The statewide order of people to stay at home has brought a benefit to our environment and our planet. With fewer cars on the freeways and less airplanes flying, there is less air pollution. Many factories have shut down or temporarily closed and the fossil fuels that are released into the air has decreased significantly. In fact, Los Angeles is experiencing the “best quality of air” since 1995. This is crucial and especially beneficial to people that have heart disease and other health problems. UCLA fielding school of public health, professor Yfiang Zhu said, “average levels of tiny airborne particles known as PM2.5 dropped 16 micrograms per cubic meter to 12 in the four-county Los Angeles…”
She also stated “We don’t need a pandemic to breathe clean air…this should be the air we breathe everyday.”
It seems that this mandatory order of staying home has reached a higher quality of clean air, however many researchers suspect it will return back to its regular state once this crisis goes down.
As most people are staying home, there is less greenhouse gases and fossil fuel being released into the air which causes climate change.
India, China, and the United States are experiencing cleaner bodies of water.
Comparing March through April of 2019 and March through April of 2020, NO2 has decreased in areas such as Mid-Atlantic to the Southwest in the United States.
Scientists are currently trying to estimate how much NO2 has decreased before and after this crisis and to compare it to human activities and contribute to global warming.
According to Lauri Myllyvieta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean air, “It is an unprecedented dramatic drop in emission.”
According to NASA, “levels of nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant primarily from burning fossil fuels, were down as much as 30%.”
What does this mean to us?
Although many of us cannot go outside, this possibly may help decrease global warming, climate change, and a decrease in Earth’s global temperature.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/04/09/air-quality-improving-coronavirus/
https://calmatters.org/health/2020/04/as-californians-stay-at-home-air-quality-improves-for-now/
