Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever.
By Scott Dance, Special to The Washington PostThe Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory, high atop Hawaii's largest mountain in order to sample well-mixed background air free of local pollution. Atmospheric levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide aren’t just on their way to yet another record high this year - they’re rising faster than ever, according to the latest in a 66-year-long series of observations.
A historically strong El Niño climate pattern that developed last year is a big reason for the spike. But the weather pattern only punctuated an existing trend in which global carbon emissions are rising even as U.S. emissions have declined and the growth in global emissions has slowed. That means the Keeling Curve reaches new heights each May, forming a new peak in a sawtooth-like pattern.
Since that year, carbon dioxide emissions tied to fossil fuel consumption have increased 5 percent globally, according to Scripps.The increase in carbon dioxide from year to year is not precisely consistent. One factor that tends to cause levels to rise especially quickly: the El Niño climate pattern.
Tropical forests serve as reliable stores of carbon because they don’t go through the same seasonal decay as plant life at higher latitudes. But El Niño-linked droughts in tropical areas including Indonesia and northern South America mean less carbon storage within plants, Keeling said. Land-based ecosystems around the world tend to give off more carbon dioxide during El Niño because of the changes in precipitation and temperature the weather pattern brings, Andrews added.
It will take some four decades to stop the annual growth in CO2 concentrations, even if all emissions began declining now, Andrews said. Because Earth’s carbon cycle is so far out of its natural equilibrium, plants, soils and oceans would give off stores of extra CO2 in response to any reduction in humans’ emissions, she said.
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