Alarmists at Wired magazine announced Tuesday the “world is in the grip of two crises,” the coronavirus pandemic and global warming.
We mustn’t let the clear and present danger of coronavirus so occupy our minds that we forget about the climate crisis, Matt Reynolds suggests, because when we finally come out of lockdown it will be there waiting for us.
“Next to the perilous urgency of coronavirus, the second great crisis, the climate crisis, may currently feel more distant than at any other point in the last decade,” writes Matt Reynolds for Wired, because cities that are usually clogged with air pollution are experiencing a remarkable improvement in air quality.
Mr. Reynolds employs the typical alarmist subterfuge of conflating real air pollution with CO2 emissions, despite the fact that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but a colorless, odorless, nontoxic gas that plants depend on to live.
According to Worldometers, so far a total of 171,334 people have died with coronavirus whereas there is no death toll recorded for global warming, perhaps because no one has died from it.
Startling numbers of people do, however, die every year from air pollution — concentrations of fine particulate matter such as sulfate, nitrates, and black carbon — but they do not die from carbon dioxide emissions.
For climate alarmists, the real danger is not the air pollution that actually kills millions of people, but the bogeyman of anthropogenic climate change whose awesome and cataclysmic effects lurk ominously on the horizon.
“Whatever the precise figure, it’s likely that the coronavirus pandemic will trigger the largest ever yearly drop in CO2 emissions,” Reynolds notes. “The dips caused by the Second World War, the financial crisis or the Spanish Flu don’t even come close.”
And yet, “this reduction in emissions is still way off what we’d need to prevent 1.5 degrees Celsius of global heating,” he warns. “To hit this, as Carbon Brief notes, global emissions would need to fall by 7.6 per cent every year this decade.”
It is reassuring that even in the midst of the coronavirus lockdown some things never change. For alarmists, there can never be enough hysteria in the world and if there isn’t something real to panic over, apocalyptic forecasts of mass destruction will always suffice.
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