Did Global Lockdowns Impact Atmospheric CO2 Concentration?
I recently learned that my local district council has signed-up to the 15-minute scheme that is rolling out across the UK.
Residents are worried, and quite rightly so, for a semi rural community like ours relies heavily on private transport, there being few bus services to speak of: no car, no cake!
Any sensible transport planner would undertake surveys both before and after introduction of a new policy so they can quantify the benefits. Not so our council.
Schemes they are going to design themselves will go ahead whether residents like it or not and whether they actually work or not. There’s a fair chance the knock-on effect will be increased travel and emissions as residents find ways around the road blocks and closures.
The Big Scheme
But there has been a rather big emissions reduction scheme in operation; a global scheme, in fact, and in place of flower beds and bollards placed across residential roads our respective governments have gone and locked us all away for weeks on end.
Businesses have gone bust, shops have closed for good and vehicles have rusted. In the height of incarceration some wag joked that they’re now getting three months to the gallon. Quite. So did this big scheme have a big impact on atmospheric CO2? Please place your bets now and let’s go find out…
Scripps CO2 Program
And my eyeballs still can’t detect any change to the incessant rise in CO2 despite the mother of all global shutdowns! Sure puts my local council’s grand scheme of a few annoying traffic bollards into perspective, I can tell you.
Dessert
I guess I better end this article with the results of an ARIMA(1,1,1) model for the prediction of mean annual atmospheric CO2 that will cheer up despondent alarmists. Try this for size:
Tada! Now that we’ve smoothed the data out to the creamy texture of the annual mean we suddenly find HadCRUT5 northern hemisphere anomaly bursting back into statistical significance as a predictor of atmospheric CO2 as measured over at Mauna Loa (p=0.001).
This is interesting because that relationship is simply not there down at the monthly level of data resolution.
Alarmists should find this pudding more palatable but there’s no getting away from the fact that a global shutdown indicator marking out 2020 failed to reach significance as a predictor of atmospheric CO2 as measured at the global reference laboratory at Mauna Loa (p=0.977).
In plain English this means we locked down the world like never before and it had no detectable effect on CO2 concentration.
Net Zero must be referring to common sense.
Wriggling Free
If residency is a genuine thing, and is up at 200 years, then this will indeed be the case and we won’t be able to detect anything as paltry as a year of global shutdown. This harsh fact cuts both ways for it means Net Zero (or any means of slashing ‘fossil fuel’ use) is not going to have the slightest impact on the climate for a very long time.
Thus, all those desperate souls throwing soup on paintings, those folk scared sh*tless about the future, and those folk seething with anger are basically screaming at the wind.
Nothing they can do, say, think or believe will make any difference in their lifetime or that of their children even if all ‘fossil fuel’ was banned globally at midnight tonight.
The only solid option these souls have open to them is to learn to live with the weather like our ancestors did.
All this, of course, assumes that The Science™ we’re all supposed to follow is 100 percent correct, yet it is abundantly clear that it is fatally flawed and requires serious revision.
See more here substack.com
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Peter F Gill
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The lack of effect on the Keeling curve was predicted by Murry Salby and myself.
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