We face two global crises. In both cases, the science is crystal clear, the economic and social impacts are devastating, and people are dying. But our reactions to them are very different.

One is the coronavirus pandemic. While many governments have been criticized for slow and uneven responses to the virus, they are now scrambling into action with emergency plans and stimulus programs.

China, the worlds second-largest economy, was virtually brought to a halt . The whole of Italy is on lockdown , with schools and businesses closed. In the U.K., the right-wing Conservative government just announced a Keynesian budget, promising $38 billion in extra spending to tackle the coronavirus. And in the U.S., the Trump administration has banned travel from most of Europe .

People are washing their hands, practicing social distancing and hoarding hand sanitizer.

Compare this to the worlds response to the climate crisis. Evidence of climate breakdown is coming at us fast. The polar ice caps are melting six times faster than in the 1990s , according to data published on Wednesday; whole ecosystems threaten to collapse in the next few decades; and scientists say we may be approaching tipping points that would irreversibly lock us into a far hotter world.

People are already dying. Around seven million people a year die from air pollution. The World Health Organization has predicted there will be around 250,000 additional deaths from 2030 to 2050 due to malaria, diarrhea, heat stress and malnutrition caused by climate change.

Yet despite this tide of bleak and terrifying scientific evidence, climate change action has been painfully slow, muted and wholly out of step with the urgency of the situation.

We spoke to six experts in climate change to try to understand why people cannot muster the kind of strong and wide-reaching action for the environment that they can for the coronavirus. Heres what the experts had to say:

Coronavirus is a simple, scary threat and were not the villain.