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Global greenhouse gas levels reached record levels in 2022, sending temperatures across the planet continuing to rise and far exceeding the world’s climate targets, the United Nations World Meteorological Organization said in a report on Wednesday.
There is “no end in sight” to the rise in greenhouse gas emissions, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warned, reporting that global concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide reached new highs last year. Emissions of these heat-trapping gases broke records as the planet continued on a path that scientists say is likely to cause widespread and irreversible damage to ecosystems and communities.
“We are seeing new, extremely high concentrations of the three main gases” that are driving global temperature rises and extreme weather events, Oksana Tarasova, chief scientific officer at the WMO, told The Washington Post.
The WMO data analyzes measurements from 150 observation stations around the world. Record levels of greenhouse gases in 2022 provide another urgent metric ahead of this month’s COP28 climate conference in Dubai. According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, last year was the fifth hottest year on the planet, and carbon dioxide levels and temperatures continued to rise in 2023.
You’ve just experienced the hottest 12 months on record on Earth
Carbon dioxide is responsible for about two-thirds of the warming effect on the climate, which is why curbing emissions is crucial to preventing the worst effects of climate change, scientists say.
“Despite decades of warnings from the scientific community, thousands of pages of reports and dozens of climate conferences, we are still moving in the wrong direction,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement.
The world is inching closer to the warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and the WMO warned that the planet could be close to tipping points that could have irreversible consequences, such as Amazon rainforest die-off or destabilization of ice leaves.
The rising concentrations are also pushing the world’s forests and oceans closer to a point where they may no longer absorb the amount of emissions that people rely on, Tarasova said. In Europe, for example, last summer’s drought caused forests to absorb less carbon dioxide, and in parts of the Amazon, stressed forests have started releasing it back into the atmosphere.
“All these things that have accumulated over centuries or millennia, when they disappear, you can’t just put them back,” Tarasova told The Post. “The melting of glaciers or the melting of ice in the Arctic – you can’t put back glaciers that have accumulated over thousands of years.”
According to the WMO, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rose to 150 percent above pre-industrial levels last year. Methane rose 16 parts per billion (ppb) in 2021, comparable to last year’s increase, and nitrous oxide rose 1.4 ppb, an increase Tarasova called dramatic. Carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 2.2 parts per million (ppm) from 2021 to 2022. The average concentration in 2022 was around 418 ppm, compared to pre-industrial levels between 270 and 280 ppm.
The last time carbon dioxide reached a concentration comparable to 2022 was 3 to 5 million years ago, according to the WMO.
The growth rate of carbon dioxide levels was slightly lower in 2022 than in 2021, but WMO scientists largely attributed this to short-term fluctuations in the carbon cycle.
Climate impacts in the U.S. are “widespread and getting worse,” a federal report says
The report comes a day after a federal report warned that the impacts of climate change in the United States are worsening, even as many governments and communities step up action. Also on Tuesday, another report concluded that the world is not moving fast enough on the many transformations needed to limit the worst impacts of climate change.
In 2022, the planet has been hit by extreme weather disasters, including catastrophic floods in Pakistan, unprecedented heat across Europe and devastating drought in East Africa.
Scientists say Earth is hotter now than at any time in the last 125,000 years. Last week, scientists said the period from November 2022 to October 2023 would be the hottest ever in modern times. And on Wednesday, NOAA said last month was the warmest October on record and the fifth consecutive record-breaking month. The month’s extreme weather events included Hurricane Otis, which destroyed parts of Acapulco; Cyclone Lola, which devastated parts of Vanuatu, a nation in the South Pacific; severe flooding in Ghana; and Mississippi River levels fell to record lows for the second year in a row.
The 2022 data underscores that the planet could warm well above the 1.5 degree threshold on its current path, WMO scientists said.
“At the moment it will be quite difficult to maintain the 1.5 degree limit,” Taalas told a news conference. “We are heading for 2.5 to 3 degrees.”
Climate change and global warming
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