn, these effects will exacerbate ice melt, sea-level rise, drought, and mass migration. The greenhouse effect is real, it is here, and is having major effects on all peoples.

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It’s difficult to ignore the parallels between the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate crisis. They are global phenomena, indifferent to race, gender, or demographic. Their effects have significant human and unprecedented economic costs. They are past the point of prevention; mitigation is the best we can hope. Their mitigation requires a unified global effort with individual responsibility, collective political will, and sustained leadership. They have caught us off-guard and need to be addressed now if we’re to diminish further catastrophe.

There are certainly many factors contributing to why Canada and the U.S., despite having numerous expert projections and global examples for what to do and what not to, are only now treating the C19 outbreak as the crisis it is. One plausible contributor to this delayed response is that we too easily ignore warnings about crises, whose effects are not immediately felt. Despite the rational basis for accepting science-based projections, we tend to ignore, deny, or underplay the negatives taking weeks or months to unfold, until it is too late. Consider the responses to 9/11 or hurricane Katrina. People banded together swiftly and were willing to make substantial personal sacrifices to prevent such future events or their fallout. Conversely, it has taken nearly three months for North Americans to recognize the problem before them with C19. In that time, confirmed cases of infection are nearly at 300,000 with 11,271 fatalities. These numbers will be substantially higher when this article is published.

There are some glimmers of hope, however, that when the collective chips are down, and reality sets in, we can rally. Federal, provincial, and municipal governments of all political stripes are addressing both the health and economic concerns associated with C19. Federal and provincial healthcare spending has increased. Nonessential travel has been suspended and borders are being closed. Local jurisdictions are uniformly shutting down schools, universities, and non-essential businesses to encourage social isolation. With such isolation comes economic stagnation. The markets have reflected this point, dropping at rates unseen since the great depression. The usual neo-liberal tactics of siphoning trillions of taxpayer dollars into the big banks, while cutting interest rates, to ‘stimulate the economy’ have not worked. A surreal moment occurred as Republican President Donald Trump laid out a $1 trillion Keynesian stimulus package. Perhaps less surprising, but encouraging nevertheless, Canada has responded in kind, with Prime Minister Trudeau releasing an $82 billion response package while assuring Canadians that our country has “entered this challenge in a very strong fiscal position.” Even if the benefits go mostly to the corporate elites, it’s a positive step forward.

North Americans are only now beginning to appreciate the magnitude of C19 and the social and economic responses necessary to address this pandemic. In another week, we will begin to understand why we must employ such seemingly dramatic measures. The message from the rest of the world has been uniform: get ready because you have no idea what’s coming. As C19’s true toll unfolds in the coming months, keep in mind that climate scientists have been exhorting this exact message for 25 years. It is here that we must acknowledge an important difference between these two crises.

Pandemics have a shelf life. They may alter significantly the status quo, but some type of normalcy will resume. It may take months or years, it may be more painful than it has to be, but this too shall pass. Such is not the case once global warming reaches the point of no return—a point, we are told by our leading experts, that is roughly 12 years from now if nothing changes. Remember this point as our current crisis escalates in the coming weeks. Recognize that a much larger, much worse, monster of our own creation is looming on the horizon and will be unstoppable if we continue ignoring it.

C19 offers us at least two lessons. First, swift responses, even if fallible, are preferable to delayed ones, even if more informed. Secondly, what might seem like an overreaction today will be recognized as a bare minimum tomorrow. A complete transition away from fossil fuels and adopting lifestyles that dramatically reduce CO2 emissions might feel like overreactions today. We must recognize them as bare minimums, however. The green new deal is a bare minimum. It is necessary if we’re to mitigate our current climate crisis without collapsing civilization in the process. Our political leaders have shown that when faced with such dire circumstances, we have the economic resources to respond. We can restructure the economy if the times demand. Well, the times demand. We have a clear idea about what’s coming and it’s not good. We can rally. We must. Time’s up.