A Silver Lining to COVID-19?

As an optimist I tend to look for silver linings in the darker clouds. The other day I read an article saying some Italians remarked that they could finally hear birds sing and see blue skies as a result of the decline of industrial activity caused by COVID-19. Something good at least had come out of the pandemic. Of course, for the cynics, there was also an unintended message, i.e. the Earth would be a lot better place without human beings to muck it up, including causing monster viruses.

But back to the silver lining. Among the things the bug has shown us, two could have positive outcomes. One, we are seeing the interconnectedness of all of us. We are truly a global society. And two, our global society is a lot more vulnerable than we might like to think. The interconnectedness has been illustrated by the speed with which the virus traversed the globe, confirmed by the desperation with which we try to stop it. The vulnerability has been illustrated by how just one minuscule bug can fracture our society while seriously undermining our health and our economy. Is it possible that these two lessons could wake more people up to the climate crisis?

After all, global warming is ultimately a far more serious threat than COVID-19. Our need to recognize the vulnerability of global society and to act collectively is therefore also far greater. Global warming, too, can spread disease. And it has many more dirty tricks up its sleeve: more frequent and more intense fires, storms and droughts; rising sea levels with massive flooding of cities and even countries; the melting of glaciers with the consequent exhaustion of water supplies; the acidification of the oceans and the death of the world’s coral reefs; disruption of ocean currents ironically creating another ice age in Wesstern Europe; and so on ... and so on. Global warming could even become irreversible and then it's a countdown until planet Earth is uninhabitable for Homo sapiens.

This cascade of catastrophes is heading our way—or is upon us now. Will this nasty little bug wake up enough skeptics and deniers such that humanity will do what is necessary to avoid the apocalypse? We really shouldn’t need a wave of suffering and death to alert us to the need to save ourselves from ourselves, but the evidence convinces even my optimist self that we probably do. If the virus does this it will truly have brought a silver lining along with the misery.