“Not only is CO2 now at the highest level in millions of years, it is also rising faster than ever. Each year achieves a higher maximum due to fossil-fuel burning, which releases pollution in the form of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,” said Ralph Keeling, director of the Scripps CO2 program that manages the institution’s 56-year-old measurement series. “Fossil fuel pollution just keeps building up, much like trash in a landfill.”
The record two-year growth rate observed from 2022 to 2024 is likely a result of sustained high fossil fuel emissions combined with El Niño conditions limiting the ability of global land ecosystems to absorb atmospheric CO2, said John Miller, a carbon cycle scientist with the Global Monitoring Laboratory.
The Mauna Loa data, together with measurements from sampling stations around the world, are incorporated into the Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, a foundational research dataset for international climate scientists and a benchmark for policymakers attempting to address the causes and impacts of climate change.
If CO2 levels are rising faster than ever, then surely we must be emitting CO2 faster than ever. So why is the New York Times reporting that emissions are leveling off? Is the study they cite legitimate? Are these reports in contradiction with one another, or am I misunderstanding something?
Global directly-anthropogenic CO2 emissions - things we measure and attribute to countries - have been flat in the period 2019-23 (except for covid dip), and maybe falling this year (due to changes in China). However there are also climate -> carbon feedbacks. The most obvious are forest fires which tend to peak during El Niño years (it’s a repeating pattern - I even remember 1998 seeming bad). Heating also enhances respiration by bugs in soils, and reduces the solubility of CO2 in seawater - the ocean is the largest and most long-term CO2 sink. El Niño also changes ocean circulation temporarily, but I forget which way this impacts CO2 (it’s not trivial - you have to think about the history and future of large patches of water).
So, if known emissions are flat, but there is a record increase in the atmosphere, that means those feedbacks are worse. It takes a while to disentangle the factors, but this is not a surprise to me.
So now we need to wait and see if it will slowly fall back or if we hit a runaway situation, basically?
Well, maybe not just wait … Some factors will fall back - e.g. El Niño is a cycle, so are sunspots, ocean patches go round in (big-slow) loops, forests can run out of tinder (for a while). But to be sure to tip the balance of those climate-carbon feedbacks we need to get the temperature down - this could be done quicker by focusing especially on emissions of shorter-lived gases - mainly methane. Cutting out aviation-induced cirrus might also help to cancel some of the warming we got from cutting shipping sulphate - the opposite effect is because low clouds cause net cooling, high clouds cause net warming (depending on angle of sun etc. …). The good news is that models already include most of these factors, the bad news is that models say we have to cut emissions much faster than we do.
Could you provide a link (or more) that support this claim?
The article posted here tells a very different story and has many links to support what they say.
It sounds legit cause it comes from NOAA and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. It looks like Scripps has been doing this kind of monitoring, since the 1950’s.
Apart from that to my understanding CO2 emissions are just skyrocketing. Sorry, but for some reason the NYT article doesn’t open for me, so I don’t know what it says.
I tried to link to an archived copy of the NYT article so everyone could read it. Apparently that didn’t work. Here’s the original paywalled link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/climate/carbon-emissions-falling-global.html
And here’s an updated archive link:
https://archive.is/mTTBx
Thank you! The funny thing is that I was just reading it and wrote a relevant comment there. So I’ll just copy-paste it:
First of I wouldn’t trust BloombergNEF for environmental sustainability estimates, only for business expansion advice.
Second would be that what the actual report of Climate Analytics says is:
This is a greenwishing NYT article, at best.