Environment & Energy
Related: About this forum2020 declines in carbon emissions were staggering. Can we keep it that way?
They started as unexpected silver linings clearer skies and cleaner air in cities from Los Angeles to New Delhi and a much-celebrated return of fish and crystal-clear waters to the oft-murky canals of Venice, Italy. By the end of last year, these local anecdotes were real and measurable markers of the pandemic's unintended climate benefits.
Yet, while heartening, the environmental reprieve isn't expected to last. There are already signs that as countries try to return to a new normal, economic activity and all the emissions and pollution that go along with it will creep up again.
And if the pandemic revealed what could be considered low-hanging fruit in the climate fight, it also highlighted the sheer scope of the problem.
"If you think about the scale of action that we need if we want to limit warming as is proposed in the Paris Agreement we would need to reduce carbon emissions by 1 or 2 billion tons every year," said Corinne Le Quéré, a professor of climate change science at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. "That's less than what we did during the pandemic, but it's still a big number."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/2020-declines-in-carbon-emissions-were-staggering-can-we-keep-it-that-way/ar-BB1fVyqU?li=BBnbklE&ocid=DELLDHP
NNadir
(33,544 posts)I didn't notice.
Neither, it would seem, did the atmosphere.
Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa
Week beginning on April 11, 2021: 418.96 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 416.44 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 393.61 ppm
Last updated: April 22, 2021
Of course, this article from MSN comes with the requisite pictures of a one time desert wilderness filled with huge steel posts supporting the nacelles of greasy wind turbines all of which are connected by roads for servicing with diesel trucks, and all need redundant copper and lanthanide magnets connected to turbines turned by burning dangerous natural gas and dumping the gas waste directly into the atmosphere.
In 20 years, all of those wind turbines will be rotting hulks, and the plastic coatings that peeled off the blades will be strewn to the wind across the desert where surviving birds can chew on them.
I'm glad that they attach a completely irrelevant picture - since presumably the wind turbines had nothing to do with millions of people dying around the world from Covid causing shut downs - so we can all play happy face and pretend we give a rat's ass about the future.
Of course, if we did care about the future - we don't - we wouldn't spend quite so much time lying to ourselves, but hey, don't worry, be happy.
By the end of May, we will see 420 ppm at Mauna Loa or damned close to it, this less than 10 years after we first hit 400 ppm, this ten year period being at the wrong end of the claim that so called "renewable energy" would save the world.
It didn't.
It isn't saving the world, even with people huddled in their homes in a fear of plague.
It won't save the world.
Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin
(108,192 posts)You're giving 2021 stats.
NNadir
(33,544 posts)Actually, I have been keeping a spread sheet of all the weekly readings at Mauna Loa and all the monthly and yearly readings for over ten years.
At 2.31 ppm over 2019, 2020 was a worse year than 2017 (1.93 ppm), 2013 (1.99 ppm), 2014 (2.22 ppm) and every year from 2000 to 2010 except 2002 (2.51 ppm) and 2005 (2.57).
In the entire 20th century, going back to 1959, only one year, 1998 (2.98) when fires set for palm oil plantations destroyed much of the SE Asian rain forest - let's all cheer for biodiesel for Germany - was as bad as 2020.
None of this inspires me to cheer for the wonderful environmental advantage of having a world wide plague, even if, for a few months, air pollution deaths may have fallen slightly lower than 19,000 people a day, which easily exceeds Covid's worst day ever.
Speaking only for myself, and I recognize that I'm eccentric, I think we should stop kidding ourselves with all these pictures of wind turbines supported on steel made but heating iron ore over coke made by heating coal with burning coal.
The claim is just silly. Two billion tons of CO2, as incredible as it might seem, even if it were real, would mean next to nothing. It doesn't even address the climate cost of land use changes (about 10 billion tons a year) never mind dangerous fossil fuel waste (35+ billion tons a year.)
We don't need to "keep this going." Neither dead minds nor dead people will address climate change, but live minds might. The continued cacophony of lies we tell ourselves are not helping. We are failing the future.