Tagged: corona

Corona and the Climate: The Opportunity to Write a New Story! 

As I am heading into the fifth week of quarantine, I am sitting down to complete this mini-series on the Corona crisis with a look into the future.  

Our current narrative is broken 

Over the last few weeks, I have been grappling with the enormity of the pandemic and its effect on our modern society. In the midst of a crisis, I find it challenging to take a helicopter view and put things in perspective. Newspapers seem to have decided already though, telling me that this is a historical moment: We are leaving the pre-Corona era behind and enter the post-Corona era. During the first weeks of the lockdown, I could not help wondering if it was all going to be that significant. Once we find a vaccine, won’t we return to ‘business as usual’ rather quickly?  

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Corona and the Climate: a Tale of two Global Crises

In my last article, I kicked off this mini-series on the relationship between the Corona pandemic and the fight against climate change. Today, I am taking a closer look at the differences and parallels between these two global crises.

A time lag of ten days or ten years

As the YouTube channel Our Changing Climate wittingly points out, one of the big differences between climate change and the current pandemic is their relation to time. When comparing cause and effect, we observe a delay of about five to ten days between getting infected with the new Corona virus and disease symptoms to emerge; this is the incubation period. Give it another three weeks and most human immune systems have fought it off .

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Corona and the Climate: don’t be delusional

Being home alone in self-isolation since mid-March, several of you have turned to me asking what I think about the relationship between the global COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis. Watching a transformation of global proportions enfold in front of my eyes is interesting, frightening, and sometimes inspiring at the same time. No longer neglecting my itching fingers, I am taking place behind my computer and starting a small series of articles about the current events and their relation to the climate.

Before getting into the complicated matters of politics and economics, I want to address the links and articles that some of you have been sharing with me over the last few weeks. Hopeful articles, often, about the signs of nature recovering in Chinese and Italian cities as a positive side-effect of the lockdowns enforced to keep the Corona virus at bay. I must admit these articles have slightly irritated me at best and rendered me hopeless at worst (no offense to everyone who sent them, I appreciate you are thinking about me ?). Let me explain.

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