Covid-19 was a dress rehearsal for global climate change. And it didn’t go well

According to the IPCC report, we should expect more devastating heat waves and out-of-control fires like this in Greece, and other “extreme events unprecedented in the observational record.” — Bloomberg

COVID-19 is a nightmare that has left more than 600,000 people dead in the United States alone. But from the very start it was also a clear dress rehearsal for the looming global catastrophe of climate change, which is barreling toward us and likely to wreak more damage than the pandemic.

Early on, it seemed like Covid-19 might sober us up, and teach us some useful lessons for that other great and imminent threat. Perhaps the coronavirus would force us to acknowledge that there really are invisible dangers in the world, and that there really are experts who know more than we do. Perhaps it would show us that if we don’t act to avert crises sooner rather than later, the problems only get worse.