The world’s climate catastrophe worsens amid the pandemic
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We may be living inside the biggest annual carbon crash in recorded history. The quarantines, shutdowns and trade and travel stoppages prompted by the spread of the coronavirus led to a historic plunge in greenhouse gas emissions. In some places, the environmental change was palpable — smog lifted from cities free of traffic congestion, rivers ran clear of the murk that long clogged their banks.
But the romantic vision of nature “healing” itself was always an illusion. As my colleagues reported earlier this month, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are the highest they’ve been in human history, and possibly higher than in the past 3 million years. The specter of man-made climate change looms all the more ominously over a planet in the grips of a viral pandemic.
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