Global warming gas levels reach record high

World carbon dioxide pollution levels in the atmosphere are accelerating and reached a record high last year, the UN weather agency said yesterday.

The heat-trapping gas, pumped into the air by cars and smokestacks, reached 393.1 parts per million (ppm) last year, up 2.2ppm from the previous year, said the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organisation in its annual greenhouse gas inventory.

That is far beyond the 350 ppm that some scientists and environmental groups promote as the absolute upper limit for a safe level.

As the chief gas blamed for global warming, carbon dioxide’s 2012 increase outpaced the past decade’s average annual increase of 2.02 ppm.

Based on that rate, the organisation says the world’s carbon dioxide pollution level is expected to cross the 400 ppm threshold by 2016. That level was already reached at some individual measurement stations in 2012 and 2013.

Scientists say the Earth last had this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at least a few million years ago, when sea levels were higher. Carbon dioxide levels were around 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution.

Trapping heat just like in a greenhouse, carbon dioxide accounts for three quarters of the planet’s heat-trapping gases that scientists say are causing sea levels to rise, glaciers to melt, and weather patterns to change. Others, such as methane, trap heat much better but have a shorter life span.

Carbon dioxide remains in the air for a century, some of it far longer, which means a lot of future warming is already locked in.

It comes days after it emerged a forthcoming report on climate change will claim that starvation, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, war, and disease are likely to worsen as the world warms from man-made climate change.

The leaked report uses the word “exacerbate” repeatedly to describe warming’s effect on poverty, lack of water, disease and even the causes of war.

The Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will issue a report in March on how global warming is already affecting the way people live and what will happen in the future, including a worldwide drop in income.

Part of the report were leaked on a climate sceptic’s website. Governments will spend the next few months making comments about the draft report.

Cities, where most of the world now lives, have the highest vulnerability, as do the globe’s poorest people.

“Climate change impacts will slow down economic growth and poverty reduction, further erode food security, and trigger new poverty traps,” according to the report.