Planet-warming greenhouse gases are "building up, much like trash in a landfill," one researcher said.

One of the major drivers of the exceptional heat building within Earth’s atmosphere has reached levels beyond anything humans have ever experienced, officials announced on Thursday. Carbon dioxide, the gas that accounts for the majority of global warming caused by human activities, is accumulating “faster than ever,” scientists from NOAA, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California San Diego found.

“Over the past year, we’ve experienced the hottest year on record, the hottest ocean temperatures on record, and a seemingly endless string of heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires and storms,” NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in a press release. “Now we are finding that atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing faster than ever.”

  • @A_A
    14•6 months ago

    My first guess on the title was : “this should be caused by a positive feedback with forest fires in the loop”.
    …so, I went and read this Wikipedia article :
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_feedbacks
    … and it says :

    (…) Carbon cycle uncertainty is driven by the large rates at which CO2 is both absorbed into plants and released when biomass burns or decays. For instance, permafrost thaw produces both CO2 and methane emissions, in ways that are difficult to model. (…)

    But it also says that this one is not the most important feedback loop.