Has the Covid-19 Shutdown Effected CO2 Rise?

As we all know, Covid-19 spread across the globe in the early months of 2020.

One by one almost every country began some sort of shutdown/quarantine system, and the world economy was thrown into meltdown.

Businesses closed, public transport ground to a minimum, air travel ceased almost completely, and millions of the public worked from home or not at all. Manufacturing has plummeted as customers for products tighten their budgets to cope.

In 2019, there were 102,465 commercial air flights. In 2020 after February, there are less than 40,000. That’s 60,000 flights LESS. Now, a Boeing 747 uses 1 gallon of fuel per second, 36,000 gallons for a 10 hour flight. Even if we took a basic average, that’s a shade over ONE BILLION GALLONS of jet fuel we haven’t burned this year… and that’s just commercial air travel.

By October, when most of us expected the virus to ease, second waves crashed upon our shores; further more draconian lockdowns were initiated… the world stopped.

By some perverse parlor trick, the world’s economies plunged to the levels looked for by climate alarmists who had demanded such shutdowns to curb manmade Global Warming. They had demanded such for many years, citing just 12 years to ‘save the planet’.

“Mankind,” they said, “was responsible for ALL of the CO2 rise in recent years.”

And because some lab technician somewhere in China slipped, those same Climate Change Activists got their birthday and Christmas all at once.

So… being the intrepid reporter, I went to the Mauna Loa Baseline Observatory website, to look at the VERY latest CO2 figures.

Below is the graph.

Now, CO2 levels vary by time of day and season, with a peak about June, and a lowest point around October.

I had to look twice. I looked at the shape of each year, and then at 2020’s figures.

Now, I didn’t expect it to have fallen dramatically, that would ALREADY have been news all over the world… BUT I did expect a discernable change for 2020, considering the huge decrease in air travel, and the significant decrease of our daily drives.

Nada, nothing, nowt, zero, duck eggs… whatever euphemism you use, there was NO CHANGE.

Yup… mankind had shut down the economy in almost every major developed country in the world, and we had made NOT ONE NOTICEABLE DENT in the rise of carbon dioxide.

I have one thing to say about this.

In my opinion, mankind is NOT responsible for ALL modern CO2 rise, in fact, I’m not even sure we’re responsible for ANY workable fraction of it!