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Multiple factors have contributed to the record rise. El Niño, the naturally occurring climate pattern that warms the eastern tropical Pacific, has been ongoing since last year. The change in ocean temperatures influences weather around the world, leading to drought in many parts of the tropics. The drought and heat that come with an El Niño event means that plants grow less, taking up less CO2 as a result. Increased wildfire activity also releases more CO2 into the atmosphere.
Burning fossil fuels is also a major driver. Emissions hit a peak last year, rising to 36.8 billion metric tons. That’s driven CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere higher, worsening a dizzying array of disasters, including heat waves, extreme rainfall, wildfires and floods, including amplifying some El Niño impacts.
“The emissions from the tropical forests are superimposed on these very large emissions from fossil fuel burning, which is bigger than ever,” says Keeling. “It’s not that El Niño events are unusual, it’s the fossil fuel burning is unusual in a historical sense. It’s an extreme. It’s never been higher.”
When the permafrost melts, we are absolutely fucked beyond repair.
El Niño doesn’t contribute to co2 rise. Why lead with this? It makes it sound like some of it at least isn’t humans fault, which is false.
Multiple factors, then mentions factors that don’t contribute…
I could imagine that el niño can contribute to CO² emmissions indirectly.
Maybe there are in an el niño year more wildfires happening compared to other years for example, which would release additional CO². Or maybe swamps get less water or a combination of several el niño weather effects.
This is true only in a climate already above pre industrial age co2 levels. Human activities are what caused it to now amplify the fires etc, which is the positive feedback we’re now trapped in (caused by us).
I’m not denying that humanity is responsible for all the climate mess we are in. I’m saying that I can imagine el niño having higher than average CO² releases due to the weather effect it brings looking at a single year, not the climate 30 years.
Of course we humans brought not only ourselves but the vast majority of life into an crisis that seems now to run off. I am very pessimistic about the future as I see still no meaningful reply to this.
Still I find it plausible that in an el niño year there could be more than average CO² emmissions while neutral or la niña years could have less, so they would cancel each other out. If that is so, it would merely be on top of human made emissions, which are still higher than ever.
However, we’re probably at a point now where one can’t say anything for sure, because no human being has ever experienced 427 ppm CO² and the whole system has an inertia. With this sentence I don’t want to say that scientists work not well. I want to say that it is much harder to come to a conclusion to values that have never been seen before compared to data that we can compare with historic data.
Of course that doesn’t mean that we can’t blame fossil fuel use, because humans emissions are the ones we control most and if we want to continue our lives than we need to stop emmitting.