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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.
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 C02 growth rates have now tripled since the 1960s, and reached levels not seen in at least 800,000 years.
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 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, WMO said.
Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare called the new data “alarming and worrying.” Even though fossil fuel emissions were “relatively flat” last year, he said, the report appeared to show an accelerating increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, “signalling a positive feedback from burning forests and warming oceans driven by record global temperatures.”
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While several governments have been pushing for further use of hydrocarbons like coal, oil and gas for energy production, some businesses and local governments have been mobilizing to fight global warming.
