Record CO2 levels are ‘turbo-charging’ extreme weather, UN agency says
Global News
The World Meteorological Organization says CO2 growth rates have now tripled since the 1960s, and reached levels that existed more than 800,000 years ago.
Heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere jumped by the highest amount on record last year, soaring to a level not seen in human civilization and “turbo-charging” the Earth’s climate and causing more extreme weather, the United Nations weather agency said Wednesday.
The World Meteorological Organization said in its latest bulletin on greenhouse gases, an annual study released ahead of the U.N.’s annual climate conference, that CO2 growth rates have now tripled since the 1960s, and reached levels that existed more than 800,000 years ago.
Emissions from burning coal, oil and gas, alongside more wildfires, have helped fan a “vicious climate cycle,” and people and industries continue to spew heat-trapping gases while the planet’s oceans and forests lose their ability to absorb them, the WMO report said.
The Geneva-based agency said the increase in the global average concentration of carbon dioxide from 2023 to 2024 amounted to the highest annual level of any one-year span since measurements began in 1957. Growth rates of CO2 have accelerated from an annual average increase of 2.4 parts per million per year in the decade from 2011 to 2020, to 3.5 ppm from 2023 to 2024, it said.
“The heat trapped by CO2 and other greenhouse gases is turbo-charging our climate and leading to more extreme weather,” said WMO Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett in a statement. “Reducing emissions is therefore essential not just for our climate but also for our economic security and community well-being.”
What’s disturbing is not just the increase in greenhouse gases, but that it may be signaling a problem in the long-standing and delicate carbon cycle, where humans, industry, cars and animals spew carbon dioxide into the air and forests and oceans pull much of it out of the air, reducing some of the potential warming effect, said WMO senior scientific officer Oksana Tarasova.
Natural land sinks, including the Amazon, remove about one-quarter of the carbon dioxide in the air and the world’s oceans suck up another quarter, she said.
The increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere “is very important in the sense that probably we started seeing the early indication of the limited capacity of the natural systems to actually absorb everything what we emit,” Tarasova told a news conference. She pointed to the Amazon, which had severe drought and heat, limiting trees ability to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
