And for a while, the world went quiet...

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The world did not end when the humans retreated into their caves.

It went a bit quieter.

Dolphins were seen in the waters of Venice.

People outside in Beijing found they could breathe without a mask -but then put the masks back on for fear of the virus. 

Will we learn from this when we start to emerge from our caves?

Covid-19 is not especially for us. It's just a scrap of opportunistic biochemistry of a type that's been around since at least the dinosaurs, and possibly longer than life like ours has existed on the planet.

There are other threats. 

On human timescales, a couple of months ago in December 2019, most of us could not see a threat. A couple of weeks ago the UK government did not think the threat worth extreme control measures. Then the numbers mounted up, and we were imprisoned in our homes.

Emerging from this crisis, can we recognise the seemingly far-off slow-burn threat that is climate change, and take action 100s of times the scale of the reaction to Covid-19. Quickly, within a decade or less, stop burning fossil fuels, in cars; other vehicles; aircraft; power stations; home heating, all the billions of places we burn too cheap fossil fuels without a thought as to the consequences in the future?

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