UN Warns Global Emissions Reached Record Highs in 2021

Today's report from the World Meteorological Organization comes just days before delegates from around the world meet to discuss climate change at the COP 27 conference in Egypt.

The United Nations agency says the Greenhouse Gas Bulletin shows the three main greenhouse gases hit record high levels in the atmosphere last year.

Greenhouse gases trap heat in our atmosphere and are a major contributor to global warming and climate change.

Agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide and methane, the combustion of fossil fuels is another.

The WMO's Senior Scientific Officer Dr Oksana Tarasova says the increase in the level of gases in the past year is too significant to ignore.

Tarasova says: "The major gases that provide the maximum contribution to warming, that's why we're looking at the year trends and for all three top gases carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide we are seeing the highest level on record. So basically the trend which I've seen last year, it continues and what is particularly frightening this year is that if we look at the growth rates of carbon dioxide, then it's pretty comparable to the average growth rate within ten years, but if you look at the growth of methane, that's the highest ever we have in the history of our observations if we go 30 years back when we started the measurement the increase in methane, which we've seen from 2020 to 2021, is higher than anything we've seen."

Of the three main types of greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide – the biggest jump between 2020 and 2021 was in methane.

Its concentrations in the air come with the biggest year-on-year increase since regular measurements began four decades ago according to the WMO.

"So just to give you the perspective, like in the 80s we were talking about an increase of ten units parts per billion of the molecules of methane then we were in the plateau, let's say around the year 2000 say from 1990 to 2007. From 2007 we started growing but then it was kind of slowly like five, six. This year we have a 18, 18 parts per billion increase in atmospheric methane, and for nitrous oxide, which is the third most important greenhouse gas, we also have the highest growth rate. So they're all hitting the records and two of them are increasing faster than before," says Tarasova.

Methane is more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, but doesn't stay in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide and there's 200 times more carbon dioxide in the air than methane.

Three-fifths of the methane we produce comes from livestock, rice farming, the use of fossil fuels, and biomass burning and landfills.

The rest comes from natural sources like wetlands and termites.

Over a 20-year time-period, a molecule of methane traps about 81 times as much heat as a molecule of carbon dioxide but over a century it goes down to trapping 28 times more heat per molecule than carbon dioxide, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Since pre-industrial times, which WMO sets at 1750, CO2 concentrations in the air have increased by nearly 50% to 415.7 parts per million.

Methane is up 162% to 1,908 parts per billion, and nitrous oxide — whose human-made sources are things like biomass burning, industrial processes and fertilizer use — is up about one-quarter to 334.5 parts per million.

Tarasova says the gases also threaten our biodiversity because they affect our soil and our water sources.

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