Humans and El NinoTeam Up to Create a Record Jump in CO2 Pollution

Climate Change, Anthropocene, & Associated Issues

Date posted: 04/14/16

David Biello reports that 2016 is a year to remember, it is the infamous year that has already recorded the largest annual change on record in the makeup of the air you breathe. Fueled by pyromania and the El Nino global weather phenomenon, carbon dioxide concentrations reached 409.44 parts per million on April 9 at an air-sampling station atop Hawaii Mauna Loa, a rise of more than 5 ppm since the same date last year. And it could get worse. Where you assign the peak will depend on whether the focus is on daily, weekly or monthly averages. The monthly peak is certainly still ahead of us, says Ralph Keeling, a geochemist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California who measures atmospheric CO2 every day at Mauna Loa and other stations, carrying on the work his father started in 1958. The recent daily values were extraordinarily high, however, so perhaps they will not be overtaken. There is hope, however, as CO2 from burning fossil fuels and other human activities appears to have leveled off in 2015 at roughly 40 billion metric tons of CO2 liberated into the atmosphere. But in recent years massive brush fires deliberately set to clear land in Indonesia and a general increase in forest fires around the world likely helped spur the historic jump in levels from 2015 to 2016. El Nino, a warming of tropical Pacific Ocean waters that changes weather patterns across the globe, causes forests to dry out as rainfall patterns shift, and the occasional unusually strong super El Nino, like the current one, have a bigger effect on CO2 levels in the atmosphere. The previous super El Nino, in 1998, saw the earlier record CO2 jump of nearly four ppm. During an El Nino, there are anomalous patterns of temperature, precipitation and drought over many regions of the Earth. We have observed that the CO2 rate of increase gets an extra boost during an El Nino, Tans explains. We also know that most of the extra boost is provided by terrestrial ecosystems.