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The levels of crucial heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere reached historic highs last year, growing at near-record fast paces, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Carbon dioxide, the most important and abundant of the greenhouse gases caused by humans, rose in 2023 by the third-highest amount in 65 years of record keeping, NOAA announced Friday. Scientists are also worried about the rapid rise in atmospheric levels of methane, a shorter-lived but much more potent heat-trapping gas. Both jumped 5.5% over the past decade, The Associated Press reports.
AP carried the story a day after Reuters reported that 57 companies accounted for 80% of the world’s carbon dioxide from fossil fuel and cement production between 2016 and 2022. The report by InfluenceMap “found most companies had expanded their fossil fuel production since 2015, the year when nearly all countries signed the UN Paris Agreement, committing to take action to curb climate change,” Reuters writes.
The 2.8-parts-per-million increase in airborne carbon dioxide levels from January to December, 2023, wasn’t as high as the jumps in 2014 and 2015, AP says. But they were larger than every other year since 1959, when precise record-keeping started. Carbon dioxide’s average level for 2023 was 419.3 parts per million, up 50% from pre-industrial times.
Last year’s methane’s increase of 11.1 parts per billion was lower than record annual rises from 2020 to 2022. It averaged 1922.6 parts per billion last year. It has risen 3% in just the past five years and jumped 160% from pre-industrial levels, showing faster rates of increase than carbon dioxide, said Xin “Lindsay” Lan, the University of Colorado and NOAA atmospheric scientist who did the calculations.
“Methane’s decadal spike should terrify us,” said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who heads the Global Carbon Project that tracks worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide but wasn’t part of NOAA’s report. “Fossil fuel pollution is warming natural systems like wetlands and permafrost. Those ecosystems are releasing even more greenhouse gases as they heat up. We’re caught between a rock and a charred place.”
Methane emissions in the atmosphere come from natural wetlands, agriculture, livestock, and landfills, and most important, from leaks and intentional flaring of natural gas in the oil and gas industry.
Methane is responsible for about 30% of the current rise in global temperature, with carbon dioxide to blame for about twice as much, according to the International Energy Agency. But methane is 84 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over the crucial 20-year span when humanity will be scrambling to get climate change under control, prompting the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to identify methane controls in fossil fuel production as one of the quickest, most affordable paths to the deepest emission reductions by the end of this decade.
The third-biggest human-caused greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, jumped 1 part per billion last year to record levels, but the increases were not as high as in 2020 and 2021. Nitrous oxide, which lasts about a century in the atmosphere, comes from agriculture, burning of fuels, manure and industrial processes, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
“As these numbers show, we still have a lot of work to do to make meaningful progress in reducing the amount of greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere,” NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory Director Vanda Grubisic said in statement.
At last year’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai, more than four dozen major oil and gas companies pledged massive—almost complete—but voluntary cuts in their methane emissions in a new initiative that could trim future rises in temperature rise by 0.1°C, AP says. During that same two-week meeting, Canada pledged to mandate a 75% reduction in fossil industry methane emissions by 2030. And the EPA issued a final rule to reduce methane emissions from oil and gas.
But over the past five years, methane levels have risen faster than at any other time in NOAA record-keeping. And recent studies have shown that government efforts to track methane are vastly underestimating the pollution going into the atmosphere from fossil fuel production.
Studies of the specific isotopes of methane in the air show much of the increased methane is from microbes, pointing to spiking emissions from wetlands and perhaps agriculture and landfills, but not as much as the fossil industries, Lan said.
“I’m still mostly concerned about carbon dioxide emissions,” Lan said.
Carbon dioxide emissions going into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels and making cement hit an all-time high last year of 36.8 billion tonnes, twice the amount spewed into the air 40 years ago, according to the Global Carbon Project. But about half of what’s coming out of smokestacks and tailpipes is temporarily sucked up and stored by trees and oceans, keeping it out of the atmosphere, Lan said.
Atmospheric climate pollution continued to increase in 2023 despite the United States reporting a doubling in its emissions reduction rate since the adoption of its 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, and the European Union touting a record 15.5% reduction in its power sector emissions in 2023.
The main body of this report was published by The Associated Press and republished by The Canadian Press on April 5, 2024.
