The Age of the Great Dying is BeginningGuess How Many People Are Already Dead From Global Warming and Covid Put Together?
umair haque
Dark, dark thoughts echo in my mind these days. As reluctant as I am to share them with you, perhaps I also have a certain responsibility to. This one — and I don’t recommend you read this essay if you’re at all feeling anxious or depressed — goes like this.
Here’s the way that I think about the future — don’t worry, this isn’t the thought itself, just the context. The 30s are going to be the decade of global warming ( aka “climate change”) turning catastrophic. Megafire, megaflood, megatyphoon, “heat domes” — all these will replace the gentle seasons as we once thought of them. The 40s, the decade when mass extinction — already accelerating — begins to upend the basic systems of our civilization. And the 50s will be the decade of the Final Goodbye — when our civilisation’s systems simply crash and come to a halt, food, air, water, medicine, all in short supply, because we cannot produce them anymore, having killed the living planet.
That much you should already be able to feel. In the searing temperatures of the twin heat domes still covering much of the planet. In the way that much of the planet can’t get vaccines for a new plague. Or the way that a new plague is simply being left to breed new variants, each more infectious and deadly than the last.
What I’ve described to you is a set of megatrends. But beneath them runs another one, perhaps the grimmest of all.
The age of the Great Dying has begun.
I know that sounds grandiose, melodramatic, and faintly ridiculous. I don’t want it to be true, and I don’t write it for hyperbole’s sake. Let me simply present you with some facts that will explain what I mean — and leave you, probably, as chilled as I am.
A grim threshold was recently crossed. 4 million people around the world are now dead of Covid. How many people is that? More than in all the wars in the last half century or so. It’s nearly the population of a country like Denmark. It’s a staggering number. And it’s only just the beginning. Let me come back to it, though. For now, let’s call it 5 million, because even epidemiologists will agree it’s certainly a dramatic underestimate.
Another such line was crossed, too. Extreme temperatures now kill more than 5 million people a year. That number, too, is going to rise dramatically, because we’re only at the very beginning of a trend of runaway warming.
Put those together, and you already have 10 million people dead. In the last year or so. From a new pandemic, and from a warming planet. Ten million people.
How many is that? It’s more than the populations of Denmark and New Zealand. More than the population of New York City or London.
Let me say it again. Already — in this past year or so — ten million people are dead. Of things that did not exist a few years ago. A new pandemic, and a warming planet. More people are already dead from the new catastrophes we’ve made than make up entire countries.
Maybe now you see a little bit what I mean by this especially grim term “the Age of the Great Dying.” Still think it’s hyperbole, exaggeration, overstatement? (Maybe you do, if you’re a certain kind of privileged white American. So try imagining being the families of one of those ten million people who are already dead.)
Ten million dead and counting. I want you to reflect on that and think about it carefully. Did you know? Why didn’t you? What does it mean? Should you be indifferent to it? Is your ignorance manufactured for the benefit of elites, perhaps?
Ten million dead in one year from Covid and global warming. That’s how staggeringly fast what I’ve called “the Age of the Great Dying” is happening.
The crucial questions are: how many more will there be, and how fast?
The answers are not good. Covid is going endemic. Nobody cares about vaccinating the world, except a handful of doctors and scientists. eand.co |
