essay impact of lockdown in climate
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That record was broken in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, even though the health crisis has driven one of the largest, most dramatic drops in CO2 emissions ever recorded. During the peak of the global confinements in the first quarter of the year, daily emissions were about 17 percent below last year’s, according to research published this week in Nature Climate Change.
But even such big drops in carbon dioxide emissions will have little impact on overall CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, says Richard Betts—a scientist at the U.K.’s Met Office—and that’s what matters most for climate change.
The pandemic has disrupted life around the world, and stay-at-home orders have kept large swaths of the world at home for months now. But the disruption only results in a tiny drop in the overall concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere because of how long the gas effectively lingers.
So that record concentration of 418 parts per million? That would have been just 0.4 parts per million higher without the virus-driven emissions drop, according to an analysis posted on climate science and policy website CarbonBriefearlier in May.
Still, for energy and climate expert Constantine Samaras, the message is clear: Just because this devasting pandemic has only a small impact on today’s CO2 levels doesn’t mean the climate crisis is lost.
“A pandemic is the worst possible way to reduce emissions. There’s nothing to celebrate here,” says Samaras, of Carnegie Mellon University. “We have to recognize that, and to recognize that technological, behavioral, and structural change is the best and only way to reduce emissions.”
What did we see with CO2 emissions vs. concentrations?
During this unprecedented, deadly global event, millions of people who could stay at home did just that. Cars sat in driveways. Air travel ground to a halt. Manufacturing plants slowed or stopped. Public buildings shut their doors. Even construction slowed down. Nearly every sector of the energy-using economy reacted to the shock in one way or another.
The result was one of the biggest single drops in modern history in the amount of carbon dioxide humans emit.
Over the first few months of 2020, global daily CO2 emissions averaged about 17 percent lower than in 2019. At the moments of the most restrictive and extensive lockdowns, emissions in some countries hovered nearly 30 percent below last year’s averages, says Glen Peters, one of the authors of the Nature Climate Change analysis and a climate scientist at Norway’s Center for International Climate Research.