A United Nations agency reported on Monday that greenhouse gas concentrations continued to rise this year, despite expectations that coronavirus lockdowns would bring emissions down.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in its Greenhouse Gas Bulletin that “in the short-term the impact of the Covid-19 confinements cannot be distinguished from natural variability.”
Many scientists predicted carbon emissions would drop by the largest amount they have in decades this year, NBC News reports, with planes grounded, ships docked and commutes dissolved as people worked from home and many businesses shuttered.
However the WMO referred to this year as a “tiny blip,” saying the changes seen this year would be similar to normal annual fluctuations.
“The rise has continued in 2020. Since 1990, there has been a 45% increase in total radiative forcing – the warming effect on the climate – by long-lived greenhouse gases, with CO2 accounting for four fifths of this,” wrote the WMO in its report.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is not a solution for climate change. However, it does provide us with a platform for more sustained and ambitious climate action to reduce emissions to net zero through a complete transformation of our industrial, energy and transport systems,” said WMO Secretary General Professor Petteri Taalas.
“The needed changes are economically affordable and technically possible and would affect our everyday life only marginally. It is to be welcomed that a growing number of countries and companies have committed themselves to carbon neutrality. There is no time to lose.”
The WMO estimates that during the harshest period of the lockdown, global daily CO2 emissions dropped by 17 percent.
“Carbon dioxide is the single most important long-lived greenhouse gas in the atmosphere related to human activities, contributing about two thirds of the radiative forcing,” writes the WMO.
Carbon emissions in the U.S. are believed to have been impacted by record-setting wildfires this year, offsetting the expected decrease from COVID-19 lockdowns. Fires in California burned more than 4 million acres this year.
Governments around the world have recently announced further actions seeking to reduce their carbon emissions. The U.K. and California both announced plans to ban the purchase of new fossil-fuel powered vehicles in the next 10 to 15 years.
