Say, What Can The Coronavirus Teach Us About ‘Climate Change’?

Well, it can certainly teach us that these Warmists are nutballs and their cultish beliefs make them link everything to their cult, but, I doubt that’s what David Wallace-Wells at NY Mag means

What Coronavirus Teaches Us About Climate Change

…

Not all that long ago, climate change was a story unfolding only in the future tense. Now that it has begun roaring into the present with a terrifying fury, the matter of reducing warming through decarbonization (often called “mitigation”) has been displaced, to a degree, in the public conversation among policymakers, advocates, investors, and futurists. There is more and more talk now, instead, about what’s called “adaptation” — not how to reduce carbon emissions to limit warming, but how to adapt to a world defined by climate pummeling in ways that would allow us to endure those blows. This shift has been most pronounced among the world’s conservatives — it has been the basic response of Australian prime minister to his country’s devastating fires, for instance — but it is not a perspective confined to the right. Recently, the New York Times considered the plan, advanced by the Army Corps of Engineers, to construct a sea wall, enclosing all of New York harbor, that would stretch for 6 miles and cost at least $100 billion. In South Florida, they are also talking about flood walls, but there the Army Corps is proposing building them not off the coast but on the mainland, leaving all of Miami Beach — and the states’ other barrier islands — exposed. In Europe, they’re talking about damming up the entire North Sea — a 400-mile barrier in two parts, to be built at a cost in the hundreds of billions.

We have to go to the 8th paragraph, the final one of the screed, to find out the headline

An even better contemporary illustration about the dilemma of adaptation — or, really, the false choice between adaptation and mitigation — may come not from the challenges of climate change but the coronavirus. In the scariest projections, 70 percent of the world could be infected by COVID-19, with probably 2 percent of those numbers dying from the disease — a worst-case scenario of 100 million or so deaths. But while even these scenarios spare the overwhelming majority of the species, of course they are also horrifyingly large death tolls, and therefore not an argument for complacency but for vigilance — from both public-health officials and workaday citizens. Quarantines are imperfect tools in the fight against diseases like this, and yet of course we would prefer to see the problem contained, to the extent it can be, rather than watch it grow as quickly and expansively as possible, trusting we could clean up the mess on the other side. The health infrastructure we have today (in certain parts of the world at least) is one reason that the death rate is as low as 2 percent; the health infrastructure we are building today (construction of new hospitals, the deployment of military resources, research in pursuit of a vaccine) may drive that figure lower, perhaps even to zero, over the course of the next year or so. But those facts alone — or, rather, the partial hope that they represent — is not a reason to forego action today. Best of all, of course, would have been if we could have avoided the virus in the first place.