Is the COVID-19 pandemic a precursor for our planet’s future under climate change?
Yes, says Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University, in an analysis for NBC News.
“Other than the occasional hurricane or earthquake, we have lived our whole lives taking for granted that this thing we call ‘civilization’ was a machine that could never fail,” he writes. “It’s time to wake up.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has already disrupted and altered the social, transportation, energy, economic, and health care networks our global civilization has built over the last 100 years. Like the pandemic, climate change will also have long-term effects on these networks as heat waves, floods, fires, and storms inundate our systems.
“If I asked you just a few weeks ago to imagine what that would look like, what it would feel like, to see those networks stressed, you’d probably point to some Hollywood science fiction movie,” Frank writes. “Today, you just have to turn on the news. Now we know firsthand the dread that follows when these systems are threatened.”
Read the full op-ed on NBC News.