COP26: If not now, when?
In Glasgow, England, global leaders are talking about the future of climate change in the next 5-10 years. But it’s already happened to my family and me in our neighborhood. Last weekend, there was a moon tide up to 1.7 meter high. It would not be the peak of this season and we are expecting for a much higher tide very soon.
My father told me that we did not do anything to change situations, but we just did not have money to execute projects. He used to work for a regional institute of planning water resources. Infrastructure is very expensive. So, ten years ago, I skipped classes and joined startups.
Living in a city with air pollution, daily traffic jams and bad sewing systems, especially in the middle of all congestion is a very unpleasant experience. I remember after a heavy rain, schools and streets flooded in dark water. Sometimes I was stuck on the street. There were big thunders on top of my head. It was an unforgettable event.
Three years ago, I worked on a few dozen projects and became a director. But those are not my true calling. I moved back to academia. A mistake put me into frontier research. Luckily, previous skills and experience helped me survive and travel further than I could have imagined. On trips, I was amazed by how similar we were and how kind the world was. I talked to people and learned about their daily life. And hope to do something to repay what I earned.
I was in Europe before COP25.
It was an underwhelming experience as a prediction for what happened a few months later. To talk about climate change to somebody living in a developed country is really hard. But I could not stop myself after reading a NYT paper about a new climate prediction. My country and my city were at the top of that list. So, I returned and stepped up as a founder. Crazily I moved around the world to build a business physically and virtually.
We are running out of time.
The reality hits us much harsher. A scenario that I could anticipate in 5-10 years came in just a few months. A red map of Australia's wildfire turned into a red map of a pandemic. My country was also one of the first places to experience a mass disruption in social-economy. The warning was also ignored again by the West. But it just took a few days to see a consequence with a cost of life and health.
For the Delta variant, it was nearly six straight months with various social distancing levels. We did not have access to vaccines, but could not accept that people lost their beloved family members. There is a growing concern about the Delta plus variant. As soon as we open our borders and economy, it will come to us. This would not be the last time and we have to learn to live with it every day.
I hope that people talk about climate change in COP26 like Covid-19.
With urgency and day-to-day actions across the globe. In the past two years, there were a lot of “extreme and un-predicted weather events” exceeding all the historical records. Just take the US as an example. Droughts and wildfires in California. Snow storms and hurricanes in the South. Flash floods and tornadoes in tri-states. Given the current situation and the projection, we should expect more events to happen faster.