Thread by @davelevitan

A year ago (+2 days) I wrote for @sciam about whether the planet would "remember" covid, based on drops in emissions and changes in pollution and how that will show up in ice cores, tree rings, and so on. The primary answer was yes, it will. 1/

scientificamerican.com/article/will-t…

Some pollutants, like soot and some aerosols from smokestacks and tailpipes, clearly ended up dropping enough as the world locked down to show up in those paleoclimate records. 2/

But the big one, CO2 -- probably not? As it turned out, even though the pandemic did stretch out, CO2 emissions only dropped less than 7%, and bounced back by the end of 2020. 3/

But the one I find most interesting is plastics, which one expert I spoke with discussed last May. And we have REALLY followed through on her predictions/concern.

Anyway, now that we're through more than a year of it, it seems clear, based on what those experts told me, that a paleoclimatologist 1000 years from now could *absolutely* find a weird little blip in 2020. This left a mark on the planet itself.