That's true, but I think the point is: people will witness first-hand how reducing pollution and emissions leads to much better environment in the span of weeks.
I also hope that there will be some dip in relevant global climate measurements, so there will be something to point to and say: "here's direct empirical evidence that climate change is man-made and that reducing emissions helps mitigate it".
This thread seems to be confusing climate change / carbon (dioxide) with local pollution.
climate change / carbon (dioxide) and carbon taxes are about long-term temperature change due to C02 concentration and the effects of that. COVID-19 isn't changing that in 1 year.
Local pollution is caused by burning gasoline and factory smoke.
I was talking both. They're related - local pollution does local damage to the environment; climate change is bad because it does damage to the environment everywhere simultaneously.
I don't expect COVID-19 to show up too strongly in temperature graphs, but I hope some of its effects show up somewhere with large enough effect size that we have a statistically significant dip in the chart to point to as direct evidence that human activity is causing this, and changes are meaningful to fixing it.
because environments everywhere have adapted to a rhythm of temperature that will no longer exist due to global warming. a good definition of damage is "harmful change."
I also hope that there will be some dip in relevant global climate measurements, so there will be something to point to and say: "here's direct empirical evidence that climate change is man-made and that reducing emissions helps mitigate it".