The first place I hit a wall with this post was when you said that climate change, unlike pandemics, is demonstrably killing people today. That’s clearly just not true, and it makes me not feel eager to continue reading because it’s just such a clearly wrong statement.
To clarify, I should have said, “future pandemic risks.” You are certainly correct in that we have seen tremendous death and suffering as a result of Covid-19. I apologize for the confusing language.
One of the challenges is that you’re only tautologically correct if you say “future pandemic risks,” which by definition haven’t happened yet. We could likewise say that the risks from climate change that we’re worried about are also “future climate risks” which haven’t happened yet.
It sounded to me like you were shifting from proposing that pandemics hadn’t killed anyone yet (false) to proposing that future pandemics were less risky because they hadn’t killed anyone yet (tautologically true of both future pandemics and future climate deaths). So I remain unclear about what it is about climate risk you’re claiming is riskier than pandemics.
The first place I hit a wall with this post was when you said that climate change, unlike pandemics, is demonstrably killing people today. That’s clearly just not true, and it makes me not feel eager to continue reading because it’s just such a clearly wrong statement.
To clarify, I should have said, “future pandemic risks.” You are certainly correct in that we have seen tremendous death and suffering as a result of Covid-19. I apologize for the confusing language.
One of the challenges is that you’re only tautologically correct if you say “future pandemic risks,” which by definition haven’t happened yet. We could likewise say that the risks from climate change that we’re worried about are also “future climate risks” which haven’t happened yet.
That’s exactly why I compared the relative future risks of climate change, nuclear war, and pandemics in my writing.
It sounded to me like you were shifting from proposing that pandemics hadn’t killed anyone yet (false) to proposing that future pandemics were less risky because they hadn’t killed anyone yet (tautologically true of both future pandemics and future climate deaths). So I remain unclear about what it is about climate risk you’re claiming is riskier than pandemics.