NOAA Shows Carbon Dioxide Concentrations Are Increasing

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) just released its latest Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI) report, and the document does not bring about good news. It shows that carbon dioxide concentrations around the world are increasing.

This upward trend has been going on since the 1880s, which is when the current climate record began. Researchers take the end of the 19th century as a starting point for most climate analysis conducted to date. This is also the time when the Industrial Revolution.

Researchers have known that greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations have been steadily rising since that time, when fossil fuels began fueling the world's fast-growing economies. The amount of CO2, methane and other GHG these countries has released since then continuously increase.

This year made no exception, scientists from NOAA discovered when compiling their new report. The AGGI was first compiled back in 2004, using the year 1990 as a baseline index for comparison and analysis. By 2010, the report showed a warming value of 1.29.

What this figure means is that the “combined heating effect of long-lived greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere by human activities has increased by 29 percent since 1990,” NOAA experts explain.

“This is slightly higher than the 2009 AGGI, which was 1.27, when the combined heating effect of those additional greenhouse gases was 27 percent higher than in 1990,” the statement goes on to say.

Scientists also focused on the evolution of GHG other than CO2 and methane, such as nitrous oxide and the chlorofluorocarbons CFC11 and CFC12. The latter are extremely long-lived in the atmosphere, causing long-term effects, but they currently don't affect the air as much as the former two.

NOAA experts are quick to point out that AGGI is an indicator of a current situation, and not a predictive tool. It is not its role to say how much warmer the world will get in the near future, or whether the Earth will exceed the 2-degree Celsius threshold that will take its climate beyond the point of no return.

“The increasing amounts of long-lived greenhouse gases in our atmosphere indicate that climate change is an issue society will be dealing with for a long time,” NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) Global Monitoring Division director Jim Butler explains.

“Climate warming has the potential to affect most aspects of society, including water supplies, agriculture, ecosystems and economies. NOAA will continue to monitor these gases into the future to further understand the impacts on our planet,” he concludes.