Coronavirus Reveals the Risks and the Necessity of Tackling Climate Change Now Before It’s Too Late
Coronavirus powerfully demonstrates the meaning of tipping points and the necessity for us to develop more respectful, sustainable relationships with nature
Coronavirus and climate change are both caused by humans’ overexploitation of nature and our willful disregard of natural boundaries and processes. The outbreak of the virus, like HIV, is largely the result of the global wildlife trade, which threatens to empty the world’s forests and exposes to humans to a host of deadly diseases from wild animals. The United States is not exempt from the blame because it is a major player in the global illegal wildlife trade as a “consumer” of other species and as a transit point for wild animals. In addition, once it became clear that a new virus (SARS-CoV-2) had jumped from another species to humans in Wuhan, China, many world leaders initially responded by denying the threat and hoping that by ignoring it would go away — but denying natural processes like exponential growth of a highly transmittable pathogen actually facilitated the virus’ growth and created a second disaster (rapid spread of infections and overwhelmed healthcare systems) on top of the first one.
Despite many governments’ bungling of their responses to coronavirus, this is a chance for our societies to learn some deeper truths about climate change and the 6th extinction crisis — and our systems’ vulnerabilities and complete lack of preparation to deal with these crises — and the need for immediate, bold action to ward off the worst impacts through a Green New Deal.
First, the coronavirus pandemic is giving us a real-world lesson of the meaning of “tipping points” and how important it is to act early to avoid the permanent, widespread damages of crossing nature’s thresholds. A tipping point is a point in a natural system beyond which basic functions start to break down and the whole system often irreversibly, and sometimes suddenly, shifts to a significantly less healthy state.
On the level of the individual human body, it can be said that coronavirus has a tipping point. As long as the virus stays in the nose and throat (the upper respiratory tract), the illness tends to be relatively mild, but if it spreads through the windpipe and into the lungs (the lower respiratory tract) this can suddenly lead to very severe conditions such as pneumonia, lung damage caused by the body’s overly aggressive immune system response, and possible infection by a second virus or a bacteria (which is made more likely if the epithelium lining of the trachea or bronchi are damaged). At this stage, when the immune system is pumping the lungs full of virus-fighting fluid, the amount of oxygen passing through to the bloodstream can diminish greatly, which threatens other organs’ functions, and the body can enter septic shock. In the words of a senior scientific adviser to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “When you get a bad, overwhelming infection, everything starts to fall apart in a cascade … You pass the tipping point where everything is going downhill and, at some point, you can’t get it back.”
I am wary of the average American’s ability or desire to understand scientific concepts like exponential growth, but when you see people suddenly go from mild symptoms to extremely severe ones it’s a visceral example of the power of tipping points, which are built into many natural systems.
Second, there are clearly tipping points to Covid-19's spread at the societal level. If countries don’t act radically enough and early enough, the virus can end up spreading rapidly throughout society (like in the case of Italy and, quite possibly, the United States). This is due to the nature of exponential growth and natural reproduction of any organism that has an abundance of resources (the Ro or reproduction rate of coronavirus is likely around 2.79 to 3.28, meaning that every time the virus spreads it infects around three times more people than the last time).
In contrast, some places have done excellent jobs of dealing with the virus — Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan have all kept their case numbers low and “flattened the curve” relatively quickly. Most of these places implemented aggressive testing early on, banned flights from China very early when such a policy could still be effective, and quarantined and did contact tracing and of all identified carriers along with other preventative measures. They listened to the scientists and health experts and did not put the interests of the economy over the well-being of their citizens. But perhaps even more importantly, they already had well-organized systems in place to deal with a viral outbreak. This was partly the result of the 2003 SARS outbreak which hit several of these countries very hard, giving them 20 years to develop plans and systems to deal with the next epidemic. Singapore had “ready-made government quarantine facilities and a 330-bed, state-of-the-art national center for managing infectious diseases that opened last year.” Taiwan has a Central Epidemic Command Center to coordinate across government agencies and mobilize resources, a centralized database to enable the use of A.I. and data analysis to identify those most at risk of having the virus, and a national health insurance system that allows anyone to get a free test and pays for their food, lodging, and medical bills if they have to go into quarantine for 14 days.
In other words, these places have responded to the virus well not just because they listened to the scientists or because some of them have more authoritarian governments, but because they fulfilled one of the central roles of government — to prepare for highly likely-to-occur, high-risk threats to the entire society and to organize society’s response when faced with such crises.
Climate change and the 6th mass extinction crisis are far more complex and more threatening risks than coronavirus, because they threaten to destroy natural systems and stable conditions that we have relied on for millennia for the sustenance of human civilization. Some likely impacts of climate change include more frequent and more severe droughts and heat waves, more intense hurricanes, erratic changes in precipitation patterns, the expansion in range of disease-causing virus and bacteria, and severe crop failures and livestock shortages. Due to the coronavirus, we are already seeing shortages of agricultural workers and some countries starting to hoard food.
As an insightful NBC commentary put it recently, modern “civilization” is really a series of networks stacked on top of each other — healthcare, data, supply chains, food, etc. As the world becomes more interconnected these networks are becoming more complex and more far-flung, which may paradoxically make them more fragile and more vulnerable to shocks in one part of the world:
The warnings must be taken seriously, as studies of multilayered networks show they can be fragile: Breaking links in one network cascades through the others like a fragmenting bullet ripping through a complex machine.
So what does any of this have to do with climate change? Like this pandemic, climate change is also going to push on the networks that make up our civilization. Unlike the pandemic, its effects will be long term, and there won’t be a vaccine that can save us.
If coronavirus is like a bullet ripping through the machine, what happens when climate change shoots several much larger bullets through widespread droughts, crop failures, and massive migrations of people due to sea level rise? Coronavirus shows us our systems are clearly not as resilient or flexible as we thought they were, and they are definitely not ready to deal with long-term, on-going disruptions due to climate change.
However, we can avoid the worst effects of climate change, like with coronavirus, if we act swiftly and boldly enough to avoid the tipping points. The Earths’ climate, like the human body, is a highly complex system with many in-built tipping points which, if crossed, could cause the system to rapidly decay to a state that is much less conducive to supporting the diversity of life or human civilization. For instance, permafrost currently contains 1,400 gigatons of carbon worldwide or nearly twice all the carbon in our atmosphere (850 gigatons), and if we don’t account for the possibility of rapid thawing events, we could greatly underestimate the rate of permafrost carbon release and could even get ourselves locked into a self-feeding spiral (a “feedback loop”) of increasing warming leading to more permafrost melting and carbon release.
This is similar to coronavirus’ outbreak in a society — the effects of acting early and containing the virus right before the tipping point are magnitudes of order less than the damaging effects of crossing the tipping point.
Thinking of the Earth’s natural systems like the human body, we could also consider regional biogeochemical cycles to function like organs, the failure of any one of which would cause massive local damage and threaten the health of the whole system. Scientists say that the Amazon rainforest has a tipping point of habitat destruction and fragmentation beyond which the entire forest will shift from a vibrant tropical rainforest to a drier, savannah-like system. If this happens, we would lose a huge treasure of irreplaceable biological diversity. While some say the Amazon acts as the lungs of the Earth due to its massive abilities for gaseous transfers, another apt metaphor is that it is the heart and arteries of South America because it functions as a biotic water pump that spreads 20 billion tons of rain over a large area of the continent accounting for 70% of its GDP (using Brazil as one example, less than 10% of its crops use irrigation, so there is a huge dependency on rainfall for agriculture and the country’s power production). When countries encourage clearing of the Amazon for expansion of agricultural commodities production, they are undermining their own future and playing with dangerous natural processes that could unleash damages far worse than coronavirus on their economies.
The Amazon forest also acts as the liver of the region, because plants release antioxidants into the air that neutralize pollutants, and of course it plays an important role of carbon storage and mitigating against climate change.
It’s very easy to take it for granted when your lungs, your heart, your arteries, and your liver are all functioning properly (as politicians like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro do when they ignore the warnings of nature), but their value quickly becomes apparent when your bodily systems become toxic and your organs start to fail.
As with coronavirus, if we wait until we see the worst symptoms of climate change to act, it will already be too late as we will likely have crossed significant tipping points. As some health experts have pointed out, you have to take preventative measures before a crisis develops because coronavirus can rapidly expand from a small segment of the population to a much larger portion— “So if you wait till you see a problem, then you have another month of agony, at least.” The timescale of climate change is slower than coronavirus, but this also means if we wait until we fully “see” the problem we may have to deal with an outbreak of uncontrollable, severe climate disruptions for decades or centuries.
The climate and 6th extinction crises may seem like more intractable or inevitable problems than coronavirus, but I think that is because we have misunderstood the problem and the role of nature in them. If we simply focus on individual metrics like lowering our CO2 emissions or protecting more land area within the context of our current economic systems, then yes it is almost impossible to bend the emissions curve or to set aside enough protected areas in the face of relentless, short-sighted, mindless, inefficient and overly-consumptive economic growth. But if we take a step back and understand that we have to fundamentally change our relationships with nature — and that this must lead to changes in all of our economic activities to be in line with natural processes and limits, then we could realize we have the technology and the ability to shift to a different way of being that meets all of humanity’s growing needs while maintaining the ecological integrity of the planet. We may not be capable yet of making this shift for the sake of the planet, but if everyone understands the risks of coronavirus I think we could be capable of making this shift for the sake of ourselves and avoiding the much worse risks of crossing planetary climate and extinction tipping points.
Lastly, climate change is similar to coronavirus in that if we understand and respect powerful natural processes, we will start to see those natural processes work in our favor rather than against us. For instance, we know that if we implement drastic enough measures to stop the spread of coronavirus like a society-wide lockdown, the curve of new cases should hit an “inflection point” after which it starts to decline. Some writers have pointed out that climate change is different in that there is no such inflection point— we have to reduce our emissions all the way down to zero, because there is no point at which the problem is going to “naturally” get better. I agree with the truth that we have to reduce emissions to zero ourselves, but this thinking also shows a fundamental misunderstanding of nature and our relationship with it.
The natural world is not “fragile” or some passive object that is “in need of protection.” Coronavirus should be an example to us of nature’s terrifyingly powerful capabilities of reproduction and abundance (in this case, abundance of the virus) and it is extremely important for us to act according to our scientific understandings of natural processes. Calling nature “fragile” makes nature look like a victim and puts our problems on nature, when in reality the problem lies entirely with ourselves. How can we possibly expect the natural world to continue to function if we completely destroy and convert vast areas of habitat, dump million of gallons of overly-powerful pesticides and fertilizers into rivers, and overharvest species like pangolins not for any nutritional value but merely to feed superstitious beliefs? Going back to the issue of coronavirus and exponential growth, given livable conditions and availability of resources, many species of plants, animals, fungi etc. can reproduce exponentially. The “nature” of nature is not fragility, passivity, or scarcity but abundance, resilience, complexity, change, and interdependence.
The truth is that if we were to alleviate the many human pressures on nature (not by halting economic activity but by transforming it to be in accordance with natural limits and processes), we would likely begin to see huge support of our efforts to fight climate change through the regeneration of forests, wetlands, kelpbeds, and other carbon-rich ecosystems. Such “nature-based solutions” to climate change could account for 15 to 37% of all the carbon reductions needed to meet the Paris climate goals, and if they occurred on top of our efforts to reduce our emissions to zero they could trigger the beginning of a process of drawing down atmospheric carbon to below our current levels.
This is also the essence of the Bottleneck to Breakthrough theory, which states that although we are placing extreme stresses on the natural world right now, long-term demographic trends indicate that in the next couple hundred of years we will see a significant alleviation of human pressures on nature, possibly leading to massive rebounds in many species and natural systems.
The problem is that our current relationship with nature is that of an abuser to their victim and we are projecting all of our problems onto “the victim” (nature is “too fragile” or is “threatening us” ) without objectively looking at ourselves. If we did, we would realize that the only feasible solutions involve changing our behaviors. If we respect nature we will also see that, in fact, the natural world has agency, power, potential for regeneration and abundance, and can support us through our most difficult times.
This is also a bit like learning to respect your own body, its limits, and be in tune with its needs and natural rhythms. We need to start taking care of the global climate and the natural world as if they were our own bodies, and the bodies of our children, and our grandchildren.
This will require such significant changes in all of our economic activities that the only political solution that meets the scale of what is required is a society-wide Green New Deal.
A Green New Deal gives us the opportunity to realign our investments and economic activities so that they occur in tandem with the workings of natural processes and so they respect, support, and maintain ecological systems. It can also create millions of jobs and allow us to confront and solve social inequities and racism. Like our response to coronavirus, this will likely require us to put our economies on a wartime footing and it will be expensive in terms of dollars — but the price of inaction is far higher than the price of action.
In the U.S., the Trump administration has likely already botched our response to coronavirus by denying the problem, acting much too late with conflicting messaging and direction. The result is the U.S. infection rate curve has a trajectory that is straight up and is outstripping any other country in the world. Even though Congress passed a $2.2 trillion stimulus package, they are already talks of a second stimulus bill because the first one won’t be enough to stop us from entering a potential Great Depression-magnitude downturn. If the virus spreads uncontained throughout the U.S. population, it will be extremely difficult to bring the number of new cases down to zero and our economic downturn is likely to last longer than in other countries or the loss of lives will be worse, or both.
As Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont said, “It’s even more tragic, because we had an opportunity to see it coming, and now it’s going to change things forever, and we don’t know when it’s going to end in its current form.”
In other words, our lack of preparation, denial of the problem, and Trump’s undermining of our abilities to respond to a pandemic all comprise a second disaster that is even worse than the first. The resulting deaths, damages to Americans’ well-being, and to the economy are largely the results of Trump’s ineptitude. It is likely the economic damages will accelerate each additional month that policies to contain the outbreak remain in place — but if Trump lifts these policies too soon it will facilitate the spread of the virus and will prolong the amount of time it takes to contain it and the economic downturn. This is what happens when we don’t have systems and plans in place to enact preventative measures when they are most needed — we are stuck with a worst-of-all worlds scenario in which there are no good options to solve the crisis.
But we are not at that stage with climate change. We still have a good, and possibly the best, option — a Green New Deal to create millions of jobs and lift our economy out of recession, begin to reverse deeply entrenched inequalities and racism, and put us on a sustainable trajectory in which we respect the terrifying power of tipping points. Now is the time to mature and recognize there are some boundaries in nature we should not cross. Our bodies are not invincible, and neither are our societies or economies — let’s turn this into an opportunity to improve our health, well-being, and future rather than into an endless series of crises.
