The sun sets behind smoke from a distant wildfire as drought conditions worsen near Glennville, California on July 12, 2021.

David McNew | Getty Images

A year after the coronavirus pandemic shut down businesses, reduced ground flights and vehicle traffic around the world, scientists say the resulting temporary drop in CO2 emissions had no lasting impact on climate change.

According to the new report “State of the Climate in 2020” by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, many metrics on the health of the planet have declined significantly in the past year.

The NOAA report, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, confirms that, despite a 6 to 7% decrease in emissions from reduced activity during the pandemic, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere is still at the highest level ever was ever measured last year.

Scientists also confirmed other records in 2020, including:

• The highest annual increase in the concentration of methane, a powerful climate-changing gas
• Average global surface temperatures were among the hottest on record
• Sea level reaches the highest value ever recorded
• Oceans absorbed a record amount of carbon dioxide
• 2020 was the hottest year on record without an El Niño.

The results come shortly after a sharp analysis by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned that limiting global warming to nearly 1.5 degrees Celsius, or even 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, over the next two decades would not be immediate far-reaching reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will not be possible.

The annual global average carbon dioxide concentration at the earth’s surface was 412.5 ppm, about 2.5 ppm more than in 2019, the highest in at least 800,000 years, the NOAA report said.

Last year there was also a record increase in emissions of methane, which remains in the atmosphere for a shorter time than carbon dioxide, but causes about 84 times as much warming over this period.

Above-average temperatures were common around the world last year. In Europe, 2020 was the hottest year on record, with all five of the warmest years occurring since 2014, the report said.

The average surface air temperature over land in the Arctic last year was the highest ever recorded in 121 years. The Arctic also experienced its highest forest fire year in 2020.

In central Siberia, where most of the forest fires burned, record high spring temperatures triggered rapid snowmelt, which, according to the report, contributed to the continent’s fourth smallest snow cover in May and smallest snow cover in June.

The US also saw a record number of costly disasters in 2020 as climate change causes more frequent and intense hurricanes, forest fires and floods.

The country has had a total of 22 climate disasters, each costing more than $ 1 billion, breaking the previous annual record of 16 disasters the country witnessed in both 2011 and 2017, the report said. Wildfires in the western United States also burned nearly 10.3 million acres from California to Colorado, most of the country has seen in over two decades.

Looking ahead, 2021 has already broken some of the records from last year.

July was the hottest month ever. And a heat wave that scientists say would be made “virtually impossible” without climate change hit the Pacific Northwest and Canada, causing hundreds of heat-related deaths.

A person has a nasal swab used for the coronavirus (COVID-19) test, which was performed on Jan.

Jeenah moon | Reuters

Covid cases are still on the rise in the US, but the rate of infection is showing signs of slowing, especially in some of the states hardest hit by the Delta variant.

Although cases rose to their highest level since January at an average of 152,000 a day for the past week, the pace of the rise in new infections has slowed significantly in the past two weeks, data compiled by Johns Hopkins University shows. The number of new cases rose 11% last week, nearly a third of the seven-day jump from 30% just two weeks ago, the data said.

A combination of the increased number of recent cases and the number of Americans vaccinated means that the virus is infected, according to Dr. Bruce Farber, director of infectious diseases at Northwell Health in Manhasset, New York, may now find fewer people to infect.

“All outbreaks have these spikes, and when the percentage of the population becomes both infected and vaccinated, and it can be a combination of those things, you run out of fuel,” he said. “And in this case the fuel is unvaccinated and uninfected people.”

The US has seen a handful of spikes in cases over the course of the pandemic. Average daily cases hit around 32,000 in April 2020 before subsiding and then rising to a new high of 67,000 a day average in July 2020. Many hoped the pandemic was contained last fall, as the average daily cases dropped to around 34,000 shortly after Labor Day 2020, before the fall and winter holiday season drove a spike in Covid cases to a seven-day average in January of 251,000 cases per day. There was a steep drop after the holidays before the UK alpha variant sparked another surge in cases in the US last April, averaging 71,000 cases per day.

Even as cases approach a new high, it may still be some time before this becomes apparent in local hospitals. Hospital stays and deaths tend to delay case numbers by a few weeks or more as it takes time for people to contract the virus and then get so sick they need urgent care.

Nationwide hospital stays can bend the curve. For the week ending August 23, an average of more than 12,200 Americans were hospitalized with Covid every day, data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows. That is an increase of 6.6% compared to the previous week, a smaller jump than in the last few weeks.

The death toll, however, continues to rise rapidly. Johns Hopkins data shows the country’s average daily death toll exceeded 1,100 on Wednesday, a 39% increase from the previous week, driven by large and rapidly rising deaths reported from Florida, Texas, Louisiana and Georgia became.

Some of the states that saw the earliest effects of the delta variant spread are seeing falls or flattening in cases.

Louisiana, which led the country in population-adjusted daily cases for weeks until it was recently surpassed by Mississippi, is now seeing some signs of relief. The state has a seven-day average of about 4,700 daily cases, 10% fewer than a week ago and 20% from its high of about 5,800 daily cases 10 days ago.

Alyson Neel, spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Health, said it was too early to know if the Louisiana outbreak had peaked.

“We cannot ignore that there is some daylight in the cases, we cannot ignore that there have been fewer reports of Covid cases for at least a few days, and that is really good,” said Neel.

“I don’t know if we would say we know if we peaked or not, but we’re grateful for the little downward trend in some cases,” she added.

Although case numbers are slowing, it could indicate that the delta surge is finally nearing its peak, but many states are still facing a spate of hospital admissions and deaths. The 139 deaths reported in Louisiana on Aug. 24 are the highest one-day total in the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins data.

According to the U.S. Department of Health, just under half of Louisiana’s ICU beds were occupied by Covid patients on Thursday, compared with 30% nationwide. The surge is also putting a strain on healthcare systems in Texas and Florida, where more than 50% of ICU beds are currently treating coronavirus cases, according to HHS.

“I would of course hope that people will not see falling case numbers as a sign that we are really out of the woods,” said Dr. Barbara Taylor, assistant dean and professor of infectious diseases at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, told CNBC. “There are so many other factors that we need to consider to take into account how much this puts a strain on all of our systems and all of our health systems.”

Texas has an average of 16,970 daily cases, up 10% from last week. That’s below the state’s record high of more than 23,000 daily cases set in mid-January and shows some signs of easing, but the daily death toll in Texas nearly quadrupled this month to an average of 153 per day.

In Florida, which is responsible for about 1 in 7 new US cases, infection numbers have remained more or less constant for the past week, despite being at pandemic highs. The state, which stopped reporting daily case numbers in May, said it had 150,740 new infections on Friday, compared to 151,764 the previous week, and hospitals are so strained that the Orlando mayor asked residents last week to do so Reduce water to conserve the resources needed to combat the recent surge in Covid hospital admissions.

Florida deaths have now risen to a new seven-day high of 1,486 deaths – the highest weekly total in the pandemic.

In Missouri, which started seeing a spike in cases from early July, daily cases have dropped 10% over the past week to an average of about 2,400 per day. But even there, the number of deaths rose in the past week by 36% to an average of 35 daily deaths.

Infectious disease experts say returning to face-to-face learning for high school and college students will pose another hurdle to slowing the spread, with the potential for localized outbreaks this fall. However, there is a game book on how to fight the virus at this point in the pandemic, Taylor said.

“I think the answers are the same as they have been for a while: vaccinating more people, giving more people more access to vaccinations, and easier access to mobile clinics,” she said, adding that masking and social distancing from those in different households are still important tools.

“We know ways to reduce or mitigate risk in both schools and work environments,” said Taylor. “But I think it’s going to be really challenging in some places, and there are big differences in practice within schools.”