The world didn’t confront itself with such a terrible pandemic for a long time until the COVID-19 era. 2020 would need a restart just like our computers, some people might say. Despite the lockdowns for many countries, the ‘stay home’ initiative, the global recession, or the millions of people infected with the virus, there is one overall advantage: the planet becomes less polluted. Or at least, that’s what some specialists were claiming.
Figures published by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, show that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 had even increased this month by comparing the situation with a year before. Therefore, NewScientists says that there’s a new average monthly high of 417 parts per million (ppm) in May, which means up from 414.8 ppm a year before.
While common sense tells us that these results should have been otherwise, Richard Betts from the UK Met Office says the following:
It’s not surprising. The analogy I use is filling a bath from a tap. The water from the tap is the emissions and the water level in the bath is the concentrations. We’re still putting CO2 into the atmosphere, it’s just building up slightly less fast than before. What we need to do is turn the tap off.
It’s not over yet
While Europe and countries from other continents are enjoying a significant downfall of the numbers of COVID-19 infections and deaths, the horror even intensifies in certain areas across the globe, and it’s still about the same as active in the US. The current epicenter of the pandemic is in Latin America, with Brazil as the most affected country with over 630,000 infections and a death toll of over 5,500 people. India, Mexico, Pakistan, Chile, Qatar, and Afghanistan are also facing significant growth in the number of daily infections and deaths.
Hopefully, the world is within the final stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. The stats from above were brought to the public by worldometers.info.
