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Carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere soared by a record amount to new highs in 2024, committing the planet to more long-term temperature increase, a new World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report released on October 16 in Geneva showed.
The report, WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, said, “Continued emissions of CO2 from human activities and an upsurge from wildfires were responsible”. But it also attributed the surge to reduced carbon absorption by sinks such as land ecosystems and the ocean. The analysis identified the cocktail of conditions as “a vicious climate cycle.”
“The heat trapped by CO2 and other greenhouse gases is turbo-charging our climate and leading to more extreme weather. Reducing emissions is therefore essential not just for our climate but also for our economic security and community well-being,” said WMO Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett.
The report comes less than a month before the 30th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change gets underway in Belem, Brazil.
“This is an ominous signal and should be seriously considered by policy makers at Belem. They should come up with appropriate responses rather than beating about the bush about theoretical climate action,” said a senior climate activist to this correspondent at the sidelines of a climate meeting currently being held at Colombo, Sri Lanka.
The report has pointed out that CO2 growth rates have tripled since the 1960s, accelerating from an annual average increase of 0.8 ppm per year to 2.4 ppm per year in the decade from 2011 to 2020. However, the rise reached record proportions in recent years as the global average concentration of CO2 surged by 3.5 ppm from 2023 to 2024, the largest increase ever since modern measurements started in 1957.
Incidentally, in 2004, when the first bulletin was published, the annual average level of CO2 measured by WMO’s Global Atmosphere Watch network of monitoring stations was 377.1 ppm. In 2024, it had shot up to 423.9 ppm - a whopping rise of 12.5 per cent in 20 years.
The report has pointed out that “the likely reason for the record growth between 2023 and 2024 was a large contribution from wildfire emissions and a reduced uptake of CO2 by land and the ocean in 2024 – the warmest year on record, with a strong El Niño”.
During El Niño years, CO2 levels tend to rise because the efficiency of land carbon sinks get reduced by drier vegetation and forest fires, as was the case with exceptional drought and fires in the Amazon and southern Africa in 2024.
The report points out that the concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide, second and third most important long-lived greenhouse gases related to human activities, have also risen to record levels.
The world’s premiere scientific organisation said they have released the latest report “to provide authoritative scientific information for the UN Climate Change conference in November”, which is expected to push climate action across the globe, especially in developed countries. “Sustaining and expanding greenhouse gas monitoring are critical to support such efforts,” observed Oksana Tarasova, coordinator of the Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, one of WMO’s flagship scientific reports.
Methane accounts for about 16 per cent of the warming effect on our climate and has a lifetime of about nine years. Approximately 40 per cent of methane is emitted into the atmosphere by natural sources like wetlands while about 60 per cent comes from anthropogenic sources such as cattle, rice farming, fossil fuel exploitation, landfills and biomass burning.
In the case of nitrous oxide, the globally averaged concentration reached 338.0 ppb in 2024, an increase of 25 per cent over the pre-industrial level.