When the pandemic locked everyone at home in 2020, I thought “so this is how they are going to solve the climate crisis!”. The problem of global warming never left my mind, but I didn’t see any plausible solution. How to convince people that we had to urgently stop burning fossil fuels? And then came the pandemic, which fit like a glove.

There is much debate over whether the virus is from a laboratory or whether it came from nature. For me there was never any doubt it is from a laboratory and was planted to try to solve the climate crisis. But, before you stop reading, it is not the focus of this text.

Pollution and Albedo*

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about pollution being an ally in the fight against global warming. This would happen because the pollution particles reflect back off the Earth part of the Sun’s radiation, which then doesn’t turn into heat. Initially, I thought this was the biggest nonsense, but then I was almost convinced, after going through so many texts on the subject.

*albedo is the fraction of incident radiation that is reflected by a surface (such as a cloud)

But there was one thing that didn’t add up: in 2020, certain that they (politicians, leaders) were finally trying to solve global warming, I paid a lot of attention to the climate. Initially in São Paulo, where in recent years there have been increasingly strong winds, close to 100 km/h, causing several damages and knocking down lots of trees. In 2020, there was no strong winds here.

Considering the World, I also don’t remember about any major weather event in that year. Every news was about coronavirus. But that’s just my memory and I started to think of some parameter that I could use as a reference.

The 2020 hurricane season

I’ve been following the hurricane season for years, especially in the Atlantic. I decided to use it as a parameter to prove that the decrease in pollution that happened in 2020 due to the pandemic was beneficial for the Planet. When searching “hurricane season 2020” the first thing that caught my attention was that no F5 was formed in the Atlantic. Wikipedia cites “Despite the record-high activity, this was the first season since 2015 in which no Category 5 hurricane formed“.

On this same Wikipedia page there is a link to 2020 Pacific hurricane season where it says “The 2020 Pacific hurricane season was the least active Pacific hurricane season since 2011“.

Honestly, the pandemic gave me hope that the global warming would be solved. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened: the pandemic was a light at the end of the tunnel for stopping the burning of fossil fuels, but that light vanished when the world, once again, did not came to work together.

The addictions of human kind

It is very difficult to kick an addiction, and humanity has many. Fossil fuels, coal, natural gas, derivative gas, crude oil, petroleum products, consumption, excess food. I don’t want to go into details, but I’ll quote a BBC headline that means a lot Should we give up flying for the sake of the climate?

Consumption, consumption, consumption. All campaigns, all advertisements, everything focuses on consumption. Consumption drives the Economy, but the Economy do not save the Planet resources, and they are finit. Sustainability doesn’t exist, the packaging says it’s recyclable, but the pot is always new.

Food, food, food. We get sick, develop diabetes and a lot of heart problems from eating too much. Hence, we consume even more resources (medicine) to try to heal ourselves, but the excess food is hard to let go.

In closing, the pandemic may not have solved the problem, but it certainly showed the way. The Planet breathes better without pollution.

The articles below show pollution in some places before and after the lockdown:

Coronavirus: before and after – How lockdown has changed smog-filled skylines

Here’s How The Coronavirus Lockdown Has Affected Pollution Levels In India