102Currently, the novel coronavirus has spread to nearly 100 countries worldwide, including China. In the face of this impending global pandemic, one can't help but wonder if the situation would be significantly better had Hubei Province taken measures earlier and if the international community had sooner adopted China's epidemic prevention measures.
According to research by the team led by Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and head of the national high-level expert group, if Hubei had intervened five days earlier, the number of infections could have been reduced by two-thirds. Conversely, if intervention had been delayed by five days, the scale of the outbreak would have tripled, with the number of infected people exceeding 350,000.
Ignorance and weakness are not obstacles to survival; arrogance is. On March 4, 2019, Dr. George Gao, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said in an interview, "SARS-like viruses may come at any time, but another SARS event will not happen. Our infectious disease surveillance network is well-built, and we can stop the virus when it comes." However, just nine months later, the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, with infection and death tolls far surpassing those of the 2003 SARS outbreak! The statement "controllable and limited human-to-human transmission" became the biggest joke of 2020.
The only lesson humanity has learned from history is that it has not learned any lessons from history. Studies have shown that the source of the novel coronavirus was illegally traded wildlife, similar to the origin of the SARS virus. According to a 2008 paper published in the journal Nature, among the more than 300 new infectious diseases that emerged between 1940 and 2004, 60.3% were zoonotic diseases, with 71.8% originating from wildlife. Therefore, refraining from consuming wildlife is the best way to prevent new infectious diseases. On February 24, 2020, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress passed a decision to comprehensively ban illegal wildlife trade. It is hoped that after the pandemic, wildlife will gradually disappear from the dining tables of the Chinese people.
2020 is destined to be a year of multiple crises. Apart from the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia experienced wildfires that burned for five months, claiming over 1.2 billion lives. The Antarctic saw temperatures exceed 20°C, leading to ice melt. A locust plague ravaged East Africa and spread to South Asia, all consequences of climate change that have affected all of humanity. Human activities have inflicted unprecedented damage on the Earth's ecosystem. Protecting the environment and reducing emissions are urgent tasks.
Global warming is a slow and gradual climate change that accumulates year by year, subtly influencing the planet until it reaches a tipping point, leading to catastrophic changes. Once this critical point is reached, it will have a devastating impact on humanity, including frequent volcanic eruptions and tsunamis, disruptions to food supply chains, and the release of frozen viruses. Any of these scenarios could spell doom for all of humanity.
Like earthquake prediction, research and forecasting of global warming are based on existing facts and theoretical knowledge, estimating future events. Both carry significant uncertainty. If correct, they are taken for granted; if wrong, they face widespread criticism. Unlike earthquake predictions, which can eventually be verified with quantifiable losses, the harm caused by global warming once it reaches a tipping point will be immeasurable, and the resulting damage may be irreparable.
If we take action and control global warming, the aforementioned severe climate disasters would not occur. But if these severe climate disasters do not happen, how can we prove that the research and predictions on global warming are correct? This creates a paradox: to some extent, the research and predictions of global warming cannot be verified. Taking the current pandemic as an example, if we had taken measures to control it, how would we know about its high transmissibility and destructive power? Without this knowledge, would we have taken preventive measures at the early stage of the outbreak? If Wuhan had controlled the epidemic from the beginning, would the bad habit of consuming wildlife still persist, and would Chinese people continue to regard wildlife as delicacies, leading to future outbreaks of infectious diseases caused by the consumption of wildlife? In other words, even without COVID-19, there might have been a COVID-29 or similar infectious diseases.
When an epidemic breaks out, we can draw on thousands of years of experience and take a series of remedial actions. However, extreme climate disasters caused by global warming are largely unprecedented in human written records, leaving us with little historical precedent to rely on. "At first, no one cared about this disaster; it was just a forest fire, a drought, the extinction of a species, the disappearance of a city, until the disaster became relevant to everyone." We hope that the scenario described in "The Wandering Earth" will not come true, and that we can continue to thrive on Earth.
We cannot verify the authenticity of global warming to those who are skeptical, not because it's impossible, but because we cannot afford the cost of verification. We can only do our best to protect the environment, protect the Earth, and protect our home. The best time to plant a tree was ten years ago; the second-best time is now. It's too late to change the past, but it's not too late to act for the future. We should start from ourselves and from small things around us, such as using less electricity, water, and paper.
