If the dark cloud of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic has even a hint of a silver lining, it’s this: lockdowns ordered to blunt the outbreak resulted in a rapid, dramatic drop in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
This resulted in suddenly clear skies over some of the globe’s most air-polluted cities and regions.
“As covid-19 infections surged in March and April, nations around the globe experienced an abrupt reduction in driving, flying and industrial output, leading to a startling decline of more than a billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions,” reports the Washington Post, citing a new study published on Tuesday.
“That includes a peak decline in daily emissions of 17% in early April,” the Post says. “For some nations, the drop was much steeper.” In India and Europe, for instance, emissions plummeted by more than 25%.
Unfortunately, there’s a flip side: the sharp decline of daily emissions noted in March and April has already begun to shrink as many nations and U.S. states move to crank their economies back up to pre-pandemic levels. China may already have already passed that mark, with pollution increasing rapidly.
The study in the journal Nature Climate Change was conducted by an international team of scientists, who cautioned that as heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) levels rise again, pollution break will likely be “a drop in the ocean” when it comes to climate change.
“The biggest global drop was from April 4 through 9,” reports the Associated Press, when the world was spewing 18.7 million fewer tons of CO2 a day than it did on Jan. 1. That was the lowest global emission rate since 2006.
But it was very brief.
“It’s like you have a bath filled with water and you’re turning off the tap for 10 seconds,” the lead author of the study, British climate scientist Corinne LeQuere, told the AP.
Of course, no one seriously thought such a reduction would or could be sustained.
“If next year returns to 2019 pollution levels, it means the world has only bought about a year’s delay in hitting the extra 1.8 degrees of warming that leaders are trying to avoid,” LeQuere told the AP.
That life-altering level will likely still occur at some point between 2050 and 2070.
