Even more importantly, I assume regions affected by bad air quality like North Italy are also the worst with regard to cronic respiratory issues in the general population, which makes the situation a lot worse.
Reduced travel and industry will see this happen and saw this in China, globally over the year the effect will be interesting and whilst it will do wonders for the climate. One aspect that I'm currently pondering is the winter 20/21. Reason being that it has been shown that less planes flying means temperature difference day/night, slightly warmer during day, but also colder at night. As we saw for the days post 9/11 in America.
So whilst the effect upon climate from this virus is going to be notable, what will the impact upon the 20/21 winter, will it make it more inclined to be colder (normal for many parts). That is the aspect that intrigues me.
This is 100% anecdotal but I saw it snow the other day in Tokyo in March and it’s been very cold. It’s been a while since it’s snowed in March I’m sure.
I’ve also noticed the Japanese alps we’re having a super bad winter until a few weeks back when things kicked into gear and the snow started falling again.
I have absolutely no idea but Is it possible to have a short term decrease in emissions change the weather like this ?
Yes you will get events outside the norm, it is not the single events but the whole period average you need to look at, like looking at a single day or week of weather note and remembering the whole period around that single event. Yet the whole winter period would be warmer. Then you can have one part of a large country have it colder than normal and yet the other parts has it warmer and the average for that whole country being warmer, yet for those in the colder part they will disagree.
Yes you will get events outside the norm, it is not the single events but the whole period average you need to look at, like looking at a single day or week of weather note and remembering the whole period around that single event. Yet the whole winter period would be warmer. Then you can have one part of a large country have it colder than normal and yet the other parts has it warmer and the average for that whole country being warmer, yet for those in the colder part they will disagree.
EDIT ADD: >I have absolutely no idea but Is it possible to have a short term decrease in emissions change the weather like this ?
I don't think this is going be as short term and will certainly playout throughout the year at least.
LongTerm: The World will be a different place a year from now, hard to speculate, but this is WW3 The World vs a Virus
if only we were so unified though. It would be a great ww3 if we were all fighting this together, but it seems like when it was in China the west was like "this is a chinese problem" and now it's in the west and almost dead in china it's more like "this is a democratic problem" (since allegedly democracies were too brittle to be able to respond until it was too late - democracies dither while autocracy hide).
it could have been fought together but instead it's only about us vs them.
depends, some reflect, some don't, but all done high up and the layers above them warms, having a detrimental effect overall. So a mixed bag, certainly not a solution.
Not to be a downer but the opposite could also be true. The less economic activity, the less particle emissions. While those particle emissions eventually contribute to global warming, they actually prevent a rise in temperatures in the short-term by blocking sunlight. Like you mentioned, the highs are higher and the lows are lower.
We could actually see an acceleration of some of global warmings' effects on the climate as temperature peaks increase.
I hope you understand that your declaration sounds bonkers to any rational person? I understand of course that there is a possibility as the system is chaotic. But narrative wise this creates an impossible situation, where everything, even the movement in the supposedly right direction is bad? I would consider "What else do you want from me? ---- off" a normal and valid reaction to this.
In the short term, decreasing economic activity could raise temperatures. Your objection only makes sense in a bizarre universe where there are only all-good and all-bad choices. In our universe, good choices have bad effects and bad choices have good effects.
This theory speaks more to me of “because our effect on the environment is so excessive and unknown, we have no idea how the environment actually is naturally (in 2020)”
It seems like this is a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of all the pollution that’s happened over the last 150 years. Is it reasonable to expect a lasting effect here?
Once the dust settles, the data and more so, political and populus consensus will be more pro good air quality than currently and the momentum will see much change. That's my prediction of how this will traction over the years ahead.
Certainly see airplane tickets become more expensive as the days of cheap subsidized (low fuel tax's/duty) flights are in the end of days. Airlines running on razor thin margins will not survive this and personally, that's a good thing given the that IMHO the overall impact is a false-economy upon the environment.
Though that will only see more investment into electric planes, which will have a fair chance with a fair market for such competition.
Interesting times ahead, kinda focusing on the positives over the loss of life that will drive such change.
CO2 isn't everything, what about disrupted air streams or high altitude pollution (NO2, NOx, PM2.5, &c.) ? Surely burning 1L of jet fuel at sea level is not the same as at 15k feet (ozone layer ?)
It's very easy to focus on CO2, it's probably the least harmful thing a jet engine will exhaust.
We’re another type of virus on this planet, we need to remember that and remember what it feels like to be under attack by one. Hopefully we then adjust behaviour accordingly.
This lines up with a hypothesis I've got that this is causing severe cases in places where there is a high baseline of lung damage. Either from asthma or other genetic conditions, or from exposure to poor air quality.
Such that these lock downs are preventing more bad cases, but not by preventing the spread of covid, but by limiting exposure to other things. In this case, it could be lowering emissions period, which makes the entire place a bit more hospitable.
Which implies several things. One, the lock down for the states could be superfluous. Most places here have better air already.
Two, covid is already everywhere. The exponential growth we are seeing happened a couple months ago, such that now we are just seeing how fast we can deploy testing.
Three, we really need to focus on a cleaner environment. The old saying of "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is clearly false (if this hypothesis is true), it makes you easier to be killed.
As I've said in another post, I expect I'm wrong in this. So would love to or how/why.
I'm not sure I follow? My claim is in the places finding they have covid now, for the most part it has already reached saturation levels. Not that it doesn't grow exponentially, per se. Just in many places that growth happened well before testing.
While true, I bet you could also correlate lung damage to population density. Thing is, we know there are causal attributes to some of these places to poor lung health.
This is why I'm asking on this forum. If folks have good data sources to watch for to disprove this, please let me know.
You can see my perspective on why I have this hypothesis below. I give good odds that I already had covid. Hit me really hard, but the same symptoms for the rest of my family have been very mild. We all got fevers. We all got coughs. I couldn't breath well enough to say three words at a time.
Could be plenty of things, so I'm socializing this hypothesis to help disprove it.
Air quality in (parts of) China is much worse than any part of Europe, even northern Italy. To be proportional, deaths in China would need to be a magnitude higher. On the other end of the scale, Switzerland would need to be almost free of fatalities, etc.
You also don’t have much of a model. It would be strange for one virus to show an extreme sensitivity to existing environmental lung damage when all our experiences show either linear or at worst multiplicative compounding.
I didn't limit the virus to being sensitive to environmental lung damage. I'm saying existing lung damage makes people more prone to the serious cases.
Would be why you haven't heard of many (any?) children getting this. You know they are getting it.
So, I'm not clear on your criticism. The air quality in China is worse, but from what we've heard, their fatalities have been worse. They took ridiculously extreme measures and had a lot of deaths.
My perspective is I had the worst asthma attack of my adult life a month ago. Closest to this I have had was when I had walking pneumonia about a decade ago. I literally could not breath well enough to say three words at a time. I was not tested for covid, because I did not knowingly have contact with someone that did. Looking back, hard for me to think I had something else. I look at the rest of my family, who have all had fevers and coughs, and I ask why don't they also have difficulty breathing? Best answer I have is lung health.
Well, in the affected parts of China enforced isolation is in effect, and satellite imagery has shown that the air in these areas is dramatically less polluted now, so the effects are mitigated for now. Also, they're only testing in affected cities, not in rural areas, where the virus could be much more prevalent for all we know.
Their reporting of test results is unreliable anyway as they could be distorting numbers to make it seem like they have less of a problem than they do or to make it seem like their containment measures are working, and the tight control over the media and their totalitarian society makes it very difficult to independently confirm their numbers.
So I would take any reports coming out of China with several large heaps of salt.
In many places the number of tests run (on suspected cases not just random) is 10x the positive cases... and still there are thousands positive. I don't think the exponential growth is behind us... even in China.
In many places, the tests run are well behind people already recovering from the mild cases. Would they show as negative or positive? (Genuinely asking.)
Yes, we would need an antibody test (typically much easier/faster/cheaper) to detect whether you had the disease and developed antibodies... although those antibodies fade with time, and it doesn't tell you if you're currently infections. So it would make sense at some future date to run a quick antibody test, and if positive run the longer 6+hr RT-PCR for 2019-nCoV.
The concern is that someone could become reinfected either due to insufficient immune response or small evolution in the virus surface protiens, which could also make it more or less virulent.
Actually, fatality is most likely not as high as it appears from (confirmed) cases compared to deaths.
A large fraction of cases may go unrecorded because people only have minor symptoms and don't get hospitalized. In places with more extensive testing, like South Korea, deaths make up < 1% of confirmed cases. And even there, it's assumed that not all of them have been recorded.
I really do hope that this event will give a big blow to the mass-tourism industry. It doesn't feel right to catch a flight from Europe to half-way around the world (Thailand, let's say) for just a few hundred euros, there are lots of externalities not included in that price. To say nothing of the Dutch-disease-like effects brought by mass tourism to those tourist places.
Business travel is also something we should look to curtail. I expect there are a high number of business trips that could be replaced with virtual meetings if they needed to be (say, if there was a global pandemic restricting travel). In the US around 1/5 of domestic flights are for business purposes [0]. If you also include people who relocated for work, and are travelling to visit family, I expect it would be much higher.
Yes, although it’s worth saying that at least in Britain business trips are a strong minority of flights. With Heathrow expansion the case was made that it was vital because capacity was stretched, and businesses in general needed the extra flights, but in fact most flights are tourism. And even within that category there’s a lot of frivolous travel, people flying for a night or two, or even commuting by plane.
With respect, travelling to relocate for work or to visit family seem like they fall into the category of necessary flights - I mean, if you said to everyone "you can only take 10 return flights in your life from now on", people would spend them on relocating and family visits with considerable ease. They would think twice about that ski trip though.
As you say, the average business trip is more about status and could easily be dropped. But it's not fair to put relocation for work into that category.
My point about relocation is a lot of people relocate for jobs that they could easily do at home or in a satellite office. I get that some people want to move so they aren't stuck in the same town of pop. 1,200 all their life (that's my situation), but I don't think most people are in that situation.
Say you were raised in Wichita, KS. I've never been there, but given its size I assume you can have a pretty good lifestyle living there. However if you want to work in tech, media, journalism, law, finance or a whole bunch of other industries, you would really be limiting your opportunities if you stayed there.
It’s also unsustainable with our current capacity (both technology and logistics) to track and block the movement of diseases. We’ve already had problems happen with wildlife, moving trees or bees around without sufficiently advanced and rigorous tests has already created pandemic-like conditions for various species, and the same applies to humans.
Have to say our leaders, the EU and globalism in general seem to be looking decidedly worse off: many leaders are following rather than leading; the EU love-fest has disintegrated into closed borders and selfish refusals for assistance; and globalism looks to have delivered us a rapid, efficient and apparently unblockable conduit for spreading a dangerous disease to all corners of the earth. Yay open borders!
Was surprised to hear it was China that was offering help to the EU first, yet none of the other countries seemed to care for Italy. So much for the United States of Europe ever forming.
Its also surprising so many people thought globalism would be with no significant downsides whatsoever. A virus wreaking havoc was waiting to happen, and we never thought about creating a plan. You'd figure these are the times you'd call people to duty; not to go to war, but to do the small things (medical, transportation or other essential stuff) that others can't do or to help handle to load. In case of emergency, I'm sure I'd prove a lot more useful transporting hospital beds than fixing JIRA tickets for a SaaS company in finance.
But maybe that's just me.
Well it's probably better for those of us who can continue business as usual to continue business as usual, and for those who can't (because their companies are closed frex) to voluntarily take up these emergency work roles. Once we run out of people looking for work, maybe then we can consider a bit of conscription.
But in general, yes. Governments are underresponding and underdelivering. There is no creativity left.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadSo whilst the effect upon climate from this virus is going to be notable, what will the impact upon the 20/21 winter, will it make it more inclined to be colder (normal for many parts). That is the aspect that intrigues me.
I’ve also noticed the Japanese alps we’re having a super bad winter until a few weeks back when things kicked into gear and the snow started falling again.
I have absolutely no idea but Is it possible to have a short term decrease in emissions change the weather like this ?
Yes you will get events outside the norm, it is not the single events but the whole period average you need to look at, like looking at a single day or week of weather note and remembering the whole period around that single event. Yet the whole winter period would be warmer. Then you can have one part of a large country have it colder than normal and yet the other parts has it warmer and the average for that whole country being warmer, yet for those in the colder part they will disagree.
EDIT ADD: >I have absolutely no idea but Is it possible to have a short term decrease in emissions change the weather like this ?
I don't think this is going be as short term and will certainly playout throughout the year at least. LongTerm: The World will be a different place a year from now, hard to speculate, but this is WW3 The World vs a Virus
if only we were so unified though. It would be a great ww3 if we were all fighting this together, but it seems like when it was in China the west was like "this is a chinese problem" and now it's in the west and almost dead in china it's more like "this is a democratic problem" (since allegedly democracies were too brittle to be able to respond until it was too late - democracies dither while autocracy hide).
it could have been fought together but instead it's only about us vs them.
no
Take a look at the meteorological effects the forrest fires had on Australia recently.
I would say you're hyper smug answer might be right and might be wrong at the same time.
We could actually see an acceleration of some of global warmings' effects on the climate as temperature peaks increase.
In the short term, decreasing economic activity could raise temperatures. Your objection only makes sense in a bizarre universe where there are only all-good and all-bad choices. In our universe, good choices have bad effects and bad choices have good effects.
Certainly see airplane tickets become more expensive as the days of cheap subsidized (low fuel tax's/duty) flights are in the end of days. Airlines running on razor thin margins will not survive this and personally, that's a good thing given the that IMHO the overall impact is a false-economy upon the environment.
Though that will only see more investment into electric planes, which will have a fair chance with a fair market for such competition.
Interesting times ahead, kinda focusing on the positives over the loss of life that will drive such change.
It's very easy to focus on CO2, it's probably the least harmful thing a jet engine will exhaust.
Not when the focus is on global warming
Such that these lock downs are preventing more bad cases, but not by preventing the spread of covid, but by limiting exposure to other things. In this case, it could be lowering emissions period, which makes the entire place a bit more hospitable.
Which implies several things. One, the lock down for the states could be superfluous. Most places here have better air already.
Two, covid is already everywhere. The exponential growth we are seeing happened a couple months ago, such that now we are just seeing how fast we can deploy testing.
Three, we really need to focus on a cleaner environment. The old saying of "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is clearly false (if this hypothesis is true), it makes you easier to be killed.
As I've said in another post, I expect I'm wrong in this. So would love to or how/why.
You can see my perspective on why I have this hypothesis below. I give good odds that I already had covid. Hit me really hard, but the same symptoms for the rest of my family have been very mild. We all got fevers. We all got coughs. I couldn't breath well enough to say three words at a time.
Could be plenty of things, so I'm socializing this hypothesis to help disprove it.
You also don’t have much of a model. It would be strange for one virus to show an extreme sensitivity to existing environmental lung damage when all our experiences show either linear or at worst multiplicative compounding.
Would be why you haven't heard of many (any?) children getting this. You know they are getting it.
So, I'm not clear on your criticism. The air quality in China is worse, but from what we've heard, their fatalities have been worse. They took ridiculously extreme measures and had a lot of deaths.
My perspective is I had the worst asthma attack of my adult life a month ago. Closest to this I have had was when I had walking pneumonia about a decade ago. I literally could not breath well enough to say three words at a time. I was not tested for covid, because I did not knowingly have contact with someone that did. Looking back, hard for me to think I had something else. I look at the rest of my family, who have all had fevers and coughs, and I ask why don't they also have difficulty breathing? Best answer I have is lung health.
Their reporting of test results is unreliable anyway as they could be distorting numbers to make it seem like they have less of a problem than they do or to make it seem like their containment measures are working, and the tight control over the media and their totalitarian society makes it very difficult to independently confirm their numbers.
So I would take any reports coming out of China with several large heaps of salt.
The concern is that someone could become reinfected either due to insufficient immune response or small evolution in the virus surface protiens, which could also make it more or less virulent.
A large fraction of cases may go unrecorded because people only have minor symptoms and don't get hospitalized. In places with more extensive testing, like South Korea, deaths make up < 1% of confirmed cases. And even there, it's assumed that not all of them have been recorded.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/207103/forecasted-number...
As you say, the average business trip is more about status and could easily be dropped. But it's not fair to put relocation for work into that category.
Say you were raised in Wichita, KS. I've never been there, but given its size I assume you can have a pretty good lifestyle living there. However if you want to work in tech, media, journalism, law, finance or a whole bunch of other industries, you would really be limiting your opportunities if you stayed there.
Its also surprising so many people thought globalism would be with no significant downsides whatsoever. A virus wreaking havoc was waiting to happen, and we never thought about creating a plan. You'd figure these are the times you'd call people to duty; not to go to war, but to do the small things (medical, transportation or other essential stuff) that others can't do or to help handle to load. In case of emergency, I'm sure I'd prove a lot more useful transporting hospital beds than fixing JIRA tickets for a SaaS company in finance. But maybe that's just me.
But in general, yes. Governments are underresponding and underdelivering. There is no creativity left.
Also HN 2020: flag out of front page all Chinese reduced emissions posts.
https://www.baaqmd.gov/about-air-quality/current-air-quality...