The annual peak of global heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air has reached another dangerous milestone: 50% higher than when the industrial age began.
And the average rate of increase is faster than ever, scientists said Monday, despite the slowdown in industrial activity brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, The Associated Press reports.
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The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the average carbon dioxide level for May was 419.13 parts per million. That’s 1.82 parts per million higher than May 2020 and 50% higher than the stable pre-industrial levels of 280 parts per million, said NOAA climate scientist Pieter Tans.
Carbon dioxide levels peak every May just before plant life in the Northern Hemisphere blossoms, sucking some of that carbon out of the atmosphere and into flowers, leaves, seeds, and stems, AP explains. The reprieve is temporary, though, because emissions of carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil, and natural gas for transportation and electricity far exceed what plants can take in, pushing greenhouse gas levels to new records every year.
“Reaching 50% higher carbon dioxide than pre-industrial is really setting a new benchmark and not in a good way,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part of the research. “If we want to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, we need to work much harder to cut carbon dioxide emissions and right away.”
Climate change does more than increase temperatures. It makes extreme weather—storms, wildfires, floods, and droughts—worse and more frequent and causes oceans to rise and get more acidic, studies show. There are also health effects, including heat deaths and increased pollen. That’s why countries signed the Paris Agreement in 2015 in a bid to hold average global warming to 1.5°C.
The one-year jump in carbon dioxide was not a record, mainly because of a La Niña weather pattern, when parts of the Pacific temporarily cool, said Scripps Institution of Oceanography geochemist Ralph Keeling. Keeling’s father started the monitoring of carbon dioxide on top of the Hawaiian mountain Mauna Loa in 1958, and he has continued the work of charting the now famous Keeling Curve.
Scripps, which calculates the numbers slightly differently based on time and averaging, said the peak in May was 418.9.
Pandemic lockdowns slowed transportation, travel, and other activity by about 7%, earlier studies show. But that was too small to make a significant difference. Carbon dioxide can stay in the air for 1,000 years or more, so year-to-year changes in emissions don’t register much.
The 10-year average rate of increase also set a record, now up to 2.4 parts per million per year.
“Carbon dioxide going up in a few decades like that is extremely unusual,” Tans said. “For example, when the Earth climbed out of the last ice age, carbon dioxide increased by about 80 parts per million and it took the Earth system, the natural system, 6,000 years. We have a much larger increase in the last few decades.”
By comparison, it has taken only 42 years, from 1979 to 2021, to increase carbon dioxide by that same amount, AP notes.
“The world is approaching the point where exceeding the Paris targets and entering a climate danger zone becomes almost inevitable,” said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, who wasn’t part of the research.
