Fossil Fuel Emissions Push Greenhouse Gas Indicators to Record High in May

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04062020/fossil-fuel-emissions-mauna-loa-keeling-curve-coronavirus-hawaii

By Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News
Jun 5, 2020

As graphs go, the Keeling Curve is simple, but it clearly illustrates the planet's vexing global warming challenge. In a decades-long upward zigzag it charts the unrelenting increase of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

An annual update of the curve done this week shows that CO2 once again spiked to a record high during the past year. The short-term throttling of emissions during the coronavirus pandemic didn't even show up as a blip, scientists said, adding that the readings are important because they help explain that fossil fuel pollution is changing the climate dangerously, and faster than expected.

The CO2 concentration during May averaged 417.2 parts per million, the highest monthly total ever recorded. It increased at about the same rate as throughout the 2010s, researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego said after analyzing thousands of samples taken over the past 12 months.

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"In the 1990s, the CO2 concentration was increasing at 1.6 ppm each year. In the 2000s, it was 2 ppm per year, and the rate ticked up again in the current decade, to 2.4 ppm per year," Tans said. "CO2 is the main thing causing global warming. It's two-thirds of all climate forcing."

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Along with CO2, methane and nitrous oxide, the index also measures several less abundant but super-potent greenhouse gases. It shows that the heating power of all greenhouse gases combined is 45 percent higher than in 1990, a year chosen partly because the 1997 Kyoto Protocol set it as a baseline for international climate calculations. In the index released last week, combined greenhouse gases for the first time trapped the same amount of heat as an atmosphere with carbon dioxide at 500 ppm.

Using a slightly different formula, Tans compared the heating effect of all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere today with Earth's pre-industrial climate, before 1800. The increase is "equal to adding 3.22 watts of heating power over every square meter of the Earth," he said.

"If that heat were focused over Greenland, it would melt 5.2 percent of the ice sheet and raise global sea level 15 inches in just one year," he said. "The heat retention caused by greenhouse gases in 2019 equals the electrical output of 1.64 million large power plants. That's staggering."

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