There’s nothing to celebrate here,” says Samaras, of Carnegie Mellon University. This can involve different treatment of how greenhouse gases other than CO 2 contribute to climate change, ... Credit: Le Quéré et al. “From humanity’s perspective, the COVID-19 pandemic is the largest event many of us have ever experienced. Webinar: Do we need to stop eating meat and dairy to tackle climate change? The study featured in 739 online news articles from 405 outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, New Scientist, CNN and USA Today. Jet stream: Is climate change causing more ‘blocking’ weather events? (There is also a second study on tropical cyclones in the Top 25. Over the first few months of 2020, global daily CO2 emissions averaged about 17 percent lower than in 2019. nature climate change (2020); global carbon project. Think of the atmosphere as a bathtub. They were also shared on social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. “In a way, it’s hard to mentally reconcile that with just a small difference in emissions; it seems almost dismissive. Daily global greenhouse gas emissions declined 17 percent by early April compared to 2019 levels due to coronavirus-related shutdowns around the world, according to new research published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The Nature Climate Change team estimates that drop to be somewhere between 4 to 7 percent, depending on the way lockdowns develop over the rest of the year. Study co-author Prof Simon Lewis, a professor of global change science at University College London and the University of Leeds, wrote a Carbon Brief guest post about the research when it was published. These studies were covered around the world in news articles and blogs. By entering your email address you agree for your data to be handled in accordance with our Privacy Policy. “You need behavior change, and you need people to accept new technology and encourage them to embrace it.” That, she adds, means “tackling climate change needs to be led by governments.” Tracking all these “mentions” was Altmetric, an organisation that scores and ranks papers according to the attention they receive. Even with all this economic upheaval and the emotional toll of isolating, our emissions have dropped only 17 percent in the short term and will likely drop by less than 10 percent for the year. The annual report is the latest in a project involving 35 academic institutions and UN agencies from across the world, which began in 2015. (Le Quéré et al. ‪CICERO Center for International Climate Research‬ - ‪Cited by 12,368‬ - ‪Global fossil CO2 emissions‬ Mapped: How climate change disproportionately affects women’s health, Coronavirus: Tracking how the world’s ‘green recovery’ plans aim to cut emissions. (A forecast that would prove to be very close to an estimate at the end of the year.). When the paper was published in August, lead author Prof Piers Forster – founding director of the Priestley International Centre for Climate at the University of Leeds – told Carbon Brief that the moment was “make or break” for global climate targets: “Before we had coronavirus we weren’t on track, we absolutely weren’t…If we don’t do it today I think we won’t ever be able to, unfortunately.”, And, finally, towards the bottom of the Top 25 are a couple of papers on climate “tipping points” – thresholds where a small change could push a system into a completely new state. Indeed, 2020 followed a year where climate change had been propelled onto newspaper front pages by Greta Thunberg, school strikes and Extinction Rebellion. The Nature Climate Change team split the CO2 sources into six categories and looked at how much each changed between January and April, while countries rolled in and out of confinement. But what this experience does show is when humanity is united around a goal, big changes can happen on short time scales.”, Photograph by Bartek Sadowski, Bloomberg/Getty Images, Plunge in carbon emissions from lockdowns will not slow climate change, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/05/plunge-in-carbon-emissions-lockdowns-will-not-slow-climate-change.html, Mauna Loa long-term monitoring project of atmospheric CO, In 2018, for example, concentrations rose by 2.5 parts per million, start dropping by about 7.6 percent each year, See how your city might change by 2070 if climate change isn’t addressed. It affects literally everyone on the planet,” says Anna Michalak, a scientist at Stanford’s Carnegie Institution for Science. “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. Temporary reduction in daily global CO 2 emissions during the COVID-19 forced confinement. “We treat the atmosphere like this big waste dump,” says Ralph Keeling, a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography whose lab runs the Mauna Loa long-term monitoring project of atmospheric CO2. The lead up to the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement was marked out by many as the year for climate action. Update: This piece was updated on 20/01/2021 to add a mention of Altmetric’s newly published Top 100 for 2020. Taking the final spot in the Top 10 is “The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance” in Science Advances, with a score of 2,400. “You can’t tackle climate change with behavior change alone,” Le Quéré says. Nearly every sector of the energy-using economy reacted to the shock in one way or another. Betts and his colleagues run a model that makes these predictions for the coming year. It is, perhaps, no surprise then that the top climate paper of 2020 was also about Covid-19. That’s barely different than what the team expected without the coronavirus-related impacts. It was also picked up by 37 posts from 29 blogs and tweeted more than 3,000 times. During the crisis, people needed those almost as much as ever. "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. 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