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I.The Pandemic Has Led to a Huge, Global Drop in Air Pollution zoom_in

The coronavirus pandemic is shutting down industrial activity and temporarily slashing air pollution levels around the world, satellite imagery from the European Space Agency shows. One expert said the sudden shift represented the "largest-scale experiment ever,” in terms of the reduction of industrial emissions.“ Readings from ESA’s Sentinel-5P satellite show that over the past six weeks, levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) over cities and industrial clusters in Asia and Europe were markedly lower than in the same period last year. Nitrogen dioxide is produced from car engines, power plants and other industrial processes and is thought to exacerbate respiratory illnesses such as asthma.
While not a greenhouse gas itself, the pollutant originates from the same activities and industrial sectors that are responsible for a large share of the world’s carbon emissions and that drive global heating. Paul Monks, professor of air pollution at the University of Leicester, predicted there will be important lessons to learn.

One of the largest drops in pollution levels could be seen over the city of Wuhan, in central China, which was put under a strict lockdown in late January. The city of 11 million people serves as a major transportation hub and is home to hundreds of factories supplying car parts and other hardware to global supply chains.According to NASA, nitrogen dioxide levels across eastern and central China have been 10 to 30 percent lower than normal.
NO2 levels also dropped in South Korea, which has long struggled with high emissions from its large fleet of coal-fired power plants but also from nearby industrial facilities in China. The country has avoided putting entire regions under lockdown but is meticulously tracing and isolating suspected coronavirus cases. The changes over northern Italy are particularly striking because smoke from a dense cluster of factories tends to get trapped against the Alps at the end of the Po Valley, making this one of western Europe’s pollution hot spots. Since the country went into lockdown on March 9, NO2 levels in Milan and other parts of northern Italy have fallen by about 40 percent. “It’s quite unprecedented,” said Vincent-Henri Peuch, director of the Copernicus Atmosphere Service.

II.Yes, Emissions Have Fallen.That Won’t Fix Climate Change zoom_in

IT’S BEEN ONE of the few slivers of hope as we’ve trudged through the Covid-19 catastrophe: As industries shuttered and we all sheltered in place, we’ve stopped spewing so much planet-warming gas. One analysis by the climate group Carbon Brief in April calculated that emissions could fall by 5.5 percent this year. That seems like a tiny tally until you consider that until 2020, emissions had been steadily ticking up year after year, and that the 2008 economic collapse brought about I am here to snatch that sliver of hope away from you—and potentially replace it with a new sliver of hope. Writing today in the journal Nature Climate Change, an international team of scientists calculates that the coronavirus lockdown may only cool the planet by about 0.01 degree Celsius by the year 2030. (The rough math is that 1 degree Celsius equals 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.) But. They also argue that if humanity would aggressively fund renewables in the aftermath of the pandemic, we could avoid an overall increase of 0.3 degrees by 2050—that’s 0.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

III.Coronavirus Is Bringing Down Emissions, but Not for Long zoom_in

When the Chinese economy does recover, they are likely to see an increase in emissions in the short term to sort of make up for lost time, in terms of production,” says Zeke Hausfather. Researchers quantify these emissions by looking at factors like how much coal China reports using in its power plants, and by snooping with satellites on nitrous oxide emissions, a proxy for industrial activity. For precedent for this kind of economic bounce-back, look no further than the 2008 financial crash in the US. It caused a 3 percent reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions,

Indeed, much to the chagrin of climate scientists, global emissions continue to grow year over year. “Broadly speaking, the only real times we've seen large emission reductions globally in the past few decades is during major recessions,” says Hausfather.