A spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide due to the El Niño climate phenomenon will likely cause levels of the greenhouse gas to surpass a significant threshold this year, averaging more than 400 parts per million for the entire year for the first time ever, a new study has revealed.
Researchers from the UK Met Office, who published their findings online Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, reported that, based on emissions data, sea surface temperature data, and climate models, the recent El Niño event resulted in a spike in CO2 concentrations this year.
As a result, carbon dioxide concentrations as measured at the a monitoring station at the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, is likely to remain above 400 ppm for all of 2016, and for the foreseeable future as well, according to reports published this week by BBC News and The Guardian.
The last time that CO2 levels were regularly above 400 ppm was between three and five million years ago, before the first modern humans stepped foot on the Earth, the study authors noted. In an average year, carbon dioxide concentrations increase by an average of 2 ppm, but this year, a record-setting increase of 3.15ppm (+/-0.53ppm) is anticipated by the Met Office.
Credit: OCO-2 /JPL-Caltech/NASA
So this would be a good time to panic, right?
However, as Richard Betts at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre in Exeter told BBC News, there is no reason to be overly concerned by the findings. “There’s nothing magical about this number,” he explained to the UK news outlet. “We don’t expect anything suddenly to happen. It’s just an interesting milestone that reminds us of our ongoing influence on the climate system.”
Using a seasonal climate model to predict sea-surface temperatures in the Eastern Pacific, which is the region typically most effected by El Niño, Betts and his fellow researchers determined that the monthly CO2 levels for 2016 would be 404.45 ppm, with a May high of 407.7 ppm and a low of 401.48 in September. The impact of El Niño has increased by 25 percent since 1997-98, when the phenomenon last hit, due to a corresponding increase in manmade emissions.
Betts also warned that we should not expect to see sub-400 ppm levels again anytime soon. As he explained to The Guardian, “Once you have passed that barrier, it takes a long time for CO2 to be removed from the atmosphere by natural processes. Even if we cut emissions, we wouldn’t see concentrations coming down for a long time.”
“We have said goodbye to measurements below 400 ppm at Mauna Loa,” he added. “We could be passing above 450 ppm in roughly 20 years. If we start to reduce our global emissions now, we could delay that moment but it is still looking like a challenge to stay below 450 ppm. If we carry on as we are going, we could pass 450 ppm even sooner than 20 years, according to the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] scenarios.”
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