Take This Seriously
Inspired by the Article: Coronavirus Holds Key Lessons on How to Fight Climate Change by Beth Gardiner
The coronavirus and global warming threats are quite similar. “While the disease is playing out more quickly than the effects of global warming, the principle is the same… if you wait until you can see the impact, it is too late to stop it” (Gardiner). These situations both require our attention and are impacting us negatively even though one’s effects are more prominent compared to the other for the time being. By no means it is to say that global warming is less threatening, so proper and serious action should also be taken towards it. It’s better to start taking precautions and making improvements towards this threat right now before we reach the point where no matter what we do there’s no turning back.
The pictures here depict: NYC undergoing flooding which is a severe effect from global warming & Coronavirus causing vast casualties. This emphasizes how these threats could seriously affect us if we don’t take action and that one is not necessarily more severe than the other.
There has been a gradual realization on how society’s perspective should’ve actually been. Certain situations require you to “have to act in a way that looks disproportionate to what the current reality is, because you have to react to where that exponential growth will take you” (Gardiner). In other words, we should all acquire the ability to think ahead of time in order to act appropriately and avoid serious consequences. For instance, people should have already been thinking ahead on how coronavirus would negatively impact us; in this way we could’ve started preventative measures to combat it earlier. Now this lesson can be applied when it comes to dealing with global warming, since we have seen the negative effects for not taking coronavirus seriously from the start. We wouldn’t want to end up in the same place when it comes to serious global warming effects.
The pictures here depict: The preventative measures that we could have been implementing from the first stages of coronavirus & the preventative measures we should continue to take to slow down the process of global warming.
“Scientists long warned this might happen, but political leaders mostly ignored them, so now must scramble to respond to a crisis they could have prevented, or at least eased, had they acted sooner” (Gardiner). Here political leaders are being called out for being negligent towards taking serious action regarding threats. For instance, if these political leaders would’ve taken into account how dangerous coronavirus can be and truly prioritize the wellbeing of our society then our situation would’ve likely not have gotten this bad. They decided to do nothing in the beginning and instead focus on anything that can most likely be profitable. This heavily connects back to global warming because political leaders literally have put this threat on the backburner due to them lacking the ability to see how harmful this threat actually is. It is affecting our environment gradually for sure but sooner or later we will be heavily feeling the effects too and at that point action by our political leaders will barely make a difference.
The pictures here depict: People deciding to ignore/neglect important circumstances at hand & how late our political figure decided to take action against coronavirus hence in the cartoon the tests are being delivered at such a slow pace thus allowing the virus to spread even more. One can assume at this point in time that most likely our political figure would be late to take action towards global warming based on how this incident was handled which isn’t good at all.
