When You Can't Keep Your Thoughts to Yourself

I’m about to say it out loud.

All the thoughts I've been thinking concerning two global issues bugging me.

Maybe someone else ‘outed’ their thoughts in another forum, another corner of the world. Chatted about it in a quaint café to an enrapt listener. Presented a PowerPoint to infuse community activism.

This might sound repetitive and/or may be a divisive issue.

I hope not.

Repetitive and divisive is not what I’m going for.

I’m going for candid assessment and immediate comparable action at a minimum.

Climate change and the environment have been that imminent cardiac arrest scenario world leaders and inhabitants have known about for decades, yet it has taken F-O-R-E-V-E-R to see meh progress and results.

I mean when faced with cold hard evidence-based realities that rising temperatures from increased CO2 emissions, leading to extreme weather and ozone layer depletion, leave humanity on a spinning blue sphere of catastrophic certain doom in years that don’t require scientific notation to record, why wouldn’t there be a lot of thinking and doing something about it?

However, in the barely two years that SARS CoV-2 has flexed its viral lipid layer, some of those same world leaders and inhabitants have, as the expression goes, 'moved like gangbusters' to get ish done fast.

The timeline is irrefutable.

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic status in March 2020. By December 2020, the first person in the UK received a Pfizer Covid-19 jab as part of a vaccination roll-out that had successive waves of pharmaceutical companies churning out patented products with boosters and more on the way.

Experts contend that there was unprecedented cooperation vis-à-vis funding, ethical approval, volunteer recruitment, manufacturing negotiations, and production scale. The results were in complete compliance with safety standards, adhering to clinical trials protocols and regulatory processes. But because of unprecedented (a word that gets thrown around frequently nowadays) consultation and communication (people globally working together), a Covid-19 vaccine, worthy of Guinness World Record status, was produced.

Well, blow me down!

I’m not complaining.

Neither am I making any statement for or against pandemic management or any vaccination programs.

I’m just gawking at the speed at which bureaucracy, red tape, and implausible timelines got drop-kicked out the window for this issue.

The international community came together to address this.

But global warming? Climate change?

It has been over thirty years.

THREEEEE-ZEROOO!

Where is all the bureaucracy and endless filibustering being bound, gagged, and hauled off to the garbage dump? I have yet to see red tape raining out of any window and trampled underfoot.

You know, so our earth can enjoy the same speed of support and resolution.

Esteemed scientific and intellectual minds worked around the clock enacting management solutions: Emergency protocols. Mandatory face coverings. Travel restrictions. PCR tests. Lockdowns.

Immediate implementations at times beggaring belief, human rights, and legislation.

We live in a global house on fire.

I can’t be the only one thinking that without a liveable planet, won’t the coronavirus thingy kinda solve itself?

Well, of course, there are two very different global issues at stake here (with the same disproportionate preventable death end result.) There are complexities of processes required for settlement blah-blah-blah-yadda-yadda-yadda.

But those stakeholders who moved like greased lightning, showing they were capable of moving like greased lightning though…

And how fast an agency can move when sufficiently motivated.

Glaringly so.

Climate change became front-page news in 1988 when NASA Institute for Space Studies Director Dr. James Hansen testified to the US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee about the causal link between greenhouse gases and global warming. He was adamant that these factors were “changing our climate now.” He warned of a threat to the earth’s climate with continued human usage of carbon-based energy sources.

A chemistry degree recipient addressed the United Nations in 1989. She also raised concern over increasing CO2 in the atmosphere holding wide-ranging implications. UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher requested a global treaty on climate change.

The United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change (UNFCCC) had 165 country representatives sign its treaty in 1992, committing to reduce carbon emissions and prevent global temperature rise that would prove detrimental to existence.

As of the last conference, there were 197 parties of the convention. These signatories, known as the Committee of the Parties (COP), have to date hosted 26 such conferences for goal setting, timelines, and intervention methods to mitigate climate change which is now on a temperature rise default setting unless a gargantuan, galaxy-sized shift occurs.

Let’s be clear.

One conference every year.

A historical timeline on this issue longer than my arm.

Massive monumental efforts toward meetings, summits, and diplomacy equating to minuscule effects.

The earliest CO2 levels at Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory in 1958 recorded a concentration of 313 parts per million (ppm). In May 2021, that reading had climbed to 419 ppm.

If drastic unpopular action could stop this rise and give us a fighting chance, wouldn’t you want to take it?

The results of high CO2 concentrations are almost to-the-letter scientific predictions of sea-level rise and higher ocean temperatures, death of coral reefs, the spread of tropical diseases, superstorms, flooding, droughts, and extreme wildfires.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) senior scientist Pieter Tans stated that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere and oceans for thousands of years, and “we are adding roughly 40 billion metric tons of CO2 pollution to the atmosphere per year.”

It’s frustrating.

But I am not frustrated, just disgusted.

I cannot help seeing the two issues side by side in conspicuous disparity.

There is time to battle coronavirus. There’s no time left to address climate change.

Covid-19 has claimed over five million lives worldwide. Increased global temperatures would catastrophically impact the life of the entire human population of over seven billion add 8.7 million animal species plus 390,900 known species of plants.

SARS CoV-2, like all pathogens, is spread by the chain of infection. It leaves an opportunity for disruption to a link in the chain as protection. But with the impact of climate change, no safety exists for anyone within this biosphere.

The science regarding the pandemic is primarily focused on immunity to combat contagion. But there is zero immunity for defense against a planet that has lost climate equilibrium. We would all, as the saying goes, be sitting ducks.

According to Joe McCarthy, staff writer at globalcitizen.org, an organization committed to positive global change, “Climate change is an urgent public health threat that will kill far more people than Covid-19 through heatwaves, waterborne illnesses, air pollution, and much more.”

And Sociology Professor Robert Brulle’s words resonate in the online publication The Conversation, when he says, ”Future generations will look back on our tepid response to global climate disruption and wonder why the world did not act sooner and more aggressively.”

I sincerely wonder where those “future generations” will be living if atmospheric CO2 numbers aren’t dialed back yesterday.

From where I stand, I am convinced the war on climate change will continue to be spearheaded by masses of grassroots activists, organizations, and ordinary people using innovative approaches for global mindset mass shifts. These may just be the Hail Mary passes to prevent a planetary tipping point into the abyss.

But if the worldwide leadership and agencies could add proportional generous helpings of that unprecedented cooperation. . .well. . .that’d be great.

I really appreciate you for reading my story! Thank you so much!

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