Re:Traffic and Pollution Plummet as U.S. Cities Shut Down
by pdonis on Sunday March 22, 2020 @03:43PM
(#22657931)
> I’ve been thinking a lot about the next looming crisis: Climate Change.
I wish people would not try to use one crisis as a justification for claiming another. Not everyone agrees that climate change is "the next looming crisis".
The reason we know COVID-19 is a crisis is that we can directly measure the impact. We don't have to rely on questionable computer models projecting things decades into the future. (And I don't just mean climate models--we also have to have economic and sociological models to estimate the impacts of what the climate models predict and calculate the net benefits vs. costs. Not all impacts of climate change are harmful. And if you really believe we have economic and sociological models that can make predictions decades into the future with enough accuracy to justify multi-trillion-dollar policy decisions, I have some oceanfront property in Tibet I'd like to sell you.)
Directly measuring the impact of COVID-19 means we can test the predictions of people who projected various possible scenarios for how such a crisis would play out, and what kinds of actions in response would have what kinds of consequences. It's too early at this point to run all those tests, but when things are back to approximately normal we should definitely run those tests and assess the results. That will help us to be better prepared next time. It will also help us to see what kinds of behaviors we should discourage on the part of major actors who have a stake in trying to spin the public's perceptions. And it will also show us where our infrastructure is fragile so we can take steps to make it more robust, which will put us in a better position to respond to any future crisis.
I wish people would not try to use one crisis as a justification for claiming another. Not everyone agrees that climate change is "the next looming crisis".
The reason we know COVID-19 is a crisis is that we can directly measure the impact. We don't have to rely on questionable computer models projecting things decades into the future. (And I don't just mean climate models--we also have to have economic and sociological models to estimate the impacts of what the climate models predict and calculate the net benefits vs. costs. Not all impacts of climate change are harmful. And if you really believe we have economic and sociological models that can make predictions decades into the future with enough accuracy to justify multi-trillion-dollar policy decisions, I have some oceanfront property in Tibet I'd like to sell you.)
Directly measuring the impact of COVID-19 means we can test the predictions of people who projected various possible scenarios for how such a crisis would play out, and what kinds of actions in response would have what kinds of consequences. It's too early at this point to run all those tests, but when things are back to approximately normal we should definitely run those tests and assess the results. That will help us to be better prepared next time. It will also help us to see what kinds of behaviors we should discourage on the part of major actors who have a stake in trying to spin the public's perceptions. And it will also show us where our infrastructure is fragile so we can take steps to make it more robust, which will put us in a better position to respond to any future crisis.