March 21, 2020
Scientists say that COVID-19 may kill 5% of Earth’s population if it spreads. It is an incurable, unprecedented viral pandemic.
Upon hearing this data, we shut down cities, give leaders emergency powers, listen intently to the scientists and experts. Regardless of our mathematical background, we have all learned what “flatten the curve” means and why it matters. Human safety has taken precedent over profit to perhaps the greatest extent in recorded history. We wash our hands cleaner than Lady Macbeth’s, and we hoard food to outlast the apocalypse.
The colleagues of those very same scientists tell us that Earth’s average temperature will rise by 3.2 degrees centigrade if its curve is left unflattened. At which point, unprecedented, irreversible, incurable ecological change will set in: rising sea levels and stress on food supply will affect upwards of 50% of Earth’s population (much of that in undeveloped countries which did not contribute to the original fossil fuel consumption).
And upon hearing this data, we squabble in geopolitical sessions, discredit the experts as doomsayers, feed fossil-fuel oligarchs with votes and profits, live the American dream, and merrily feast our way to perdition.
Perhaps humanity’s original sin is mathematical in nature. Perhaps we simply cannot estimate orders of magnitude accurately, nor can we apply curve-flattening to phenomena longer than a few weeks.
Or perhaps the opposite is true. Perhaps we are excessively, inhumanely skilled at math, especially the simple calculus of those who reap what they did not sow.
For we recognize innately that the sum total of cultural privilege and accumulated wealth is indeed sufficient to assure continued housing and food even in climatological cataclysm… but uncured viruses will kill the wealthy and the destitute indiscriminately.