Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/24/nasa-studies-show-covid-19-shutdowns-lowered-greenhouse-gas-emissions.html
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At my job when COVID hit more than half of the employees started working from home. The two primary owners of the company work from home, come in maybe once a week or once a month. Those of us that come in are the ones that have to be here to deal with deliveries, etc. We could continue like this indefinitely.
And since the lockdowns in March the traffic on the expressway is minimal. Where before it was a parking lot between the suburbs and downtown (and I preferred to zig-zag through side streets and access roads) now I can zip right through with maybe a short slowdown in one area.
How about we start offering businesses incentives to have some employees work from home? It’s cheaper than building new expressways or subway lines, it’s better for the environment, it might be better for some of our sanity too.
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Just to nitpick: the study that this story highlights deals with nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant responsible for smog and acid rain, not greenhouse gases (though one might reasonably infer that greenhouse gases would be reduced, as well.)
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Hear hear. I imagine this is where a lot of businesses will end up. Commercial leases are massive line items. Even moving to a smaller office space would save many businesses loads of cash.
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OK call me a complainer but I’m 10 seconds into the video and already, it’s annoying me.
What’s with the colored bands moving across the graphic? Could they not just have shown us some interesting, actual data/graphics while doing the intro? Instead it looks like a test-pattern from hell.
Ok on to watch the rest. I’ve had too much caffeine clearly.
Edit: wait, now I see words on top of the color bands…implying that each one is a different measurement? So instead of a pointless test pattern, it’s actually information overload?? Now I want the bands to slow down and be explained. Ok, watching the rest now.
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ok, my final verdict: Not enough time spent on the cool animations
Like at https://youtu.be/OWRxa5eQTUw?t=24) where you can watch the Sahara casting hurricanes into the Gulf Coast
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The hurricane formation animation…
That must be one Hell of a butterfly.
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I am in the habit of cycling out to Melbourne airport to watch the planes. During our first lockdown I noticed that there is a whole mountain to the north west of Tullamarine which I had never noticed due to pollution.
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If you’d like more cool movies, I recommend these videos from NASA SVS. I happen to work for the GMAO at NASA Goddard on this model, so I’m always happy to see our work out there in the world. 
This one is particularly nice as it is the scientists talking about and in front of this video.
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And I happen to work for the SVS, and made about half of the visualizations in this video (a few based on your model!), so I second your comment. 
Thanks for the shout-out of our stuff!
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Yep. The rate might have slightly decreased, but the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere means that the overall amount will still increase, just a little more slowly than it otherwise would have.
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Thank you! Those are great!
LOL and that one video has literally 100 bands in the test pattern. Information overload overload!
Damn shame that it took a catastrophic pandemic to get the world to see the error of its ways, fossil-fuel-wise.
As for working from home, great idea. How much time gets eaten up by long, torturous commutes?
Disappointing. Sure, we weren’t expecting that pandemic lockdown would cut greenhouse gases anywhere near as much as we need to to save the planet for y’alls great-grandchildren, but the other side of the coin would be that if it did make a measurable and significant drop in CO2, that woud be evidence that, yup, this is a man-made crisis like scientists have been telling us for the last 150 years and oil companies have been denying for the last 50.
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