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This has been a century in the making, I am not sure that 6 months of economic downturn is going to have much affect.
by comeonseriously 6y ago
This has been a century in the making, I am not sure that 6 months of economic downturn is going to have much affect.
- boringg 6y agoIndeed it has been longer than that. The hope was that at least with 6 months lowered economic activity there would be some temporal relief - though the lag from CO2e pollution to temperature spike is probably significantly more than 6 months so no benefit would be seen until next year.
- jfengel 6y agoIt wouldn't be expected to actually lower the temperature. Even with the downturn, we're still producing more CO2 than the environment can absorb, so CO2 will net increase. The best you can hope for is that it would increase less than expected. The metaphor I heard from several researchers is that it's like a bathtub filling up -- we turned down the tap a bit, but it's still going to overflow. So you wouldn't expect the temperature to be lower than previous years. It might be lower than the predicted amount, but probably by less than the uncertainty in the prediction. The year as a whole is shaping up to be the second hottest (after 2016), though it's possible that it may end up being hotter than than year as well.