Well, it appears that gravity has very much returned, and we’re all stuck firmly to the ground for a while. Hope everyone is staying safe, and staying home. Thanks for reading.
The imagery is remarkable, if not that surprising: as the world has retreated inside, out of public spaces, out of work and off the streets and out of their cars, we can see the pollution begin to disappear.
First in China and then elsewhere, in Italy in particular, satellite imagery and other tools started showing us what a real decline in global movement, production, and activity looks like. The concentration of nitrogen dioxide, in particular, is easy to track, and serves as a marker for other pollutants—it is produced from combustion in cars and tracks and in power plants and factories, and it lasts a much shorter time in the atmosphere than some other gases (like carbon dioxide).
There will be other attendant benefits. Ozone production at ground level, which can cause respiratory ailments and exacerbate asthma, will go down—its primary source is car exhaust mixing with sunlight, and there’s a whole lot fewer cars out these days. In Los Angeles, where smog (made largely of ozone) is generally a way of life, saw rush hour traffic moving at more than 70 percent faster than normal by the middle of last week—before California was locked down.
There are reports of the canals in Venice having clear water for the first time in recent memory. Carbon monoxide levels over New York City declined by more than 50 percent over last week. Once we have some distance from this current crisis and take stock from afar, there will almost certainly a fairly impressive drop in carbon dioxide emissions as well—industrial output, and of course air travel, being dramatically diminished.
There are two ways you could look at this. On the one hand, you could imagine it as a “silver lining,” or even take it farther and argue that this is a good thing, that the virus is “healing” the world or some other bit of New Age madness. This, essentially, is eco-fascism: kill the people, fix the planet.
Or, you could see it as an illustration, rather than a solution. It is showing us in stark terms our effect on the world. Obviously, we already knew all of this: we have been measuring NO2, and CO2, and ozone, and we’ve been staring down into the canal’s filthy water for decades on end. We could easily have said three months ago: if we stopped burning fossil fuels, or stopped driving, or stopped all the factories, then many of the bad things we are doing to the world would likely stop. The world would exhale, we might have said, happy to be rid of its dirtiest inhabitants.
But very obviously, just saying it wouldn’t have done much. But seeing it? I’m not the most optimistic of science writers in the world, but I guess my glass-half-full moment in this dark time is that maybe this will actually start to look like an opportunity. There are plenty of arguments out there about how to restart society once we can, about changes to how we treat workers and healthcare systems and so on, and those satellite images of declining NO2 are basically a built-in argument on how to do the environmental side of things. We now don’t have to speculate on what a cleaner-burning economy looks like; we saw it. It was right there (well, it is right there, for the foreseeable future).
That doesn’t mean do *this* [gestures around] again, obviously. That’s back to the fascism bit again. It means using that new, tragic evidence to argue for spaces with fewer vehicles, for more remote work and telehealth, for more generally, a realization that humanity’s obsession with capital-G Growth maybe could use a bit of a rethink. At some point those swirling NO2 animations will tick back the other way, once we push through the worst of it and begin to restart. Here’s hoping we remember what they looked like.
random bits
NASA fixed a wonky bit of the InSight lander up on Mars… by having it hit itself with a shovel.
Here are some tips from astronauts about how to not go crazy when you’re home alone for a while.
In case you’re curious, the update to the last issue, about being a wanderer as wandering becomes impossible, is that our other house-sits have canceled and our current hosts are stuck half way around the world for the time being. So that’s fun.
Anyway, this is all horrifying and just weird, but we’ll get through it. Stay home, stay safe everyone.
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Do people comment on these? If not, or even if so... You wrote: "...even take it farther and argue that this is a good thing, that the virus is “healing” the world or some other bit of New Age madness." New Age madness indeed. Would love to see you comment on the flip side of this same coin -- the nonscientific bullshittery of theories that espouse that Mother Earth is rising up and pushing back by imparting this disease on us, in some way because of what we've done to the environment. That's not how it works. Or maybe that's how it worked in Avatar: the Movie? Anyway, I think there's some danger behind thinking of the Earth as some kind of cosmic being capable of such activity -- because the reality is that this planet is an unwitting participant in everything we are doing to it. 'Tis a very one-way street here. The Earth itself will not rise up and solve our problems for us.