The coronavirus pandemic against the climate change emergency

Protecting public health was a core function of governments long before state expansion in the 20th century. “Great fears of diseases here in the City, being said that two or three houses are already closed”, Samuel Pepys written in his journal April 16, 1665. “God preserve us all. Londoners trying to flee the plague had to get a certificate of good health signed by the mayor, who also imposed a curfew and lockdown on plague outbreaks. A generation after the Great Plague, Massachusetts was who passed laws for the quarantine of smallpox patients.

19th century urban Britain saw a huge increase in deaths from infectious diseases. In 1849, over 50,000 people died from a cholera epidemic that swept through London. The previous year, Parliament passed the landmark Public Health Law. According to historians of the law, “public health was not a party affair, and the need for comprehensive health legislation was not controversial. That year, physician John Snow made the first major epidemiological breakthrough with his Discovery that faecal contamination causes cholera.

A framework of public health law and improved medical knowledge have led to the construction of vast networks of drinking water, high-speed sewers and waste recycling. The Victorian Sanitation Revolution occurred at the height of classical liberalism, when public health was understood to mean measures that must be applied to entire communities and not preventive activities, such as campaign against the so-called childhood obesity epidemic. A real pandemic, spreading geometrically across the world in a few weeks, shows the falsity of this “epidemic”.

Likewise, the current coronavirus pandemic puts the climate emergency, which has lasted for nearly 32 years, into perspective. The climate emergency was first announced in June 1988. “Humanity is carrying out an unintentional, uncontrolled and omnipresent experiment on a global scale, the ultimate consequences of which could be just a global nuclear war”, the Toronto climate conference. declared this month.

One way to assess the reliability of a body of science with major policy implications is to know whether experts in the field are inclined to overestimate the seriousness of the problem. Take smoking: In 1953, Richard Doll, one of the pioneering epidemiologists in discovering the link between smoking and lung cancer, predicted that in 1973 the number of lung cancer deaths in Britain s ‘would amount to 25,000. The actual number was 26,000. Doll’s prediction passed a difficult test.

In contrast, the Toronto Climate Conference predicted that global temperatures would increase by 1.5 to 4.5 ° C (2.7 ° F and 8.1 ° F) by the 2030s. Since 1988, global average temperature increased at a rate of 0.177 ° C (0.32 ° F) per decade, less than half of the 0.36 ° C (0.65 ° F) per decade implied by a 1.5 ° C increase in by 2030 and only a sixth of the rate of a 4.5 ° C rise. If there has been a mainstream climatologist who underestimated global warming, he or she must have made the scientific equivalent of a Trappist vow of silence.

More recently, Myles Allen, a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), admitted that computer climate models work too hot for the actual climate. “We haven’t seen this rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models,” Allen Recount the London Times in September 2017.

The coronavirus pandemic shows what a real crisis looks like. No one has to catastrophize it; The facts speak for themselves. Inducing fear and panic is counterproductive.

Global warming is different. For more than three decades, climate change has been the disaster that looms on the horizon. It moves at glacial speed; there is plenty of time to prepare for it. Humans – the most adaptive species on the planet – have adapted to a changing climate since they first wore animal skins for warmth. The idea that the generation born since 1988 experienced something approaching global nuclear war is absurd. Even the destruction of last year Forest fires in Australia were fueled by green policies that kept fires controlled.

One thing has not changed and will not change: catastrophizing climate change for political ends. To one of the secret meetings in 1987, limited to just 25 key participants who led to the formation of the IPCC, it was recognized that climate change had to be catastrophic to persuade politicians that they should embark on damaging emission reductions. Earlier this month, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres complained on attention to COVID-19: “While the disease is expected to be temporary, climate change has been a phenomenon for many years and will stay with us for decades and will require constant action. “

The failure of Congressional Democrats to hold coronavirus relief legislation hostage in exchange for the Green New Deal shows lack of judgment. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the inability to distinguish between a real crisis and an imaginary crisis in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century is the manifestation of a collective psychological disorder.

Two lessons can be learned. The first is the importance of governments and responsible international bodies focusing on real threats that can quickly exceed our ability to deal with them. Something went very wrong when the World Health Organization, the lead agency that coordinates the response to global pandemics, jumped on the climate bandwagon and called the Paris Agreement “potentially the strongest health deal of this century” and listed climate change as the # 1 threat to global health.

The second is resilience. The richest societies are better able to manage a pandemic than the poorest. After the 2003 SARS epidemic, Singapore invested in a National Center for Infectious Diseases. Among the major economies, South Korea’s response has so far been the most successful; like Singapore, it can afford to prepare because it has a strong economy, which is reflected in soaring greenhouse gas emissions. Since 1992, Korea’s carbon dioxide emissions have more than doubled and it plans to grow them under the Paris Agreement.

Unlike the Speaker of the House Nancy PelosiNancy Pelosi Democrats scramble to reach deal on taxes on money – Consider what Sinema wants Overnight Healthcare – Brought to you by Carequest – Key CDC panel backs Moderna, J&J boosters MORE (D-Calif.) And his colleagues, South Korea does not intend to sacrifice its economy on the altar of climate change. America either. Thanks to their collective obsession with climate change, Democrats are making sure it will be the election choice in November.

Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow at the RealClear Foundation, a nonprofit affiliate of RealClear Media Group that reports and analyzes public policy and civic issues. He is the author of “Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex” (2017) and “The Age of Global Warming: A History” (2013). Strategy consultant and political analyst, he served as special advisor to the British Chancellor of the Exchequer under Prime Minister John Major.