Emissions from burning coal, oil and gas, alongside more wildfires, have helped fan a “vicious climate cycle,” and people and industries continue to spew heat-trapping gases while the planet’s oceans and forests lose their ability to absorb them, the WMO report said.
The Geneva-based agency said the increase in the global average concentration of carbon dioxide from 2023 to 2024 amounted to the highest annual level of any one-year span since measurements began in 1957. Growth rates of CO2 have accelerated from an annual average increase of 2.4 parts per million per year in the decade from 2011 to 2020, to 3.5 ppm from 2023 to 2024, WMO said.
“The heat trapped by CO2 and other greenhouse gases is turbo-charging our climate and leading to more extreme weather,” said WMO Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett in a statement. “Reducing emissions is therefore essential not just for our climate but also for our economic security and community well-being.”
Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare called the new data “alarming and worrying.”
Even though fossil fuel emissions were “relatively flat” last year, he said, the report appeared to show an accelerating increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, “signaling a positive feedback from burning forests and warming oceans driven by record global temperatures.”
“Let there be no mistake, this is a very clear warning sign that the world is heading into an extremely dangerous state — and this is driven by the continued expansion of fossil fuel development, globally,” Hare said. “I’m beginning to feel that this points to a slow-moving climate catastrophe unfolding in front of us.”
WMO called on policymakers to take more steps to help reduce emissions.
Still, Hare said very few countries have made new climate commitments to come “anywhere near dealing with the gravity of the climate crisis.”
The increase in 2024 is setting the planet on track for more long-term temperature increase, WMO said. It noted that concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide — other greenhouse gases caused by human activity — have also hit record levels.
The report was bound to raise new doubts on the world’s ability to hit the goal laid out in the 2015 Paris climate accord of keeping the global average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.
The agency’s monthly data for the long-running Hawaii monitoring location for 2025 through August also showed CO2 rates are still increasing, but not as much as between 2023-2024.
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