|
?:reviewBody
|
-
Every crisis brings out the I-told-you-so contingent, the Cassandras who maintain after the fact that a realized danger was perfectly predictable (and therefore preventable). Unsurprisingly, during the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic of early 2020, a popular social media post displayed covers of Time magazine issues bearing prominent warnings about global warming and pandemic — from 2006 and 2017, respectively: These images of Time covers are real and correctly dated. The first, from the April 3, 2006, issue, bore headline banners about a SPECIAL REPORT: GLOBAL WARMING which implored us to BE WORRIED. BE VERY WORRIED: The second cover, from the May 15, 2017, issue, featured a large box proclaiming WARNING: WE ARE NOT READY FOR THE NEXT PANDEMIC advertising a feature story on the subject of The World Is Not Ready for the Next Pandemic which opened as follows: Neither of these warnings was particularly new or revelatory, however. A 2018 Historical Overview of Climate Change Science report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change, noted that The realisation that Earth’s climate might be sensitive to the atmospheric concentrations of gases that create a greenhouse effect is more than a century old. And increases in temperature correlated with increases in CO2 concentrations have been measured and noted at least as far back as 1938. Likewise, occurrences of plagues and pandemics have been charted across many centuries of human history, and we have been aware for a long time that bacteria and viruses that cause diseases in other animal species are capable of evolving to infect humans. Unfortunately, something that has also existed across the course of human history is our reluctance to bear the costs of preparing ourselves for dangers that we know are real but aren't more predictable in timing than some day.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}