"COVID-19 is not a climate-change pandemic. But if the disease and our inability to respond to it terrifies you, it should, not just as a 'fire drill' for climate change but as a test run for all the diseases that will be unleashed by warming." (1/x) https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/the-coronavirus-is-a-preview-of-our-climate-change-future.html

At @NYMag and @intelligencer, we've unlocked and published an adapted excerpt of The Uninhabitable Earth—the chapter on climate change and the future of disease.

"The virus is a terrifying harbinger of future pandemics that will be brought about if climate change continues, scrambling ecosystems, collapsing habitats, rewiring wildlife, and rewriting the rules that have governed all life on this planet for all of human history."

"Among the many unnerving lessons the two crises share is this one: Nature is mighty, and scary, and we have not defeated it but live within it, subject to its temperamental power, no matter where it is that you live or how protected you may normally feel."

"As the coronavirus has paralyzed much of the northern hemisphere, for instance, 192 billion locusts, perhaps 8,000 times more than usual, are swarming East Africa in clouds as big as whole cities, thanks to weather patterns scrambled by climate change..."

"A small swarm can destroy the food supply of 35,000 people in a single day, and they are now traveling in swathes as wide as 25 miles, imperiling the food supply of tens of millions."

"In the U.S., it looks likely we will now be sheltering in place into the beginning of hurricane season. 'We have been living in a bubble, a bubble of false comfort and denial,' as George Monbiot wrote recently in the Guardian."

"And then there are the plagues that climate change will confront us with for the very first time — a whole new universe of diseases humans have never before known to even worry about."

“'New universe' is not hyperbole. Scientists guess the planet could harbor more than a million yet-to-be-discovered viruses — many of them, like COVID-19, for now 'quarantined' in particular susceptible species, but which could evolve or “jump” into humans..."

"...either as the result of changing climatic conditions or because the scrambling of native ecosystems and habitats brings the host species into contact with humans in a much more direct way that ever before."

"The more we pave over and log and deforest the natural world, disrupting stable ecosystems and turning those organisms living happily within them out into the human world, the more diseases, and pandemics, we’ll produce."

"That is what it means to be living entirely outside the window of climate conditions that enclose all of human history — everything we have ever taken to be stable about our relationship to the planet is thrown into chaos." (x/x)