From this chart, I'm still amazed that the massive behavioral changes in 2020 due to pandemic had seemingly no impact on CO2. Makes me think personal transportation in the US is not worth bothering about if we care about global CO2.
That’s not how it works. Think of co2 level like a bathtub. Two factors influence the level of water:
* Natural cycle. This goes up and down year on year: that’s the rise and fall you see in the chart. In real life it has to do with northern hemisphere summer and leaf growth.
* Human activity. We’re pouring water into the bathtub and the water level rises
So during the pandemic we just poured water less quickly. You wouldn’t expect a drop from that. You’d just expect a slower rise.
To actually fix climate change we have to:
1. Get human emissions to zero
2. Start taking co2 from the atmosphere, actually lowering the water in the tub
It’s a big task and we haven’t even really started. Our emissions rate has been growing, not shrinking.
But we are laying the groundwork with renewable capacity and with rapidly advancing carbon capture and storage. SomI still hold out hope we can do it. But to do that we need to understand the basic shape of the problem.
