No end in sight for climate heating gases in the atmosphere

The abundance of climate-heating gases in the atmosphere reached record highs in 2022, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has reported.

This rise has been caused mainly by burning fossil fuels, the WMO went on to say.

The concentration of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is now 50% higher than before the start of the Industrial Revolution.

The Earth has not experienced similar levels of CO2 for 3-5 million years, when the global temperature was 2-3C warmer and sea level was 10-20 metres higher than today, the WMO said.

The concentrations of the two other key greenhouse gases, methane and nitrous oxide, also grew, according to the report.

Greenhouse gas levels will continue to increase until emissions are cut all the way down to net zero, meaning global heating and the impacts of extreme weather will also continue to increase.

The report highlighted that that coal must be phased out seven times faster than is happening to avoid the worst impacts of global heating, for example.

The WMO report found that the heating effect of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere rose by 50% between 1990 and 2022, with CO2 accounting for about 80% of this increase.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, with the human sources being the fossil fuel industry, cattle and waste dumps. Levels of methane rose again in 2022 and scientists are concerned that a recent acceleration of methane emissions may be driven by the effect of global heating on wetlands, producing a potential feedback effect.

The increase in nitrous oxide levels in 2022 was the highest ever recorded. This greenhouse gas is produced by overuse of fertilisers, crop waste burning and industry.

The International Energy Agency said in September that the world’s demand for oil, gas and coal would begin to decline this decade in “the beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era. But the IEA said this was still “nowhere near steep enough” to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C, the internationally agreed limit.

The past year has seen temperatures never previously seen by scientists ?and continue to shatter records, intensifying extreme weather events that take lives and livelihoods across the globe, massively increasing ?the socioeconomic and environmental costs for all of us.