A new peer reviewed paper in Nature states that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, global CO₂ emissions decreased by 17% by early April 2020 when compared with the mean 2019 levels. 

Before I go any further, it must be understood that there is no way to get actual data for CO₂ emissions and these findings are estimates based on models.  CO₂ emissions are estimated based on power plant output, estimate use of internal combustion engines and other proxy data estimates.  

Since we can’t measure CO₂ emissions in real time, the authors of this paper devised a model to calculate the reduction in CO₂ emissions by developing something they call a “confinement index (CI)” to capture the effect of various policies that affected Power, Industry, Surface Transport, Public, Residential and Aviation based on 3 different levels of confinement. 

Lots of good work went into this paper and while the paper’s results are derived from a simulation from a model, I think we can all agree that during this COVID-19 pandemic, CO₂ emissions were definitely attenuated so I can’t fault any of their numbers.  It’s the best estimate we have to go on!

Here are the results of the paper in graphical format.

This COVID-19 Pandemic will amount to a massive Economic, Social and Environmental experiment that is on a level never conceived of prior to the SARS-COV-2 virus coming on the scene and I expect hundreds of papers to be published over the coming year to analyze this.  But I hope there are at least a few papers authored to help understand the environmental impacts of this global lockdown. 

The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis states that increased atmospheric CO₂ levels (measured in parts per million – PPM) is causing the Earth to warm and furthermore, the increase in atmospheric CO₂ levels is directly traced to humans emitting more CO₂ through their increased use of fossil fuels.  

Even the wildest dreams of the most radical AGW believers didn’t propose the CO₂emission attenuation that we have seen in the past few months but now we can put the AGW hypothesis to the test.  If human caused CO₂ emissions is the source of Global Warming and elevated CO₂ levels in the atmosphere, then we should see a sharp decrease in the measured CO₂ levels in our atmosphere in the coming months and therefore a decrease in global temperatures anomalies. 

Unlike the simulated CO₂ emissions data, atmospheric CO₂ levels are measured quite accurately monthly and I have plotted the data from 1970 through April 2020 below.   

Let’s watch this data over the coming months to see if there is a decrease in atmospheric CO₂ from this drastic energy attenuation during the COVID-19 pandemic!