There has been a lot of speculation on how the COVID-19 pandemic might affect climate change—in a good way one would hope—and as we headed into the 4th month of the crisis (April, 2020) I started wondering if there was any way to see that now. One place to look might be on the Scripps Institute's Keeling Curve website, where you can see hourly, daily, weekly and monthly carbon dioxide levels from the lab on the side of Manua Loa, Hawaii. That's it below, as it appeared when I visited in 2007. The air is sampled at the top of the tower on the left and fed through tubes into one of the lab buildings.
And here's the record of CO2 levels for the past decade. It has being going up by more than 2.5 parts per million every year, and the rate of increase is still increasing (the long-term trend curve gets steeper to the right). The saw-tooth pattern is a product of biological processes, the key one being the consumption of CO2 by land plants in the northern hemisphere from May to September of each year.
(By the author, using data from: Keeling, Ralph F.; Keeling, Charles D. (2017). Atmospheric Monthly in Situ CO2 Data - Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii. In Scripps CO2 Program Data. UC San Diego Library Digital Collections. https://doi.org/10.6075/J08W3BHW Accessed on April 3rd, 2020)
You can see the latest hourly data from this facility at: https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/ When I looked there on April 3rd, 2020, there was no evidence of any drop in CO2 levels.
According to an article on that website by Rob Munroe:
"Scripps Oceanography geochemist Ralph Keeling said fossil fuel use would have to decline by about 10 percent around the world and would need to be sustained for a year to show up clearly in carbon dioxide levels, which are expressed as parts per million (ppm) of air. No events in the 62-year history of the Keeling Curve – including the global economic downturn of 2008 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s – have caused such a drop to date. The influence of fossil fuel use is usually less perceptible in short-term variations than in long-term trends, Keeling added.
It has been reported, however, that CO2 emissions from China have dropped by 25 percent since the beginning of the outbreak. That alone represents a 6-percent drop in global emissions.
Based on calculations of how many fewer tons of carbon dioxide would be added to the atmosphere if there were a sustained 10-percent decline, Keeling estimated CO2 levels in the atmosphere would deviate by roughly 0.5 ppm under that scenario."
There's an NPR interview with Ralph Keeling that you can listen to here: https://www.kpbs.org/news/2020/apr/01/what-can-fight-against-covid-19-teach-us-about-how/. There he speculates that our concerted response to the COVID crisis might indeed have a beneficial long-term effect, because we are getting a crash-course in how it's actually possible to accomplish things without travelling by car and by air to meet face-to-face.
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