THE orange skies looked more like a smoking hellscape from the film Blade Runner 2049, but this was California 2020. The images of the huge wildfires there, and in Australia earlier in the year, are perhaps as emblematic of 2020 as those of queues of people wearing face masks.
Climate change hasn’t stopped because of a global pandemic. Yet our turbocharged heating of Earth has become an almost forgotten crisis. “Climate change has been put on the back burner,” says climate scientist Corinne Le Quéré at the University of East Anglia, UK, who advises the UK and French governments.
In the meantime, the world has seen a welter of uncomfortable records or near-records this year on measures related to climate change, from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice loss, with ever-clearer consequences for global health, wealth and happiness.
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“It’s understood the covid crisis is a short-term public health crisis and an economic crisis for a few years,” says Petteri Taalas at the World Meteorological Organization. “But it’s very well understood that the magnitude of crisis we face if we fail with climate mitigation would be something very different.”
Coronavirus is far from over. But it is time to think what we want the world to look like 10, 20 and 30 years down the line. What has been happening with the climate crisis while the world’s attention has been diverted? How has the pandemic changed the game, and what can and must we do now to avoid catastrophic warming? Read on to find out.
2019: The climate Pre-Covid-19
First, a recap. Humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels has driven atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from about 280 parts per million before the industrial revolution to an average of last year, with that figure now rising by more than 2 ppm year on year. The culprit is mainly CO2 we emit by fossil fuel burning and land use change, such as converting forest to farmland. Despite briefly flatlining from 2014 to 2016, emissions have grown again, reaching . The world has now already warmed about 1°C since the pre-industrial age.
This is the backdrop that spurred nearly 200 governments to agree to “pursue efforts” to hold warming to 1.5°C, with a backstop limit of 2°C, as part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Emissions-curbing plans under the Paris agreement leave Earth on track for warming of 3°C. If we are to hit a 1.5°C path, our remaining “carbon budget” is now highly constrained: roughly speaking, the world needs to halve emissions by 2030 and reduce them to net zero by around 2050. That’s where we were.
2020: A year of New Climate Extremes
The past year has been a reminder that, however much coronavirus has distracted us, time is running out for climate change action. California’s sepia skies are just the most recent physical signal of this. Australia’s record bush fire season, from June 2019 to March 2020, wreathed cities in the planet’s worst air pollution, killed an estimated 3 billion land vertebrates and burned an area of forest unprecedented since records began.
Siberia has also been exceptionally warm. It was 10°C above average in May, with one town north of the Arctic Circle, Verkhoyansk, baking in 38°C heat on a record June day. Most striking wasn’t the temperature highs, however, but how long the heat lasted. “It’s extreme, but it’s also very persistent, persisting since January,” says Samantha Burgess at the EU-sponsored Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). Arctic fires released a record amount of CO2, breaking last year’s record. Arctic sea ice extent , and cover for the summer , after 2012.
Europe experienced some excess deaths , but this was unremarkable compared with last year, when the continent baked in extreme temperatures. The US is another story. Adam Smith at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says the country has seen extraordinary extreme weather and events. “Unfortunately, we are starting to get used to this,” he says.
California wildfires, many of which were unusually triggered by lightning in August, have burned almost as much land in the state in one year as across the whole of the 1990s. This year has seen five of California’s six largest wildfires on record. In Oregon, hundreds of thousands of people were told to evacuate, while blazes took hold in areas usually too wet to burn.
The climate change link isn’t complex. Warmer temperatures mean drier, easy-burning trees and vegetation. California’s fires have their roots in the historic 2011-2017 drought there. The state has been hit by major wildfires for four years in a row since, although 2019’s were less severe.
Here and now
The US also smashed temperature records this year. Death Valley in California recorded an air temperature of 54.4°C, the hottest such temperature ever recorded in the world, if verified. Phoenix in Arizona saw 53 days with highs of 43.3°C (110°F) or more. The previous record was 33 days in 2011. Such a leap shows that, with the climate, change isn’t always linear. “That’s an example of this step function: an exponential jump, not a little creep. We’ve seen that with wildfires, damages, and now with temperature extremes and consecutive days of extremes,” says Smith.
Meanwhile, the US hurricane season may break the record for the number of named tropical cyclones in a year, currently 28 in 2005. That may yet just be cyclical variation, rather than anything to do with global warming, but hurricane intensity is thought to grow in a warming world. Hurricanes Laura and Sally brought destructive rain, wind and storm surges to the US, while in the US Midwest region a derecho storm – a large system of fast-moving thunderstorms that can whip up very strong winds – caused billions of dollars of crop damage. Smith says 2020 may bring the biggest financial losses yet attributable to extreme events, partly because more people in the US now live near forests and coastlines, but also undeniably because of climate change, he says.
Extreme flooding has hit many parts of the world, too, from and to . “It’s a warning call that climate change impacts are here now. We can say with confidence the world is warmer than it would otherwise have been without anthropogenic emissions. And because it’s warmer, it makes these events more likely,” says Burgess. Attribution studies have already made the links explicit for Siberia’s heat and Australia’s bush fires.
Globally, this year is likely to be the second warmest on record, says Taalas. According to NOAA figures, the 12 months to the end of August 2020 were 1.01°C above the 1901-2000 baseline figure, second only to a 1.06°C excess recorded ending in August 2016 (see table). Figures from the C3S indicate .
Who cares about second? Well, 2016’s record was boosted by the natural warming of the El Niño climate phenomenon; 2020 has been incredibly warm without it. “The biggest change we see from climate change is on temperature, and there climate is an absolute game changer,” says Friederike Otto at the University of Oxford. “Even at 1°C warming, climate change is bringing us to the edge, or even over the edge, of what we are able to cope with.”
How has The Pandemic affected Carbon Emissions?
Initially, the response to the coronavirus pandemic looked as if it would also be a game changer for greenhouse gas emissions. Government-imposed restrictions on movement and activity worldwide saw global emissions drop 17 per cent in April. Most of the decline was from less road and air travel, and from industry shutting down, especially in China.
The latest estimates are for an annual emissions decline of between 4 and 7 per cent. Emissions had crept back closer to normal by June, but nonetheless any fall in that range would be a dramatic break from decades of rising emissions – the biggest annual decline since the second world war. “It’s really huge,” says Le Quéré.
But then the bad news
As Le Quéré notes, however, the higher figure is roughly, but not quite, the annual decrease of 7.6 per cent needed to check warming at 1.5°C – this year, and every year, until 2030. That is because climate change is a cumulative affair. Richard Betts at the UK Met Office likens atmospheric CO2 to the water in a bath and our CO2 emissions to a running tap. If the tap keeps running, the bath water continues to rise.
In May, expecting a slower-running tap because of coronavirus, Betts made revised predictions for fractionally lower atmospheric CO2 levels at the Mauna Loa monitoring station in Hawaii. Observations for May, June and July tracked close to his downgraded forecasts, whereas August was closer to his pre-pandemic forecast.
Betts is cautious about reading too much into one month’s data and measurements at just one site. Regardless, atmospheric CO2 levels in May , a level unseen for several million years. The figure for May 2019 was 414.7 ppm. “We were correct in saying [lockdown] wouldn’t make much difference to atmospheric CO2,” says Betts. To change things, we need to turn the tap off fully and start actively draining the bath too.
Piers Forster at the University of Leeds in the UK has estimated that this year’s covid-19 restrictions will have a global cooling effect of just 0.01°C by 2030, if we return to business as usual. Staying at home and grounding planes only goes so far without simultaneous systemic change to industry, transport and power generation. “To make a real difference to CO2 we can’t just make a short-term cut, we have to get to net zero [emissions],” he says. “We aren’t going to make the necessary changes without much longer infrastructure change and the whole structural changes to the way economies work.”
Will Covid-19 have any Lasting Climate Impact?
The dip in emissions due to the coronavirus has at least bought time for countries with legally binding climate targets such as the UK, which since 2008 has had five-year “carbon budgets”. “What covid will deliver generally is a bit of extra breathing space in the carbon budget,” says Chris Stark at the Committee on Climate Change, which advises the UK government. “I hope they use it wisely.” The pandemic slightly delayed , for 2033-2037, which will now consider covid-19’s impacts. Stark says the report, now due out on 6 December, will probably forecast that shipping and aviation emissions won’t return to pre-pandemic levels for many years.
Others are also looking at the pandemic’s longer-term impacts. Oil giant BP’s response is to by 2030. Its rival Shell : a world in which wealth is prioritised and emissions keep growing; one where public health comes first and emissions start falling towards the late 2020s; and one where economies falter amid renewed coronavirus outbreaks, social and geopolitical tensions grow, and while emissions stall in this scenario, so does climate action.
“The pandemic’s emissions reduction is what we need this year, and every year until 2030”
Leaving this bleak picture aside, David Hone at Shell says the emissions path the world takes now will depend on how long public health concerns necessitate continued large-scale social shifts, such as lots of people working remotely. A year may not be enough to cement lasting change on that front, but things could be different after three or four years of this, he says: “People might even do renovation for a home office, then they’d say I’m not leaving because I’ve spent money. The whole system starts to change.” City authorities could be forced to address empty urban centres, potentially rezoning them as residential districts. Pre-pandemic, Hone thought there was some “wishful thinking” about meeting the Paris agreement goals. Today, he sees the health crisis as a possible trigger for the necessary structural change.
“We are in a rupture phase,” says Le Quéré. She thinks there are two reasons global emissions could change radically. One is car use, which in the EU . Curbs on driving and measures to encourage home working, cycling and walking could immediately cut car emissions. Equally, health concerns may see people opt for cars over public transport; .
The second, bigger reason is governments’ post-virus financial stimulus. How much is for green infrastructure – electrification of cars rather than road-building projects, say – will dictate how much we cook the planet.
The past offers some lessons. The 2008-2009 financial crash was followed by a stimulus that , entirely offsetting the brief emissions downturn the crisis had brought about. Fortunately, history looks unlikely to repeat itself. “The climate stuff really was buried in 2008, we didn’t really have a green stimulus package,” says Stark. “I do think this time it’s different. The changing climate is much more in the forefront of people’s minds around the world.” Green tech has also matured rapidly. In the UK, renewable sources ; in 2019, it was 36.9 per cent.
“One thing that is an improvement on 2008 is there is less of a discussion of whether investment in green stuff is needed, less debate over whether climate change is a thing,” says Victoria Cuming at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. She and her colleagues have noted $159 billion of government investment announcements mentioning emissions-cutting technology since the start of the pandemic, with electrification of transport scooping up about a quarter of that.
Yet three countries – France, Germany and South Korea – account for three-quarters of this money, and the $159 billion is only about 1 per cent of all the stimulus. Increasing that percentage would offer significant rewards. Forster found a strong green recovery now would avoid 0.3°C of warming by 2050 – a huge step in the right direction.
What’s Happening With Global Climate Action?
This year should have been crowned by COP26, a landmark UN climate summit hosted by the UK in Glasgow in November. At it, the world was to thrash out concrete plans to limit global warming to 1.5°C. It was postponed by a year. While no one argues with delaying a 30,000-person conference amid a pandemic, it does mean preparatory meetings were deferred. A diplomatic drive of the sort that helped the 2015 Paris summit make progress has been hampered.
This year is also the deadline for countries to submit carbon-cutting plans known as , or NDCs, to narrow the gap between current pledges and what needs to happen to meet the Paris climate goals. Only 12 of almost 200 nations have done this, and none is a major economy. In September, however, China surprised the world by pledging to achieve “carbon neutrality” by 2060 and promising a new NDC. The European Union is signalling it will have an enhanced NDC before the year’s end, and the , , to encourage leaders to announce new NDCs then.
Silver lining
The delay to COP26 could actually be a good thing. Stark says it will allow the UK to put in place domestic policies needed to hit its target of net-zero emissions by 2050, such as bringing forward a ban on sales of new petrol and diesel cars. Momentum is also growing from businesses, city mayors and other sub-national leaders for stronger emissions cuts, says Nigel Topping, the UK government’s High Level Climate Action Champion. Meanwhile, Greta Thunberg and other campaigners are maintaining the pressure.
Work on basic climate science is one thing coronavirus hasn’t stopped. Three major new climate science reports are expected from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) next year: one on the physical science of climate change, one on its impacts and how we adapt, and one on how we stem warming. A fourth report, a synthesis of the others, is due out in 2022. Together they will comprise the sixth assessment report (AR6), a new gold standard in our understanding of climate change.
The headline news in these reports may be new estimates of climate sensitivity, a measure of how much Earth warms in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 – in other words, just how bad this is likely to get. The new, more sophisticated computer models being used for AR6 put the likely range of warming at between 1.8 and 5.6°C, up from 1.5 to 4.5°C previously. “The general perception is [the models] are running hot. I think most people are expecting it to be no more optimistic than [the last generation of models], and possibly worse,” says Michael Meredith at the British Antarctic Survey.
The reports will also look in more detail at climate change on a regional level, and there will be a greater focus on low-likelihood, high-impact changes such as extra sea level rise from ice mass loss in Antarctica and Greenland. There will be a new chapter dedicated to attributing extreme weather events to climate change and detecting humanity’s fingerprint on Earth systems. In addition, the global warming potential of methane, an atmospheric pollutant that is shorter-lived than CO2 but with a stronger greenhouse effect, is expected to be upgraded.
All of that means more hard science for a delayed summit to respond to. “I actually think it’s a positive. We’ll lose a year on the negotiations, but gain way more than a year in terms of ramping up ambition,” says Topping.
What do we need to Happen Next?
In one sense, the events of 2020 have changed nothing about climate change; in another, they have changed everything. “From a policy perspective, 2020 was not the year we expected,” says Burgess. And while the response to covid-19 has shown that deep emissions cuts can be made quickly, it also highlights the challenge of making change last and the limits of individual action.
Significantly, covid-19 has been a reminder that we will have to deal with shorter-term crises as we race to tackle the big one that will play out over centuries, and that these may be intertwined. The toxic smoke from the US West Coast fires, for example, exacerbated the pneumonia that covid-19 can cause, while coronavirus social distancing complicated housing thousands of people fleeing the blazes in sports halls and schools.
One big factor in how things play out is the outcome of the US elections on 3 November. Whoever wins, Donald Trump’s pledge to take the US out of the Paris agreement will become reality the day after. Joe Biden , and pledged to return the US to being a constructive player in UN climate talks. “We’re either going to have four more years of the ‘bring back coal fantasy’ or a very ambitious climate presidency, and that will change the geopolitics massively,” says Topping.
Regardless of the result, the wider world has the technology and the tools to halve emissions by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. The UK’s statutory climate advisers said last year that the country’s 2050 goal is feasible. It will cost about 1 to 2 per cent of GDP with existing technology and without radical behavioural changes. Governments need the political will, and businesses, which will pay for a lot of it, will be vital. Economic shifts well under way, such as the falling costs of renewable energy and batteries, will make some decisions easy. Citizens, meanwhile, who can only do so much by insulating their homes or buying an electric car, need to pressure their political representatives, in writing, in elections and where necessary on the streets.
When covid-19 has become just a Wikipedia page, climate change will still be shaping all our lives, says Meredith. “Whilst our attention is on covid, and rightly so, the fact we are losing attention on climate change really does hamper our ability to do what we need to do, and the time we’ve got is dwindling.” That is the reality of climate change in 2020.
