In the four months that people drove less, about 6 megatons of CO2 didn’t go into the atmosphere each day, equal to about 1.2 million American cars’ yearly mileage. Published in Nature Climate Change and clocking up a score of 2,528, the research warns that Arctic sea ice decline is likely to see polar bears spend more time on land, increasing how long they are required to fast and putting their survival and ability to reproduce at risk. For example, the researchers find that the ice sheet’s “temperature sensitivity is 1.3 metres of sea-level equivalent per degree of warming up to 2C above pre-industrial levels”, which almost doubles to “2.4C per degree of warming between 2 and 6C”. By entering your email address you agree for your data to be handled in accordance with our Privacy Policy. "The changes seen during the lockdown are not structural changes," said Le Quéré, who co-authored the May study on daily carbon emissions, published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change. 1990 2000 Year 2020 Feb Mar 2020 Apr May Nature Climate Change (2020); Global Carbon Project Global daily fossil C02 emissions MtC02 day 100 95 90 85 80 Feb Mar Year 2020 Residential Public Aviation Power Industry Surface Transport Apr May Source: Le Quéré et al. It is, perhaps, no surprise then that the top climate paper of 2020 was also about Covid-19. But, as with many aspects of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic soon took centre stage. Webinar: Do we need to stop eating meat and dairy to tackle climate change? This can involve different treatment of how greenhouse gases other than CO 2 contribute to climate change, ... Credit: Le Quéré et al. Its executive summary warns: “The changing climate has already produced considerable shifts in the underlying social and environmental determinants of health at the global level. In widespread news coverage, the study was covered by the Washington Post, Financial Times, Reuters, New Scientist, Guardian, BBC News, Independent, MailOnline and Sky News. There’s nothing to celebrate here,” says Samaras, of Carnegie Mellon University. (For more on the state of the Greenland ice sheet – and discussion of this study – see Carbon Brief’s guest post from September.). Le Quéré et al. It might not fill quite as quickly as it did before, but it’s definitely not draining completely. The study finds that the temporary dip in global emissions will only prevent around 0.01C of warming. The decrease in emissions from … The year of 2020 had 60. You are welcome to reproduce unadapted material in full for non-commercial use, credited ‘Carbon Brief’ with a link to the article. Framed another way: We’re still spitting out more than 80 percent as much CO2 as normal, even when life feels devastatingly different. More information: Glen P. Peters et al, Towards real-time verification of CO2 emissions, Nature Climate Change (2017). Samaras says that in no way represents what a concerted global effort to actually hit that goal would do. The study featured in 739 online news articles from 405 outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, New Scientist, CNN and USA Today. The finding that the world’s oceans could be restored within 30 years generated headlines in the Guardian, Press Association, BBC News, i newspaper and MailOnline, and was the subject of an editorial in the Times. To hit that goal, overall human-caused greenhouse gas emissions need to start dropping by about 7.6 percent each year from now until 2030 (and beyond). Just missing out on the Top 10 is the Science paper “Climate change contributes to widespread declines among bumble bees across continents”, with a score of 2,379. And thousands of newly published peer-reviewed climate papers vied for media attention throughout the year. The pandemic has disrupted life around the world, and stay-at-home orders have kept large swaths of the world at home for months now. By comparison, in 2019, the top-ranked climate paper was the seventh highest overall. 2020, Nature Climate Change. Infographic by Joe Goodman for Carbon Brief. The study, also published in Communications Earth & Environment, finds that 2019 saw the ice sheet hit a record annual loss of 532bn tonnes.). The ocean and land, which absorb or use up some of that CO2, are the drain—but even when they’re wide open, they can only let out half the water that comes in. Get a Daily or Weekly round-up of all the important articles and papers selected by Carbon Brief by email. COVID-19 illustrated individual actions are not enough to curtail warming. Analysing weather station data from around the world, the researchers find that some coastal subtropical locations have already reported wet-bulb temperatures of 35C and “that extreme humid heat overall has more than doubled in frequency since 1979”. Public buildings shut their doors. Scientists have a pretty good idea of how much more atmospheric CO2 will accumulate each year: about half as much as we pump up there (the other half gets absorbed by plants and the oceans). As normal life was turned upside down, newspaper headlines and social media conversations were dominated by lockdowns, vaccines and infection rates. Indicators in all domains…are worsening. The other huge change was in surface transport such as cars and trucks, where daily activity sank an average of 50 percent. By the beginning of the pandemic, Betts’s team had already predicted what atmospheric CO2 was supposed to do in 2020. Back in May, lead author Dr James Kossin, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Center for Weather and Climate, told Carbon Brief: “Our analysis finds that the global increasing trend in tropical cyclone intensity has now risen to a point where it is very unlikely to be random, even after addressing known issues with the historical data.”. You have been signed up successfully. However, because the paper is an invited commentary rather than a traditional research paper, it isn’t included in Carbon Brief’s leaderboard. Winds of change. Show more Professor Corinne Le Quéré of University of East Anglia talks to Jim Al-Khalili about tracing global carbon. And in 24th place, with a score of 1,831, is the Nature paper “The hysteresis of the Antarctic Ice Sheet”. (Update: Altmetric has now published its Top 100 papers for 2020. The International Energy Agency estimates that by the end of 2020, global emissions will decline by about 8 percent compared to last year. Instead, taking second spot with an Altmetric score of 3,696 is “Future of the human climate niche”, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). (There is also a second study on tropical cyclones in the Top 25. Influential academics reveal how China can achieve its ‘carbon neutrality’ goal, Global Carbon Project: Coronavirus causes ‘record fall’ in fossil-fuel emissions in 2020. Using Altmetric data for 2020, Carbon Brief has compiled its annual list of the 25 most talked-about climate change-related papers that were published the previous year. In 2018, for example, concentrations rose by 2.5 parts per million, to an average of 407.4; 2019 averages have not yet been released, but a similar value is expected. Nature Climate Change, 2020/Global Carbon Project), CC BY. What Betts showed was the dark side of the emissions problem. The North Atlantic has seen the most significant increases in cyclone intensity, the study says, with the chances of a major hurricane occurring in the North Atlantic increasing by 49% per decade. Please contact us for commercial use. Their forecasts are usually remarkably accurate. If people are driven back into their homes by rising COVID-19 infection rates, emissions could fall even more. Nature Climate Change 2019 based on data from the International Energy Agency) Advertisement. So the final prediction, for the average over the course of the year: 414 parts per million. It ranks the Le Quéré et al. China’s emissions decreased by about a quarter in February. “We have to recognize that, and to recognize that technological, behavioral, and structural change is the best and only way to reduce emissions.”. Landing in eighth place is another polar paper – “Fasting season length sets temporal limits for global polar bear persistence”. In 2019, Altmetric found two papers that passed this milestone. Looking a little further down the leaderboard, in 18th place is the Nature paper “Asynchronous carbon sink saturation in African and Amazonian tropical forests”, with a score of 1,992. If declines continue at this pace, many of these species could vanish forever within a few decades.”. The annual report is the latest in a project involving 35 academic institutions and UN agencies from across the world, which began in 2015. The higher ranking is because Altmetric changed their methodology this year – rather than taking the 100 highest-scoring papers, they have selected the five top-scoring papers across 20 categories to give them a Top 100.). The study finds that major tropical cyclones – category 3 or higher – have become 15% more likely at a global level between 1979 and 2017. (A forecast that would prove to be very close to an estimate at the end of the year.). (For more on tipping points, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth explainer.). The result was one of the biggest single drops in modern history in the amount of carbon dioxide humans emit. But Le Quéré said she hopes the study’s findings will encourage countries to think about solutions that promote economic recovery without sacrificing climate action. It was the Nature Climate Change paper, “Temporary reduction in daily global CO2 emissions during the Covid-19 forced confinement”, by Prof Corinne Le Quéré, a Royal Society research professor of climate change science at the University of East Anglia, and colleagues." “Only when we would reduce our emissions even more than this for longer would we be able to see the decline in concentrations in the atmosphere,” he says. 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