Climate & Covid-19
Call the year 2020 whatever name you like, but this is actually a very important period to learn from, as well as a tell-tale sign of future challenges.
While there are a number of highly critical events impacting our daily lives today, it is also important to keep the long- (short-) term goals in the forefront of how we manage our behavior and decisions moving forward. The climate crisis is not going away. While Covid-19 provided a tremendous, but brief break from the world’s use of fossil fuels, it has done nothing for atmospheric CO2 concentrations, which continues to keep growing. Also, with economies re-opening to business-as-usual practices, that brief break is seemingly over as fossil fuel usage rebounds.
How does atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to increase, when we made drastic reductions to emissions during the covid-19 lockdowns? The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions due to the Covid-19 lockdowns and travel bans, while welcome, nary make up for what’s truly necessary for meaningful impact. Emissions do not equate to atmospheric concentrations, and it is critical to differentiate between the two.
Emissions are exactly what they are: they are the greenhouse gases produced by our activities stemming from energy generation and usage, transportation, building and manufacturing, and factory farming, to name a few. While the covid lockdowns brought that line on the graph down a little bit, it is only a fraction of what we need to accomplish for meaningful impact.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0797-x/figures/3
Atmospheric concentration is the ratio of CO2 in our atmosphere, and the continued increase in atmospheric concentrations is due to the extremely long lifespan of CO2. Our emissions contribute to atmospheric concentrations, but because of CO2’s long lifespan, a reduction (or elimination) of emissions does very little to immediately impact concentrations. They continue to increase because we have not reduced our emissions enough. Emissions reductions need to be in the range of 20% to 30% and sustained for six to 12 months, in order for the rate of increase of CO2 measured at Mauna Loa to even slow down, according to Scripps scientists.
We need to bring both emissions and atmospheric CO2 concentrations down…way down…in order to have a meaningful impact on the climate crisis. Think of emissions as THE NOW, the immediate and short-term output of daily human activities. It is the result of everything we do – living, breathing, mining, extracting, pumping, burning, building, manufacturing, cooling, heating, driving, flying, etc. The increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 is the resulting buildup of all of those emissions over time, which is why the climate crisis is not going away even amidst the Covid-19 lockdowns. Not only are the earth’s systems unable to keep up with what people are emitting into the environment, but everything we have emitted into the environment doesn’t go away very easily. People can incorrectly conclude that since we have severely cut down our greenhouse gas emissions during this pandemic, that we have made a big dent in combatting climate change. That is absolutely not true, and it is sobering. Once we emit C02, 50% stays for centuries, and 20% stays for 1000 years. About ½ of the CO2 we have emitted since 1750 is still out there! Hence, even though we cut our emissions during the covid-19 lockdowns, those reductions are only a small fraction of what we really need to be doing. Our actions need to be severe and sustained over a long period of time, in order to avoid the worst catastrophic effects of climate change.
Below is the mitigation required in order to prevent the worst effects of climate change (to keep global temperatures below 1.5 deg C and 2 deg C).
The covid-19 lockdowns have done little to impact long term climate change. It’s important to note this, and to understand that not only do we have an enormous amount of extremely important and extremely urgent work ahead of us, but this work requires the transformation of our values, our cultures, and our societies to save us from ourselves. Now.
-by Ray Regalado
