Earth Matters: Giant solar farm planned for Texas; 'unprecedented' not OED's 'Word of the Year'
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Earth Matters is a weekly feature of Daily Kos. • Response to pandemic cuts greenhouse gas emissions in 2020, but it’s just a blip: The World Meteorological Organization reported Monday that global emissions this year will falEarth Matters: Giant solar farm planned for Texas; 'unprecedented' not OED's 'Word of the Year'
Earth Matters is a weekly feature of Daily Kos. • Response to pandemic cuts greenhouse gas emissions in 2020, but it’s just a blip: The World Meteorological Organization reported Monday that global emissions this year will fall as much as 7%. But that decline won’t make a long-term difference in the addition in the three most powerful greenhouse gases in our already over-burdened atmosphere, the WMO stated in its annual greenhouse gas bulletin. They just accumulated at a slower pace: Preliminary estimates indicate a reduction in the annual global emission between 4.2% and 7.5%. At the global scale, an emissions reduction this scale will not cause atmospheric CO2 to go down. CO2 will continue to go up, though at a slightly reduced pace (0.08-0.23 ppm per year lower). This falls well within the 1 ppm natural inter-annual variability. This means that on the short-term the impact of the COVID-19 confinements cannot be distinguished from natural variability, according to the Bulletin. The current level of CO2 in the atmosphere in 2019 hasn’t been seen since 3-5 million years ago, WMO stated. And concentrations of another greenhouse gas, methane, increased last year by 8 parts per billion, which “continues the trend of the past decade of methane increasing by 5–10 ppb per year,” the WMO noted. Oksana Tarasova, head of the WMO's atmospheric research division, told Inside Climate News, «Now you would say, 'Wow, we were in complete lockdown, it felt like life was stopped,' but the decrease for the year is only 7% at most. But it is not surprising because we didn't change anything fundamentally. It was basically business as usual. It shows how life is so deeply connected with emissions, with everything we do.» Whether we alter this deep connection in a meaningful way depends on how far we—as a global species of 7.8 billion—are willing to abandon business as usual and recover from the economic impacts of the pandemic by deploying a green approach. More aggressive Paris Climate agreement pledges, more investment in renewable energy, adopting more sustainable agriculture, and ending fossil fuel subsidies and bailouts are just a few of the pieces needed to accomplish a green transformation Read more