Dr. Marshall Shepherd, Professor and Director of the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia, writes in Forbes that just as the vaccines against COVID, created by Operation Warp Speed, have given us some hope against the virus, we also need a similar program for climate change.
Dr. Shepherd talks about how we now have 2 vaccines for COVID-19, with more in the works, thanks to Operation Warp Speed which was a public, private, and academic response against an urgent and unprecedented threat, and that climate change is just as much an urgent and unprecedented threat that requires an even more focused and coordinated response.
He cites two other historical projects which show that when our leaders decide to do something, we make it happen – the Manhattan Project in WW2 and the Apollo project in the 1960s.
He states that “Big problems require bold actions” and talks about the climate crisis being a huge problem, that is affecting us now, but the problem is people think it is far off in the future. It isn’t far off – it’s here, now. He documents evidence for this – unprecedented wildfires in the west, an unprecedented derecho in the Midwest, an unprecedented hurricane season in the east. In 2020, the U.S. experienced 16 separate weather/climate disasters that caused $1 billion or more in damage.
Dr. Shepherd notes that climate change will cause economic and human losses that are hard for us to understand. These include public health challenges due to heat, heat waves, vectors, and disasters, pressure on food and gas prices due to drought and hurricanes, water supply problems, national security and violence being accelerated, infrastructure being damaged, and economic impacts on gross domestic product, insurance (paying for repeated billion dollar losses), investments, and other economic losses.
He notes that the incoming administration is indicating it will act aggressively, and that we need a coordinated, well-funded public-private-academic partnership just like we had with Operation Warp Speed, on the scale of the Manhattan Project or Apollo project.
Read Dr. Shepherd’s article here.
12/31/2020
