 two major crises have descended upon humanity. Climate change and the coronavirus. Each in its own way is man-made. Each is an enormous problem by itself. They may seem independent of each other. In fact, they are very closely linked, stemming from the same causes and the same human activities. It's a spiraling crisis, and it's just the beginning. Unless we intervene quickly, together they will get much worse. It's a postcard from the future. Most of us are familiar with the issues of climate change and its causes and consequences. And more recently, we've been living through the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic. How has climate change affected the spread of diseases like coronavirus? And conversely, how has the virus affected climate change or the work we need to do to deal with it? And how do these two crises interact and feed on each other? These issues are the subject of our story. The underlying causes of pandemics, says a recent UN report, are the same global environmental changes that drive biodiversity loss and climate change. The report argues that human damage to biodiversity is leading us into what is called a pandemic era. Our first question is, how does climate change affect the spread of coronavirus and other diseases? Let's look at a really good example of how climate change spreads disease. It's about warming oceans and their effect on cholera in both Europe and Bangladesh. Some 40 years ago, the British Marine Station in Southampton, England wanted to track the effects of the warming oceans on marine life. They recruited yachtsmen, sailors, ferryboat captains and boaters of all kind to collect plankton samples and provide longitude and latitude of various marine locations. Within the plankton was bacteria, vibrio, cholery, cause of the deadly disease cholera. Dr. Rita Caldwell at the University of Maryland has been studying this issue for decades. With the samples in England, we extracted the DNA and then with very elegant gene probes, a mechanism by which we could determine the presence and the numbers of a group of bacteria that caused disease in humans. These are called vibrios. Vibrio cholery is the cause of the agent of Asiatic cholera, of which we are currently in a pandemic, the seventh pandemic of cholera. Professor Caldwell made some remarkable findings. So we were able to determine the increase over the past 40 years, year by year by year, in the increased numbers of vibrios, with the water temperature going up with climate change, and then linking it, associating it with the increased infections of these different diseases occurring in England, Europe and the North Atlantic of the US. So this is, I think, probably the first demonstration of a infectious disease linked to climate change. And then people would catch cholera from exposure to the water and from fish. It was from eating shellfish and fish that hadn't been properly cooked by the bacteria associated with plankton. It was an aha moment when she saw that connection. It was very exciting because I had been studying cholera for the last 40 years, and we had developed the data that showed that plankton carried the vibrios. And of course, that was controversial because physicians like to think of diseases as being person to person and not having this kind of a host. You think of malaria or the mosquito as a host, but it's hard to think of vibrios as having the host, which they do. It doesn't fly, it swims. We've seen how warmer oceans can spread a disease like cholera. What about the other nasty stuff? Diseases like Ebola, SARS, the plague and the coronavirus. What do they have to do with climate change? A lot, as it turns out, especially when you're talking about zoonotic diseases. Let's define what a zoonotic disease is. It's a disease that jumps species. It jumps from animals to people. These are called spillover events, spillover events of diseases that are not only transmissible from animals to humans, but then from human to human that have pandemic potential. We're looking at a whole list of very familiar diseases that most people will recognize. Zika, Ebola, Enga, antivirus, malaria, encephalitis, anthrax, various strains of bird flu. These are diseases that are very transmissible person to person and also from animals to humans, where we come in contact with animals or with the vectors, the carriers of these diseases is where humans will catch them. So the question is how climate change is involved in the spread of these diseases. As it warms up, we see creatures big and small running to the poles to get out of the heat. And as these organisms move, they may run into other organisms that they've never rubbed shoulders with, they may run into people. And that creates the potential that the pathogens that they might have in them could spill over into another animal, including us. Some diseases are moving to new warmer climates. We see mosquitoes, ticks, sand flies, various types of insects that can be vectors, snails, these sorts of carriers of zoonotic disease found in new locations. The places that we see climate change mattering to disease emergence most aren't diseases transmitted by insects, particularly mosquitoes, and the diseases that are transmitted through water because climate change is driving more intense downfall of rain. And when that happens, we see outbreaks of waterborne diseases. So climate change affects the spread of disease because as temperatures rise in the course of global warming, these disease vectors are likely to expand their geographical territories. We can see the northernmost reaches of these diseases moving ever northward, north of Equator. So those vectors can take any different, a lot of different forms, they can be mosquitoes, they can be flies, they can be ticks, they can also be rodents, but they are also the bats. Scientists have found that bats can be particularly dangerous. Through the study of these disease or these vectors, it has come to be found that bats are probably the most dangerous of all of them. Bats can carry a number of viruses in particular that don't seem to bother them much, but cause immense problems for people. I mean, rabies is a good example. Ebola is another good example. So-called Nipah viruses, which first emerged in Malaysia, very dangerous disease in bats. And then of course, the coronavirus is SARS and MERS and now COVID-19 all have bats species as reservoirs. Scientists are studying why bats carry so many diseases. So that has been an intriguing question. Why are bats so bad? What happens? One of the speculations is that when they fly, their body gets overheated. As a result, the heating of their body works like a fever. So as a result, they filter a lot of pathogens that come their way. They can be filtered by this overheating of the flying, right? So now the pathogens, it's just like a war there between the pathogens and the bats trying to survive. So they get hotter and then the viruses get even more resistant to heat. So what happens in that war between the pathogens and the bats, they start selecting for viruses that are potentially more lethal over time. Bat defense mechanisms actually make the disease more deadly. So it turns out that every time that you get one of those viruses into us humans, we suffer a lot because we, the way that we deal with these pathogens is via the fever. But now you just got infected with a virus that can tolerate an incredible amount of heat. So the only weapon that we had to deal with these viruses doesn't work with these viruses that come from bats. So everybody wants to know where the virus came from and the smoking gun is certainly smoking. I'm not sure it depends on how you look at it, how much smoke is coming out of it in terms of which bats this virus came out of. You know, having watched other coronaviruses, including MERS and SARS in recent years emerge from very specific species of bats and the people and having done research that shows that there are thousands of coronaviruses in bats in Asia where the disease emerged. Everyone's expectation is that this virus started in a bat and got into a person, maybe through another animal, maybe not. Can we say exactly which species it is right now? Probably not. Do we know exactly where it happened? Not really. But there's there's every reason to believe that this virus like the other coronaviruses that have emerged is is in a bat and particularly a fruit eating bat that doesn't live in caves like we see in the United States, but lives in trees in Asia. The World Health Organization reported on the origins of the coronavirus after sending a team to China. They concluded that bats or even pangolins may be the reservoir for the coronavirus, but they really aren't sure. There's been a controversy over whether there was somehow a leak of the virus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The WHO largely dismissed that suggestion, but there have been calls for a more thorough investigation. But the possibility of a leak from the Wuhan lab or even a deliberate release doesn't change the underlying reality. The transmission of diseases from the wild where they originate into human populations is the common pathway for pandemics. Climate change and the human actions that cause climate change play a huge and often unrecognized role in the process. And it's not just bats. chimpanzees brought us HIV AIDS. And as we saw earlier, SARS, Ebola, Lyme disease, West Nile virus and many other diseases have animal origins. A common thread is that these pathogens emerge from wildlife. In fact, the CDC estimates six out of 10 infectious diseases in people come from animals. So how are we getting these diseases from the wild? What are the mechanisms besides warmer oceans? How does this happen? And why? Let's take the how first. One way is extreme weather. We also have an increase in extreme weather events, right, flooding, especially, which throws human communities in contact with very dirty water, very dirty conditions, even after the water has drained away. You have sanitary problems, standing pools of water tend to attract insects and dirty water itself. Water itself is a vector. It carries disease with it, both in the form of insects and other types of animals or just in the flowing liquid itself, you know, through extreme weather events, through heating of the air and through expansion of the ranges of disease carrying insects. And it's not just insects. Turns out that deer and primates and, you know, sort of large megafauna are also vectors. HIV, for instance, is a zoonotic disease that came from primates and from chimpanzees or bonavos in Africa. As others have told us, perhaps the most important factor is that a warming planet has driven a variety of disease bearing animals further and further north and south from the equator to the more temperate zones. We see climate change, driving species to live in ways and in places they've never had to do before. And then, of course, we also realize that people are growing in number, going into places and living in places that were more or less not inhabited by people for, you know, more or less ever in an urbanized way. And it's not terribly shocking to see these statistics. Well, one direct way is the wet markets, the bush, if you will, hunting, even though you might think it's a rather limited activity, you know, one animal at a time. It actually is a profoundly important source of nutrition for a lot of populations in a lot of areas of the world. That is one way where humans come directly in contact with environments where these diseases perhaps had resided in equilibrium with the local animal population. It turns out that anthropogenic or human activity, which follows climate change, also causes the spread of disease. It's the same root causes for both. We're very familiar with the major causes of climate change. The burning of fossil fuels and the release of carbon dioxide, which is warming the planet. Humanity is causing two problems that threaten our economy and our society. One is we are changing the climate, right? Global global warming continues to increase. In fact, this year, 2020, with the NASA data set, may may prove to be the hottest year on record. It might be 2016, which is currently the hottest year on record. But we are also driving a pervasive decline of life on this planet. So our economy is extractive. It's not regenerative. It's not cyclical. We are engaging the Western, the developed nations of the world are engaging in a form of capitalism that extracts, but is not overly concerned with replacements or renewal or renovation of those resources. We have affected massive amounts of land surface on this planet. And that means deforestation. Peter Dasek, president of EcoHealth Alliance and a scientist who traced SARS back to bats puts it this way. We're the root cause of all this. Ecosystems were put under pressure by us. We expand our populations. We chop down forests. We run roads through forests. We bring livestock into new regions, trade animals globally, and we spread these new diseases. So through deforestation, we're moving closer to the disease bearing vectors. And at the same time, those vectors are moving closer to us. It's now clear that climate change and deforestation are causing the spread of disease. The part of the same thing, deforestation is part of climate change. There's no question that climate change is connected to COVID. Not necessarily in the sense that climate change led directly to the emergence of disease, but in the sense that emerging infections that we've seen in the past have occurred as a result of land use changes, particularly deforestation. And those land use changes are major contributors to climate change travel. And so it's important to recognize that climate solutions, namely in this case, preventing deforestation, are also pandemic prevention solutions. And so there's a theme here. We see this also with vector-borne diseases like malaria, where deforestation chopping down trees creates an interface between people and mosquitoes and other potentially infected populations that creates outbreaks of all kinds of vector-borne diseases. And as a key component of addressing the risk of the next pandemic, we really have to think carefully about how we manage forests, particularly in the tropics, where most of these diseases erupt. Because when you look at deforestation, deforestation is a source of climate change. For one, we are cutting down the forest and we are taking all of that carbon that is on those trees. And now we are just releasing it into the air. So that's adding to the climate change. Now, the other problem for deforestation is that those trees are supposed to be taking carbon out of the atmosphere. The whole reason that we must protect the tropical forest and diversity is to protect us because the forest absorbs greenhouse gases. It produces oxygen. It's a protective layer and it has kept us alive for centuries and centuries. So we're too much destroying the only mechanism that God and nature gave us to deal with this problem. We are destroying it. And how does deforestation lead to the spread of diseases like coronavirus? Think of palm oil, a vegetable oil extracted from the fruit of the palm tree and used in an astonishing number of products, cosmetics, animal feed, biofuel, snacks, even ice cream. So let me explain to you a couple of things that we're doing. One is destroying habitats via deforestation and things like that. So we are taking land that belongs to the bats for us to have or crops for us to have our food. So every time that you have ice cream, think about the fact that the ice cream has something there that was taken out of a palm that was planted on a place where the bat was used to ask history. So indirectly, through our consumption, we are destroying the habitats of these bats via deforestation. So they go and move around to find a place where they can live. And unfortunately, again, that's places where people live. So people say, oh, bats, we don't like bats because they're the reservoirs for SARS and MERS and Ebola. It turns out that if we wiped out bats, we would wipe out ourselves. Bats are enormously important to the survival of the human species because they have huge effects on insect populations that matter a lot to people. They have huge effects on pollination services that are very important to people. The solution is we need to protect the bats and protect their habitats to protect ourselves as just one example. Factory farming plays a role in the spread of disease. In the case of poultry, we'll pack hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of birds, perhaps even over a thousand birds into a large warehouse. And you can have disease move through this population that disease can afford to become more virulent, more pathogenic. In nature, a disease typically will be kept from becoming more virulent because it can't afford to continuously kill its host. Right? A disease that kills its host ends up going nowhere. So evolution will select in favor of the less virulent strains of a particular virus. But in a factory farm where dead and diseased animals are constantly removed and healthy animals are put in, you have an endless supply of hosts. This tends to naturally select in favor of more virulent strains of virus. Our method of beef, chicken, ham and other forms of meat in the Western world is a spawning ground for these zoonotic diseases as well. So some of the same factors that are causing climate change are causing the spread of disease. But now let's turn things around. How is the coronavirus affecting climate change directly? Let's acknowledge that it's not all bad news. Global carbon dioxide emissions fell by 6.4 percent in 2020, probably because the pandemic reduced human activity. But then these emissions started to bounce back. Still, there have been some benefits. The big upsides, if you can call them that, of COVID is huge recovery on the natural ecosystem side, whether in the ocean, with the corals, trails, forests, just not having the heavy impact of 10 million visitors a year has just changed the dynamic and the ability for those ecosystems to rebound is really quite amazing when you can see it in real time. So just yesterday I was working, I was hiking with my family and I was thinking how sad it is that our planet now is healing at a moment when we cannot remove the equation. You know, like that is the saddest thing to me. Is that the only moments that nature has healed? Has been those moments when we are not part of the question. I'm sure there's quite a few marine organisms that are looking around and be like, I'm happy to be alone again, you know, to have fewer humans. But the benefits are likely to be temporary. Some economies may recover, but there is no sign that global warming has slowed. It's absolutely true that during COVID, there were periods of time when greenhouse gas emissions were lower during any given point in the year than they have been years past. The air pollution fell dramatically in many parts of the world that people obviously were traveling less. These are all true. But in the context of climate change, they're essentially irrelevant. Meanwhile, the coronavirus may have future effects on climate. Consider mass transit. Ridership has plummeted 90 percent on some of the nation's biggest systems, including those in New York and San Francisco. Reduced tax revenues are forcing state and local leaders to trim their transit subsidies. At first, the thought was that by staying home, people would be driving less, using less energy. But now there have been more deliveries. Also, air conditioning and heating individual homes is a lot less efficient than heating office buildings. Turns out that maybe instead of reducing energy, we just shifted it around. Maybe just as important, the coronavirus is slowing down research on climate change. A case in point is Dr. Jim Thompson of the University of Washington. So I'm an oceanographer and a lot of my work centers in the polar regions and in the Arctic, much of my work has been focused on the retreat of the seasonal sea ice and what that means for the overall system. One of my specialties is ocean surface waves. And those waves are really increasing as the as the Arctic melts and as the sea ice retreats, leaving open water behind, that open water is real estate for waves to form. And the waves are getting quite a bit bigger in recent years. So the sea ice is going further and further back to the north every summer and also is happening earlier in the season and persisting later in the season. That that signal opens up the ocean to to receive the sun's rays directly. And so there's a lot of heating that's happening in the ocean because the ice isn't there to reflect the sun's rays anymore. Now that the ice is retreating so fast, now that these big waves and that when they make it to the coast, they're much bigger and the coastlines are being pretty dramatically affected. The coastlines in the Arctic are also unique in that they're mostly made of permafrost and so as much as they can be eroded, they can also just be melted and the and the coast will just sort of fall apart if there's any warm water that inundates the coastal region. Then the land basically just melts. The the average rate of retreat of the Arctic shorelines is about two meters per year. And in some places, it's 10 meters in a single year that the shoreline is just marching backwards towards the land. It's really remarkable. The hypothesis is that sea ice protects the coastline. So it's important to study how the Arctic is changing. But because of coronavirus, their work on this hit a snag in 2020. For a while, ocean research vessels were confined to port. That meant that they couldn't pick up the buoys that measure the wind, waves and ice, which captured the data necessary to understand what's happening in the ocean. So without recovering them, all that data would be lost. Fortunately, the National Science Foundation came up with a series of protocols for research and Jim Thompson's project went forward. But with significant limitations, there were coronavirus tests for the scientists and the crew members. There were quarantines going out and coming back. And instead of using the port at Nome, which was closed, they had to use the one at Seward. And that added 20 days to their trips. This was originally planned before the pandemic to be an 18 day trip. In the end, it was a 50 day trip with all the quarantine and the extra transit all the six or times. That in turn meant money. The National Science Foundation helped us absorb some of those costs and the ship operator helped us absorb some of those costs. But it also just took the part of the grant that's allocated for data analysis and really chewed a big hole in that. And it meant postponing some future research. We have a project that was supposed to be this year that was studying the hurricanes arriving on the east coast. And of course, it was a really dramatic hurricane season, right? We made it all the way through the alphabet very quickly. A lot of activity at times, there were three or even four systems, three or four storms moving and swirling around out there. And it was a very active season. And so it would have been a great one to study. And you know, there's a clear need to understand how the warming climate is really driving these really active hurricane seasons and where and how they make landfall to understand all of that. Thousands of miles south in Hawaii, oceanographic scientist Angelique White found herself in the same predicament. I'm a biological oceanographer. I'm here at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. I've been here just a few years, but the reason for coming here was to work with this program called the Hawaiian Ocean Time Series. This was begun by Dave Carl and others 30 plus years ago. So it's this really just incredible community resource where we have this long time series record of ocean biology, ocean chemistry, ocean physics at a site about just to the north of Oahu, a place called Station Aloha. So what we're really doing in this time series is is just documenting how these ecosystems work, how standard biological and chemical and physical properties change over various time scales from days to months to years to decades. And that's been my sort of heart's favorite research for quite a while here, even before I came to UH Manoa. Over the past three decades, researchers in Hawaii have gone out to an ocean research location called Station Aloha to take measurements. But this research was delayed in 2020 because many ships were confined to port in the early part of the pandemic. So for the entire research fleet around the United States and even globally, there was a significant reduction in ship days, so the number of vessels going to sea and carrying science. We were viewed as one of the essential activities, the White Ocean Time Series being an essential National Science Foundation-funded activities. Fortunately, like Dr. Thompson's research, Dr. White's trip was given the green light. But because of quarantines and social distancing, other scientists who often go on these trips weren't able to come along. And that's important because understanding what's happening to our oceans is critical to our survival. The most abundant photosynthetic organism is in the ocean. A tiny organism called Prochlorococcus, a type of phytoplankton which is responsible for nearly half of the photosynthesis on earth and thus half of the oxygen we breathe. But there is another more insidious way that coronavirus threatens to thwart our efforts to fight climate change is by pushing climate change off the urgent agenda. So of course, when a pandemic comes along, people rightly say, let's fix this pandemic, we'll worry about climate change later. And so the important lesson for me here is that there hopefully will never be in my lifetime or my children or my grandchildren's lifetime anything like what we've been through in the past year. But the odds are not for that, frankly. There's going to be something, a stock market collapse, a sadly a terrorist attack, a hack of our networks. There will be more crises of various forms. And they will always push climate change off. So the problem isn't just that climate change is a prime factor in the spread of disease or that coronavirus can accelerate climate change and obstruct the research necessary to deal with it. It's that these two crises are related. They both stem from many of the same causes and together they have significant compounding effects. CO2 warms the planet, which helps spreads disease. Deforestation not only warms the planet but pushes zoonotic diseases closer to humans. Factory farming of meats results in deforestation which warms the planet and is a factor in the spread of more virulent and deadly disease. So there's a myriad of ways that they intertwine together. There's sort of the root causes of climate. You know, the climate crisis and COVID are in the same, you know, exploitation of resources that really have been previously out of bounds for the human populations and away from them. But obviously now they've sort of intersected again. These really aren't two separate crises. They are fundamentally one in the same crisis and they feed on each other, magnifying the risk. You cannot imagine how much they are feeding upon each other. Again, depending on how, what these guys are working right now in China, what they find there, I think that that's potentially going to indicate that there was a trigger that was climate change related. When you had these two monsters coming together, man, this reason for us to be terrified and how bad this is. I mean, I don't have to, don't believe anything that I say. Look at what's happening with the COVID and look at what's happening with the wildfires and the hurricanes in the United States alone in the last year. Stan, bro, agrees. Well, so there's going to be a lot of twin disasters, like a heat wave with a flood event that's dumped on top of it or a hurricane transposed on a drought, right? I mean, you have these kind of compounding events, but pandemics are going to be one of those. We're going to have to fight two front wars against multiple cascading disaster events at once. And COVID has just been a year long sort of run up to that. It's sort of provided a postcard from the future. And one of the problems, say the experts, is that this combination magnifies the inequities that already exist. I mean, there's a couple of different ways, I think, that these two things interact. And the biggest one for me is that climate change has continued to put stress on all kinds of social systems and exacerbate inequalities within societies, both in the developed world and in the developing world. That overlaps with the way that COVID also affects marginalized and minoritized communities disproportionately to the larger population. So not only do you have challenges from climate change like increased, and take it very simple, like increased air conditioning bills in the summer, in places where that's tough to afford, you also, the same people are being affected by greater healthcare costs and greater risks to COVID at the same time. So what's happening, I think, is that the same structures that make climate change disproportionately bad for the poor and marginalized make COVID disproportionately bad for the poor and the marginalized. COVID really stripped bare all of the inequalities, all of the different economic dynamics, the differences between the haves and the have-nots around climate. COVID really accelerated trends that we were already seeing. Are we seeing an increase in the denial, disregard, and politicization of science? That's a really interesting question, and I think that this is one of the overlaps of COVID and climate change that I'm not seeing a ton of in the press and that I really think is important. So in some ways, climate change is like the original, not the original, there have been scientific controversies before this and they've been polarized, but climate change polarized science like almost no other issue in the late 1990s than the early 2000s. Oh my God, I don't even get me started. Actually, I mean, I do think this is a really important point, which is I actually believe you can draw a straight line from the campaign for climate denial that the oil corporations manufactured over decades, right? This sort of skepticism, don't trust the science. These scientists don't know what they're talking about. Here's some alternative information between that and the distrust around COVID and the vaccine and science because you've laid this groundwork for almost a half a century now. I think there's baked into the polarization of science a distrust of expertise and honestly, I think that the left has played into this in some really kind of nefarious ways. Insofar as there is a certain amount of elitism and there's also been a failure, I think, not just in the left, but in the scientific community more broadly, to acknowledge some of the past mistakes or missteps, even as the scientific community continues to ask the public to trust them. I mean, you can go back to the 50s and phyletomide, but there's been many more instances where, for example, the FDA approved something and then asked to retract or these are not infallible institutions. And I think there's a sense in which the presentation of infallibility really is can be pretty damaging, even though I don't think the institutions themselves are the ones to blame for predominantly for the kind of anti-vax movement that's growing up. I think COVID has not only sort of ridden the coattails of the science skepticism and denial around climate, but it's also accelerated it. All of that was exacerbated, I think, by the rise of social media where people can live in their echo chambers, but the stage was really set by the time we got to 2019 for vastly different interpretations of scientific information and politically motivated challenges to expert science. And there's been many issues that have fallen in this kind of category of behavior, but climate change and climate denial, because of the way that's run down party lines in the past 10 to 12 years really laid a framework for the response to COVID that ended up, I think, being really destructive. We need to know how all this started. It's not just a fervent strain, it's a really long-standing strain of American anti-intellectualism. And in part, it almost come, not almost, it part of comes out of the kind of frontier mentality that in many ways defined America's perception of itself pretty early in the nation's history, but it gets inflamed by populism at various points. So I think there's ingrained in American history a tension between the do-it-yourself, all-figured-out kind of frontier mentality that we laud in American culture. I think that's great. And then intellectual elitism, where we have these really great thinkers with really great ideas who can remake the world. And those things often are kind of at odds with each other, particularly when governance is at stake. We've always fallen victim to false ideologies that have been espoused by very charismatic people for political or personal gain. I don't know, man, like I'm telling you, one of the things that blows my mind is how blind we are. You know, how is it that we still deny some of these climatic changes where they are just killing you right now? People are not seeing the effects of climate change in their own lives, and that is part of the problem. I've long felt that if people were able to go to the Arctic and experience it in person the way I've been, that it would really change some minds and to go to those communities and the villages along the northern coast of Alaska and talk to people and talk to them and hear what they've seen in just a generation, you know, with their grandparents and what their parents grew up with and what they see now for CIs. The change is so rapid and so dramatic, and it's just not something you can deny. And so to see all of that and yet know there are people out there who still refute and deny climate change is really frustrating. That is frustrating, and I do think that I imagine some healthcare workers have felt the same thing, you know, during COVID-19. They've felt like they are working themselves to the bone as hard as they can, and yet there are others who are not not taking it seriously, not taking precautions. Scientists often feel strongly about this problem. I do find it unsettling because it's an irrationality. It's a way of denying facts that are uncomfortable to really integrate into one's thinking. I find that discouraging because it doesn't really address what science can tell us and how it can protect us. But I am worried that there's a whole, maybe even half of the public in the U.S. that are not coming along with us as we learn and try to figure out how to come up with solutions. And if you can't acknowledge a problem, it's really hard to come up with a solution. Both of these crises, climate change and coronavirus, highlight the tension and balance between individual risk and community risk? Well, I think that in the United States, as an individualistic culture, the bias is always to ask what I need to do to fix this problem. The reality is no individual can fix climate change. No town can fix climate change. No state can fix climate change. No country can fix climate change. That's the reality. But that doesn't mean that individual actions aren't essential parts of what needs to happen at a global scale. There is no shortage of ideas on how to battle climate change and the spread of disease, whether you see these as separate or related crises. There are macro solutions that require societal, even global changes. There are actions and ideas to consider in our attempts to address specific problems. And there are adaptations and strategies we need for survival. And there are also individual changes in behavior that are ethically important in any event. So how does this all play out? Well, that's a good question. My cynical historians hat, with that hat on, I suspect that we muddle through. And whatever major changes happen, change relatively slowly behind the scenes. Well, there'll be big outward facing rhetoric of change that sort of masks much smaller incremental changes if we muddle through it. Muddle through? Is that a good thing? No, no, it's not. It's just what we usually do. But of course, nobody wants that. I do think we'll find a way out of it. And we will be changed. And hopefully, we will be more attuned to practicing science as it should be. Simply because it's survival. It's a pity to have to be driven to the point of living or dying in order to make the change that we could have made under circumstances that were much more beneficial and easier to accept and to work with. It's not just little twiddling of the knobs, right? It's complete order of magnitude redo on every sector of our economy. Hawaii has taken a practical approach and established an office of climate change, sustainability, and resiliency back in 2017. Yeah, well, so I mean, the whole idea of resilience is this ability to survive, adapt, and thrive, regardless of what shocks and stresses come your way. So whether that shock or stress is a pandemic or it's a natural disaster or it's an economic downturn, a lot of the same sort of muscles are needed to be strong in order to respond to that. So what actions should we be taking? We identified 44 actions in that plan that we really needed to do to make our island more resilient. A lot of that focused on climate, but a lot of it focused on economic diversification a lot of it focused on food security. Those are the things that really manifest and come to the fore whenever you have any kind of stress or shock that hits the island. And that definitely happened with COVID. And so we actually had some things that we could pull right off the shelf and deploy in the face of COVID. Professor Colwell is creating a kind of early warning system to alert people about where and when coronavirus spreads. She and her team are looking at changes in temperature, humidity and the movement of people. Well with COVID-19 it's important to monitor population movement. We can do that by the tracking of cell phones and cell phone traffic. We can do that by the sensitive satellite that can track crowds moving cell phones. And we can couple that with the air temperature because as it gets colder people move inside that increases the risk of transmission. And we can also determine within a certain humidity range we now know from gathering the data that there's a greater likelihood of transmission as well. So humidity is an important factor? Humidity because the virus is transmitted by micro droplets. The ability of the droplets to form and to be carried in the weather pattern. And what does all this tell you? So these are put together in a very sophisticated mathematical construct that allows us then to provide this prediction of risk. And we've matched it up doing this with the United States on a county by county basis with the actual cases and the fit is between 60 and 80 percent. So it's like an amber alert? More like the pollen index. Meanwhile a group of scientists are creating a database and a global hotspot map of where diseases spill over from the wild largely in Southeast Asia, Central Africa and South America. The idea is to catch the diseases first and develop tools to deal with them before they reach major populations. As a scientist Dr. Mora is deeply involved in research on climate change and its relation to the coronavirus. He has an intense focus on practical solutions but worries about focusing too much on adaptation as a strategy. No, I'm not a big fan of adaptation. Do you know like the analogy that I give to adaptation? It's like imagine that I'm friends with Mike Tyson, okay? And Mike Tyson is super friendly guy, a good friend of mine. I'm just saying that, right? Now imagine that every now and then he just punched me in the face, you know, like, oh dude. So okay, that's my problem. It's my friend, I love hanging out with him but every now and then he just threw me a punch. And I don't like that. Now my adaptation is I put a helmet. I put a helmet so now everything that I hang out with my friend Mike Tyson, I wear a helmet wear a helmet so that every time that he punched me I don't feel the pain. Is that really the solution? Accepting adaptation is accepting that we fail. Future generations are going to be looking back at us and I'm going to say those guys adapted and look at what they left to us. So we are in the middle of a battle right now that we can win. Adapting to it is saying we just gave up. So that's what we are telling future generations we just gave up, dudes. But whether it's global change to attack root causes or developing survival strategies and that's not an either or proposition the issue is not technology. It's fair to characterize this as having moved from the realm of technology development into the realm of social change. Really what needs to take place now is social change. With social change that recognizes the need for us to live in a way that does not continuously damage the planet we will be taking the first steps to avoiding future pandemics. Many argue that scientists need to stand up and speak out and some like Dr. Anthony Fauci have for the most part done that. There's a deep discomfort within the scientific community. This is part of the kind of structural problem of having scientists on the front line of climate change politics but they have to be because they understand it the best. I feel that now oceanography, science in general it's at its heart apolitical. You think that maybe scientists buried their noses in the data and did great science but didn't do outreach and explain why their work was important? Yeah, yeah and I can understand that we're not trained as to communicate in that particular way we are trained and we learn this language and this vernacular that's very specific to our individual field so often we don't have the language that is going to effectively communicate the data that we're so close to our hearts but I do think that's changing. I'm personally like not super comfortable in front of cameras or you know doing interviews or outreach but I will push myself as much as I can to let people know like you can look at these data sets just it's demonstrative there's no argument about it. CO2 measurably is increasing in the oceans and the atmosphere and we have ideas of what the consequences for that are going to be. We know that global temperatures are increasing there's no dispute about it. So I think sounding the alarm and just being very consistent and resolute about the data that we're collecting sharing that as broadly and often as we can being honest about the uncertainties with this data and creating this conversation encouraging this conversation that's about as political as I think we can get. So in short advocacy for action on climate change has in the past taken on the form of advocacy for more and better science with the presumption that more and better science if you show it to the policy makers is going to create change. And that's where they've kind of fallen down on the job is that for years and years this was the model and it hadn't worked for a long time. I think that that dynamic has also changed a fair amount in recent years. The scientific community has become emboldened to make stronger claims about climate change as the evidence has gotten stronger but also as they've recognized the extent to which their voice is a political voice. I don't think scientists are naive actors in society. They try to insulate themselves from politics in their scientific conclusions but I think they are also smart enough to see that there are always political implications. Well Professor White doesn't disagree. This is not a political act to observe the world around you. Right this is this is an act of care and love for this one planet that we share. But science isn't enough. I realize you man you know what we are in for our for our rough right when it comes down to climate change because I mean the fact that this COVID is killing us and we still deny it. Just an indication that the road ahead when it comes down to climate change is going to be very hard to try because it's an uphill battle to change people's minds on this thing. You don't appreciate the problem. You're never going to fix it. My mind has been changing about how to fix this. For the longest of times I thought that it was about as a scientist producing the information that was required to fix this. That was my naive thinking since I was a child coming from Colombia realizing that if I study for something I can figure out the problem. But nowadays my mind is changing to the fact that one silver bullet to fix all of these problems is education. If we did have better education right now or lack of critical thinking is allowing this misinformation to take control over what we do. You see that at all levels unfortunately. The intersection of these themes climate change and pandemics in general I think it should remind us that we're not separated by borders by languages, by color that we're all sharing the same planet. To me it's really obvious that we're altering our planet in ways that are going to burden the next generations and reduce their quality of life. This shows that together when we act as a global collective we can reduce our impact. We can embrace resilience and we can not ignore the changes that we're inflicting upon the natural world. And if the pandemic has taught us anything it should be that there are consequences for ignoring the problems. Assuming it'll just go away. You'll wake up tomorrow and it'll be gone. That doesn't pan out very well for a response to viruses and it certainly won't pan out very well as a response to climate change. So you need to ask yourself what am I doing? You know if I'm going to choose to speak out about these events I've got to walk the talk and so you know the electric car the solar panels, the vegetarian I'm trying to live in a way that is consistent with counteracting the damage that we're doing to the planet. I want to make my piece you know I had obviously had a huge footprint on my planet and I believe in God and always thinking that I'm going to die I'm going to be standing at the doors of heaven and God is going to ask me what do you did with your life that you think you deserve to come in? And I can tell God you know why I publish 80 papers 12 of those papers were in the New York Times and Washington Post and people laugh at that thing, right? Those things are totally insignificant. Think about Jeff Bezos he's going there and saying oh yeah I made $14 billion a hundred billion dollars before we laugh at that thing because on the biggest scheme of things that means nothing. So I made it my goal that I want to plan a million trees before I die and I want to get into the doors of heaven and say you know what God I did the best I could who was a scientist but as a human being I planted a million trees and I think that has been so hard to do that I believe that's my key to get into heaven and I keep saying to people that come and plan trees with me that if they come and help me I write a better good letter of reference for them to God when they are the ones sitting there. In the end maybe there's a chance that coronavirus this devastating disease will focus us make us see the immediacy the urgency the danger that climate change presents no climate change and coronavirus are not the same thing but they might as well be because this is what happens when you destroy our planet we can just not afford to lose this fight man what we see in Hawaii might be just as applicable for the whole planet The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness