Covid-19 Pandemic vs Climate Change

I think that the two represent very different threats, consequences.

First of all, we are still in the middle of the Coronavirus crisis and there are so many contradictions, differences in reporting, in statistics from place to place, country to country that it will take a while to draw final conclusions.

In relation to climate change — although nobody can deny that it is actually happening in a rapid way with exponentially growing temperatures, increasing bush fires, rising sea levels, “unexpected” weather events, etc — but there is a fierce, politicized debate about how much it depends on Human activity and what its long-term consequences would be.

Still, in terms of the resulting loss of life, destruction to our Human systems we can allow ourselves some predictions, comparisons.

Epidemics, pandemics are usually bounded by time, either as a one-time event, or recurring in a mutated form, but they do not continue threatening for years, decades. And once vaccines are developed the threat can be minimized. Up to this point the virus knowingly infected over 2 million people and we lost over 150000 people worldwide.

While we have to wait for the final figures according to most reports a major part of the people we lost were elderly, with serious underlying medical conditions, and many of them would have died within weeks, months even without the infection. At the same time our physical “assets”, technical abilities are unaffected by the pandemic.

All the elements of climate change — temperatures above 50 degrees Celcius for prolonged times, rising sea levels, extreme weather events, intensifying, uncontrollable fires like the last one in Australia threaten Human life and our physical, technical abilities on a completely different, much larger scale, making a large portion of the planet — where today large metropolises are found — uninhabitable.

We might need to adopt a lifestyle only in dystopian, sci-fi Hollywood movies, living underground, or areas sealed off from the natural environment with artificial living conditions.

And considering the speed of changes, this can unfold in our or in the next generation.

There is, of course, the fierce debate about Human responsibility for the climate changes and I do not want to open that Pandora’s box. (Though according to certain observations during the global lockdown some signs of the climate change showed reversing, slowing down — besides other signs of Nature immediately repairing, balancing itself in the vacuum we left behind — due to the vastly reduced Human activity, but these observations cannot be yet taken scientifically).

One thing is certain is that we still know very little about our Natural system, the environment that provides our “incubator”, since we research it with a very narrow, selfish, exploitative aim: only to know how we could use Nature for our own unnatural, excessive, egotistic purposes.

Thus if we want to understand the natural processes the happen around us, how much we can control or even reverse them, first of all we would need to change our attitude, approach to the system.

Attainment, perception requires a certain level of similarity, “matching frequency” with the attained, perceived. In order to understand, research Nature “from inside” we would need to become similar to its fundamental qualities: mutually responsible, mutually complementing connections between its comprising elements, sustaining the balance and homeostasis that facilitates life and optimal development in living systems.

We would need to reach this similarity, fine-tuning among ourselves so though the mutual integration Human beings could integrate into Nature, like “special, undercover agents” that can understand the system by being like it.

With our inherently self-serving, self-justifying, egocentric and subjective nature, we can’t understand anything as we can grasp only what is important for us in relation to a selfish, individualistic survival. This is why our sciences also reached a wall they cannot penetrate and have to make do with theories, philosophies without actually penetrating, tangibly attaining the matter.

Thus in order to know how to solve problems like the virus pandemic, to understand and prevent the catastrophic consequences of climate change we need to change ourselves towards becoming like Nature’s system at least in small, purposeful environment which could become the pioneers, penetrating the system through their attained similarity and helping everybody else.