> If we can't beat COVID, we will not beat climate change. No technology can change human nature.
Erm, looks like we are doing pretty well to beat COVID with vaccines developed in record timing.
Erm, looks like we are doing pretty well to beat COVID with vaccines developed in record timing.
Same with climate change. Worst case is Venus, we’re heading for a few degrees Celsius change that persists for centuries, we could’ve prevented almost all of the problems we’re looking at now if we’d made the best choices even as late as the 60s and 70s.
Meanwhile, countries like Denmark and Norway with very low rates of mask wearing have seen very low COVID death rates.
EDIT: More recent data from YouGov showing same pattern: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/international/articles-reports/2.... Mask-wearing rates in Denmark and Norway picked up in 2H 2020, but were still on the low side.
Similarly, for global warming it would be a waste of time and effort to try to stop the natural process (limit human activity to revert the temperature increase) and instead focus our innovation and resources into mitigation (carbon capture, green energy, fortifying coast lines...)
It's fairly easy to prevent stuff from entering the country when you are an island. Singapore also had no problem in doing it. Notice some kind of pattern?
> China stopped it and they have heaps of people
Do you trust any data coming from China? Because North Korea also claimed they had zero death from COVID.
Also, it's fairly clear by now that there is some genetic component with COVID: there are less death in asian ethnic groups compared to others, so having less deaths in China/Japan/Korea is consistent in that regard anyway.
> The US failed spectacularly
Comparing to death rates across Europe, not that much different actually. Media brainwashing much?
With COVID letting it become so widespread with not enough protection before the vaccines, means that more people got the disease, the virus got more opportunities to mutate, and new strains are coming out, some of which could be more fatal or maybe resistent to vaccines. Getting late may makes it harder to solve, if possible at all.
With global warming is worse. Is not just stopping emissions, but what we already emitted is already driving the change. And positive feedback is already being triggered, with less albedo because less ice in the north pole, methane emissions in northern places like Siberia and Canada, and each time more frequent/bigger forest fires. So to slow it down you don't just have to capture the equivalent of what we emit (100k barrels/day makes a lot of greenhouse gases, think in 0.5-1 ton of greenhouse gases per barrel, and you have coal and others to take into account too), but also the amount we already emitted, and what comes from positive feedback (that eventually could become orders above of what we emit).
And I'm talking about greenhouse gases, not heat in particular, you are not dealign directly with warming addressing the gases, so that is something that should be taken into account regarding mitigation.
For the record, I am not advocating completely ditching liberalism, but we should understand that it became (in the form of neoliberalism) too ideological in the Western world. That prevents us seeing alternative social solutions that can be very effective in beating the pandemic.
(And I am writing this from Prague, Czechia. Strangely enough, our government managed to beat the 1st wave by doing lots of early restrictions, but then we were massively hit by 2nd wave in the reluctance to do restrictions again. This cannot be explained away by human nature, it was purely a matter of cultural perspective.)
The kind of shit individualism has evolved into is ridiculous.
Oh we all know that data coming from China is super reliable, right? After all, they never lied about the Wuhan fatalities in the first place.