Kristy Dyer has a background in art and physics and consulted for Silicon Valley We have not one but two crises on our hands: COVID and global warming. The COVID crisis is immediate, it has killed 550,000 in North America alone. Global warming is coming slowly but inevitably, we are still headed for a 1.5 C tipping point. That tipping point will make COVID look like a mild flu season. What happens if we reach this tipping point? We will lose the West Antarctic ice sheet, which will cause a rise in sea level of three metres. We lose the Greenland ice sheet which could add seven metres of additional sea level rise. The Amazon rainforest could dry out due to changes in rainfall and catch fire, releasing enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The permafrost here in Canada contains methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. When the permafrost melts, it releases that methane, a one-way process that will further accelerate global warming. There are 7.8 billion people in this world. Global warming is already thought to be causing 150,000 deaths annually, which is expected to double by 2030. These deaths arise from three sources: rising temperatures causing more deaths from malaria and dengue fever, changes in weather patterns resulting in malnutrition and diarrhea, and finally deaths from natural disasters such as heat waves, floods, typhoons and hurricanes. If global warming deaths affect millions of people why do COVID deaths strike us as more immediate? They are happening closer to home and, unlike global warming, the cause on the death certificate can be clearly specified as COVID. Unfortunately for the planet COVID is not having any meaningful effect on our carbon emissions. Initially during the April 2020 lockdown, there were indications that we were releasing 15% less carbon than a year earlier, but humans, being adaptable, learned how to live under restrictions and now it is expected that... |