Pandemic’s impacts are damaging climate research

(Climate News Network, 9 Sep 2020) Climate research is suffering permanent damage from some of the Covid-19 pandemic’s impacts, a UN report says.

Whatever else the coronavirus onslaught is doing to humankind, some of the pandemic’s impacts are clear. It is making it harder for researchers to establish just what effect climate change is having on the planet.

A group of United Nations and other agencies is today launching a report, United in Science 2020, (webcast at 1600 hours New York time) which it calls “a high-level compilation of the latest climate science information”. It is being launched by the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, with a virtual link to his counterpart at the World Meteorological Organisation, Petteri Taalas, in Geneva.

Much of what the report says will already be familiar, but its detailed finding that the pandemic is causing long-term damage to climate change monitoring is sobering.

Science advances by combining knowledge of the past with experience of the present and then combining them to forecast the probable future. That is how climate scientists have been able very recently to state that their earlier worst case scenario isn’t just an awful warning, but describes what is happening right now.

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Climate News Network, 9 Sep 2020: Pandemic’s impacts are damaging climate research