Humans are not good at responding to invisible threats. We react quickly if something with claws and horns charges towards us out of the forest, but anything invisible tends to be ignored.
So it is with COVID-19, a disease caused by a tiny and invisible virus that is highly infectious. The two week time lag between initial infections and onset of symptoms has caught the strongest of countries off guard, shut down the world economy and exposed the fragilities of our global industrial dream.
A video created in 2008 to show global carbon emissions and the need for rapid decarbonisation.
But there is another invisible global threat which has the potential to cause far more damage than COVID-19. This is the climate crisis that is caused by the carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels, clearing forests and destructive agricultural practices. Though unlike the virus the time lag between cause and effect is much longer - measured in decades rather than weeks.
Every day we add another 112 million tonnes of invisible carbon gases to the atmosphere. We don’t see or smell these gases, yet they are the result of a mindset that has treated the atmosphere as a dustbin, rather than a fragile and critical part of the earth’s life support system.
The UK emits 14 metric tons of CO₂(e) every second. That's 858 tons a minute; 1.2 million tons a day. This film shows how much that is. Data source: UK greenhouse gas emissions national statistics
So over the weeks and months ahead, as the world gets to grips with the coronavirus outbreak, let us hope that we also remember the other invisibility crisis. Lessons will be learned on how to respond to a pandemic, but the most important lesson could be that we disregard the invisible at our peril.
Note: Project Everyone commissioned us to make the global emissions film with our iconic carbon bubbles to show at the 44th G7 summit 2018 in Charlevoix, Quebec, Canada in June 2018. The model of Toronto city is used as a real-life scaling landscape to show the rate of global greehouse gas emissions in realtime. The film begins with 1000 metric tonne bubbles of carbon dioxide appearing in real-time. In 13 minutes the rate of production is 1 million metric tonnes of CO₂ and in a day the global rate of production is 112 million metric tons. More info here.
The UK carbon footprint video was created during lockdown for coronavirus in April and May 2020.