Virus image from Syaibatul Hamdi in Pixabay

After my previous post on this subject I have read many more writting about both great issues at the same time. I am surprised as there is not direct link but maybe the subjective link about great unibersal problems works not only for me. Also for others. One thing is clear, this pandemic has already changed the world in a incredible way. The hyperlinked and constantly travelling world has gone home literally, not even daring to go to next town. The increasingly important tourism and entretainment are simply closed. The families that are used to spend most of the day out of home are together all the day at home. The sport practise, profesional and personal dissapeared… We all hope to be short term but nobody really knows the medium or long-term effect in our economy, our jobs, our way of travelling, our way of staying with others, our view of differents,…

The virus is only the cause, the consequences in our health, our fear and the way we are going to get out psicologically from the lockdown can be quite surprising. We will see, hopefully in some weeks.

By the way to continue with the analogy / effect on climate change some bullet points:

The possible positive outcomes:

• The reinforcement of scicence as the most valuable tool in epidemics knoledge may help to climate scientists
• The acknowledgement of our weakness as society may lead us to more consciente of the dangers coming from climate change or other risks.
• The experience of living with less and a simpler way may help to reduce excesive consumption and consequently gain energy efficiency as society.
• The felling of acting together as a society, even a world society as all of us are in this pandemic to some extent can help us tackle other global problems like climate change.
• Realizing that we can do great sacrifices when something important is at risk canbe extrapolated to climate change too.
• I believe in home-working and tele-meetings and those options of doing things without going physically. Now we are forced, many companies and institutions are forced to that and this can show the posibilities to save some tons of CO2 in transport. I am not thinking in doing it all the time but it can be done with more frequency than now. It is a way of improving energy efficiency.

In the other hand there can be negative outcomes (the epidemics is by itself negative, for all the people dying and all the people suffering, in this case I am thinking in our long-term challenge with climate change):

• Climate Change is a long term problem and Coronavirus is inmediate. We are better prepared to understand and react to short-term.
• Many people mention the reduction of pollution and emissions. I am sure they are true but in energy consumption data I expected more differences considering the situation. This link to EU data surprises me with low energy reductions. We will se with more time, with year data for example.
• Sometimes, after those kind of shocks the rebound is very hard and we can emit much more to compensate or to forget the problem that has gone.
• A great crash in economy is, in my opinion, the worst way to face climate change. In the sort term reduces emissions but even more the efforts and investments neccessary to reduce them consistently in the future. This can happen dramatically.
• We are producing a fast consumption of some goods as masks and gloves that will last and we are reducing mass transit use. As happened with Earth Hour last Saturday the urgency and worry makes us forget every other thing or challenge in our everyday life (it is normal). For example I went by car to my office the last days to avoid the train and reduce people’s contact.

In summary we have some time to think about, these are some of the links I read and enjoyed:

• Coronavirus and climate.
• Further perspectives on pandemics and climate change 
• Where the Virus and Climate Intersect
• Fast pandemic response could tackle climate crisis.
• Even Earth Hour last saturday became strange as skeptics noted

Stay home, stay healthy and try to be positive and enjoy the possible personal positive outcomes, the negatives are very visible.