Unlike many breathless headlines published during the pandemic praising the environmental benefits of lockdowns, it actually made the planet warmer, a new paper has discovered.
According to the latest study led by the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), emissions of airborne particles, or aerosols, that block incoming sunlight and send it back into space have decreased significantly in industrialized countries around the world , causing a small but significant increase in temperature.
Aerosol emissions fell during the spring 2020 locks, in sync with the steep decline in major industrial activity around the world, allowing more of the sunlight to reach Earth, pushing temperatures in industrialized countries such as the United States and Russia rose.
“Emissions from the most polluting industries fell sharply, which had a direct impact on temperature in the short term”, said NCAR scientist Andrew Gettelman, the study’s lead author.
“Pollution is cooling the planet, so it makes sense that reducing pollution would warm the planet.”
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In certain areas, temperatures were between 0.2 and 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit (0.1 and 0.3 degrees Celsius) warmer than expected for that time of year and given the prevailing weather conditions.
The warming reached about 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit (0.37 C) in many parts of the United States and Russia, as aerosols tend to brighten clouds and reflect more of the sun’s rays back into space, while carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases insulate the planet and the solar energy closer to the surface.
Gettelman emphasized that, despite short-term warming in certain parts of the planet, the long-term effect of the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns would slow the pace of climate change somewhat, due to the more gradual impact of reduced CO2 emissions into the atmosphere.
Gettelman and his co-authors from the Universities of Oxford, Imperial College, and Leeds performed simulations using two of the world’s leading climate models, the NCAR-based Community Earth System model and a model known as ECHAM-HAMMOZ, where the aerosol concentrations during the lockdowns of 2020.
The warming effect seen in their models was strongest in the middle and upper latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, mixed near the equator and largely negligible in the Southern Hemisphere, consistent with the distribution of aerosol-producing industrialized nations.
Lest anyone get too carried away with the investigation, Gettelman was quick to warn that it would be a disastrously bad idea to simply pump more aerosols into the atmosphere to prevent climate change.
“Aerosol emissions have major health consequences”, he said. “Saying we have to pollute isn’t practical.”
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