When we think of our world, we often think of a relatively round planet which revolves around the Sun, if we think about it at all. Therein lies the problem. We do have to think about the planet, if we want to continue living on it. The planet itself won’t harm us, but our actions will. Climate change is a very real and dangerous problem. Climate change occurs due to emissions of all kinds. This is a problem, a potentially fatal one, if we don’t start acting on time. There have been plenty of problems of a similar sort which took humanity by surprise. The best examples are natural disasters and epidemics and pandemics. Pandemics are rare, but unfortunately, they happen, like the coronavirus outbreak of 2020, which started in late 2019 in Wuhan, China. It may serve as an important lesson to humanity, and it may not.
Previous Outbreaks – No Preparation
When faced with previous outbreaks, like the Spanish flu of 1918, the world dealt with it in a very peculiar and self-destructive way. During that outbreak, which geographically cannot really be located, the military lied about the many illnesses on the front, to keep morale strong. Germany, the United Kingdom, France and other countries had censorships. Spain did not, which is why the flu was dubbed the Spanish flu. It was spread by soldiers and civilians alike to around 500 million people, which was around a quarter of the world’s population at the time. Instead of lying, governments could have done more to protect their people, soldiers and civilians alike.
This lesson wasn’t learned in 2003 when the world had a SARS outbreak, nor in 2009, when the H1N1 (swine flu) virus ravaged the world. With the coronavirus outbreak, are people really learning? Some are, some aren’t. Climate change is likely to remain a big problem if the world keeps behaving as it is, greedily and carelessly.
A Global Warning – Which Might Affect Global Warming
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is very dangerous, because some people might not show any symptoms, or mild ones, leading to it spreading everywhere. It has a high mortality rate in elderly people or those who have respiratory issues. It has spread to every country in the world, which shows how virulent it is, and how late people started taking the situation seriously. Some countries, like China, South Korea and Singapore, have dealt with the virus supremely well. Other countries, namely western ones, like Italy and the United States, are doing a rather poor job.
Given the scale of the infection, and the fact that most of the world was unprepared for an event such as this, the warning cannot be clearer. We should act now in order to avoid similar problems in the future, virus related or climate change related.
Whether the world learns from the coronavirus outbreak or not, and whether that translates to other fields and other parts of the world, remains to be seen.
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