If during the pandemic there were scientists who developed vaccines and the problem could be addressed, with climate change the crisis is worse, because there is no way to face the overwhelming power of the deterioration of ecosystems, the rise in sea level, the melting of glaciers, heat waves and fires, warns Lizbeth Sagols Sales, an academic at the Faculty of Philosophy of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Two years ago the day interviewed the student of environmental ethics and ecofeminism, a member of the National System of Researchers, when the covid-19 pandemic had just begun, and then she spoke of a turning point that would be the real crisis. She now makes an assessment of what has been experienced since 2020.
He explains that “the inflection point means that there are events that are increasing and that we are no longer going to return to equilibrium, it is the point of no return. Extreme events of major floods, droughts, fires and the destruction that this entails will follow.” He considers that after the pandemic, “we are a little worse.”
Expert Bill McGuire (author of the book hot earth) warned that this is no longer stopping, and one piece of information is that the 45 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 has not been met, it is barely 14 percent, Sagols Sales said. In addition, although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made efforts and proposals to delay as much as possible reaching 1.5 degrees of temperature increase, it has not happened and it is expected that it will be exceeded in this decade, he added.
We see that “we do not have a way to stop the catastrophe: the sea level continues to rise, one of the signs of this disorder, the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic continues to grow rapidly and this carries the danger that it is going to release the methane that is under the ice, which is as toxic or more than coal and oil. If the methane is released and it does so suddenly, “it will be a terrible fire, that there would be no way to cultivate life.”
Climate affects all continents; in Europe, for example, “Spain has always had hot summers, 40 or 42 degrees, but Great Britain has never had 50 degrees. It’s not just the rise in temperatures, but the fires they cause,” he points out. All this is a change in living conditions and in social organization, there will be many migrations.
In the pandemic, the crisis was faced as each country could, “but the problem is that we do not see that this goes together with climate change, that is, that viruses do not affect the population in such a terrible way by chance or chance, but because to the extent that plant and animal species are devastated, ecosystems are no longer hosts to them, which have lost their natural order and regulation.”
He maintains that with monkeypox it becomes more evident that something that was limited to animals has already passed to man. “We can think of new infections, and vaccines. Yes, but the crisis of climate change is worse”.
The great lesson of the covid-19 pandemic “is that humans are not alone. We are with other species and ecosystems. If we don’t protect them, we don’t protect ourselves in the long run.”
Remember a phrase from the author of the Gaia theory, James Lovelock: “We no longer react to that survival instinct.”
#face #deterioration #ecosystems #Sagols #Sales