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Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere hit a record high last year despite temporary declines during the pandemic. Greenhouse gas concentrations grew at a faster pace than the annual average from 2011 through 2020, according to the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) Greenhouse Gas Bulletin published Monday. Specifically, levels of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, surged to 149 percent of the pre-industrial level or the levels before 1750, when humans “started disrupting Earth’s natural equilibrium.”

The levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the main driver of climate change, have hit a new record high, the UN said Thursday, warning that the time to act was running out. Ahead of the COP 24 climate summit in Poland next month, top United Nations officials are again trying to raise the pressure on governments to meet the pledge of limiting warming to the less than two degrees Celsius, enshrined in the 2015 Paris accord. “Without rapid cuts in CO2 and other greenhouse gases, climate change will have increasingly destructive and irreversible impacts on life on Earth,” the...

A top U.N. scientist on Thursday shrugged off an online quip from U.S. President Donald Trump that questioned global warming, saying a U.S. government report will show the “fundamental impacts of climate change on the U.S. continent.” Officials at the World Meteorological Organization also said environmentally minded efforts by the state of California, in parts of the financial sector, among grassroots activists and others will have more of an impact to help the fight against climate change than “political disturbance” and “discourse” will impede it. The science, they said, will have the last word. Some of that science comes Friday...

The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has hit a new high, the UN said Monday, warning that drastic action is needed to achieve targets set by the Paris climate agreement. “Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surged at a record-breaking speed in 2016 to the highest level in 800,000 years,” the World Meteorological Organization said. “Globally averaged concentrations of CO2 reached 403.3 parts per million in 2016, up from 400.00 ppm in 2015 because of a combination of human activities and a strong El Niño event,” it said. The Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, the UN weather agency’s...

Geneva (AFP) - The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has passed an ominous milestone, ushering the planet into "a new era" of climate change, the UN said Monday. For the first time on record, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere averaged 400 parts per million (ppm) in 2015, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in its latest Greenhouse Gas Bulletin. CO2, the main greenhouse gas driving climate change, has previously passed the 400 ppm threshold on certain months in specific locations but never on a globally averaged basis, WMO said. The UN agency also reported that...

GENEVA (Reuters) - The earth is on track for its hottest year on record and warming at a faster rate than expected, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Thursday. Temperatures recorded mainly in the northern hemisphere in the first six months of the year, coupled with an early and fast Arctic sea ice melt and "new highs" in heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels, point to quickening climate change, it said. June marked the 14th straight month of record heat, the United Nations agency said. It called for speedy implementation of a global pact reached in Paris last December to limit...

ENEVA (Reuters) - The U.N.'s weather and climate agency said on Thursday there was no cause for alarm about a record-size hole this month in the ozone layer, that shields life on earth from the sun, as it should shrink again. The ozone hole that appears over Antarctica fluctuates in size, normally reaching its widest in the polar spring as extreme cold temperatures in the stratosphere and the return of sunlight unleash chlorine radicals that destroy ozone. Last year, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said it detected the first sign of ozone recovery, largely thanks to a 1987 ban on...

'Isis' has been removed from the official list of names of future hurricanes as it was now deemed inappropriate because of the eponymous militant group, the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Friday. As the name of an ancient goddess of Egypt, Isis had been on the WMO list of names for hurricanes in the eastern North Pacific in 2016, WMO spokeswoman Clare Nullis said. But ISIS is also used to describe the Islamic State militant group, whose forces have captured large swathes of Iraq and Syria and which stands accused by U.N. war crimes investigators of committing brutal...

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), headquartered in Geneva, is releasing videos that predict what weather reports will be like in 2050 These are based on what happens if climate change is allowed to continue Earth's average temperature could rise by more than 4°C (7.2°F) by the end of the 21st century, according to researchers This could lead to more extreme weather around the world such as storms, droughts and flooding The videos are being released ahead of the UN Climate Summit 2014 What will weather reports be like in 2050? Rather dramatic and unnerving if climate change gets out of...

OSLO (Reuters) - The baseline for "normal" weather used by everyone from farmers to governments to plan ahead needs to be updated more frequently to account for the big shifts caused by global warming, the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization said on Wednesday. The WMO's Commission for Climatology believes rising temperatures and more heatwaves and heavy rains mean the existing baseline, based on the climate averages of 1961-90, is out of date as a guide, the WMO said in a statement. "For water resources, agriculture and energy, the old averages no longer reflect the current realities," Omar Baddour, head of the...

Geneva (AFP) - Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have crossed a new threshold, the UN's weather agency said Monday, highlighting the urgency of curbing manmade, climate-altering greenhouse gases. In April, for the first time, the mean monthly CO2 concentration in the atmosphere topped 400 parts per million (ppm) throughout the northern hemisphere, which pollutes more than the south, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said. "This should serve as yet another wakeup call about the constantly rising levels of greenhouse gases which are driving climate change," WMO chief Michel Jarraud said in a statement. "If we are to preserve our planet for...

GENEVA (Reuters) - There has been no reverse in the trend of global warming and there is still consistent evidence for man-made climate change, the head of the U.N. World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Monday. A slow-down in the average pace of warming at the planet's surface this century has been cited by "climate skeptics" as evidence that climate change is not happening at the potentially catastrophic rate predicted by a U.N. panel of scientists. But U.N. weather agency chief Michel Jarraud said ocean temperatures, in particular, were rising fast, and extreme weather events, forecast by climate scientists, showed...

Geneva (AFP) - Last year tied for the sixth-hottest on record, confirming that Earth's climate system is in the grip of warming that will affect generations to come, the UN's weather agency said Wednesday. "This is confirmation of the trend of global warming of the planet," World Meteorological Organization (WMO) chief Michel Jarraud told AFP. Last year equalled 2007 as the sixth-warmest year since reliable records began in 1850, with a global land and ocean surface temperature that was 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1961-1990 average, the WMO said in a statement. Last year equalled 2007 as...

The Earth experienced unprecedented recorded climate extremes during the decade 2001-2010, according to the World Meteorological Organisation. Its new report says more national temperature records were reported broken than in previous decades. There was an increase in deaths from heatwaves over that decade. This was particularly pronounced during the extreme summers in Europe in 2003 and in the Russian Federation during 2010. But despite the decade being the second wettest since 1901 (with 2010 the wettest year recorded) fewer people died from floods than in the previous decade. Better warning systems and increased preparedness take much of the credit for...

GENEVA (AFP) – Climate scientists must urgently look into changes in atmospheric currents linked to devastating floods in Pakistan and wildfires in Russia, UN climate and weather bodies said on Wednesday. Ghassem Asrar, director of the World Climate Research Programme, told AFP that changes, known as blocking episodes, can prevent humidity or hot weather dispersing. That intensified heavy rain or heatwaves and locked them over an area, he explained, potentially with a growing impact on extreme weather events that scientists expect to happen more frequently with global warming. Asrar said that European researchers had modelled the blocking pattern in atmospheric...

PARIS (AFP) – Big volcanic eruptions have had a cooling effect on Earth's climate, but the Icelandic event is too small to provide any such respite from manmade global warming, scientists said on Friday. The benchmark cooling event of the past 20 years was in 1991, when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines. It cooled Earth's surface by 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) over the next year, enough to offset the impact of greenhouse gases from 1991 to 1993. A smaller cooling episode occurred in 1980, when Mount St. Helens in the US state of Washington blew its top,...

PARIS (AFP) – A cold front is sweeping across Europe after gripping swathes of North America last month, but the deep freeze does not mean the threat of global warming has abated, caution scientists. "The major trend is unmistakably one of warming," Michel Jarraud, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), told AFP. "If we look at the trajectory over the last 160 years, it overlays a large natural variability, and that's what causes confusion." The cooler weather that was a hallmark of 2008 can be explained partly by La Nina, a reversal of the phenomenon by which warm...

In previous parts of this series (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) I’ve shown how a political agenda took over climate science primarily through the UN and specifically the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The agenda was spread to the world at the 1992 Rio Conference. Periodic Reports from the IPCC maintained the focus on CO2 and increased the political pressure. Please understand I am not claiming a conspiracy, but rather a cabal, which is defined as a secret political clique pushing a political agenda; in...

Top 11 Warmest Years On Record Have All Been In Last 13 Years ScienceDaily (Dec. 13, 2007) — The decade of 1998-2007 is the warmest on record, according to data sources obtained by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The global mean surface temperature for 2007 is currently estimated at 0.41°C/0.74°F above the 1961-1990 annual average of 14.00°C/57.20°F. The University of East Anglia and the Met Office's Hadley Centre have released preliminary global temperature figures for 2007, which show the top 11 warmest years all occurring in the last 13 years. The provisional global figure for 2007 using data from January...

UNITED NATIONS - Chicago and Los Angeles will likely to face increasing heat waves. Severe storm surges could hit New York and Boston. And cities that rely on melting snow for water may run into serious shortages. These are some of the findings about North America in a report by hundreds of scientists that try to explain how global warming is changing life on Earth. The scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a summary of their findings on global warming last Friday and outlined details of the report focusing on various regions on Tuesday. According to the...