Ahead of the COP23 climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany next week, an annual bulletin released on Monday revealed that last year, the average global concentration of carbon dioxide surged at a record-breaking pace to the highest level in approximately 3 million years, renewing scientists’ concerns that more action is needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“There’s still time to steer these emissions down and so keep some control, but if we wait too long humankind will become a passenger on a one-way street to dangerous climate change.”
—Dave Reay, University of Edinburgh
“This should set alarm bells ringing in the corridors of power,” Dave Reay, a professor of carbon management at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved with the research, told the Guardian. “We know that, as climate change intensifies, the ability of the land and oceans to mop up our carbon emissions will weaken.”
“There’s still time to steer these emissions down and so keep some control,” Reay added, “but if we wait too long humankind will become a passenger on a one-way street to dangerous climate change.”
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The Greenhouse Gas Bulletin (pdf), published by the United Nations World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) Global Atmosphere Watch program, found that globally averaged CO2 concentrations increased from 400 parts per million (ppm) in 2015 to 403.3 ppm last year.
Scientists have reliable data on carbon dioxide concentration spanning approximately 800,000 years, and researchers estimate the last time the planet had a comparable concentration of carbon dioxide was 3 to 5 million years ago, during the Pliocene epoch, when the global temperature was up to 3°C warmer and due to melting ice sheets, sea level was about 66 feet higher than it is today.
The bulletin attributes the increase in CO2 levels to the El Niño event and greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, including “growing population, intensified agricultural practices, increases in land use and deforestation, industrialization, and associated energy use from fossil fuel sources” since the “industrial era, beginning in 1750.”
While emissions represent the full amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, the measured concentrations focus on what remains in the atmosphere “after the complex system of interactions between the atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, and the oceans.” As carbon sinks, the oceans and biosphere each take up about a quarter of total CO2 emissions.
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