This is apparent from the annual report of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the European service that collects data on the state of the atmosphere, the planet and the climate. The annual increase in atmospheric methane in 2020 and 2021 was substantially higher than in the previous two decades. Satellite measurements show that the atmosphere has never been as high in methane as it was in 2021, at 1,876 parts per billion.
The researchers at C3S aren’t sure what causes this acceleration. Methane is released from swamps, oil and gas extraction and agriculture. Also, the permanently frozen soil of northern areas holds a lot of methane. Due to global warming, that permafrost slowly begins to thaw, releasing the methane in it. Scientists have warned that this could eventually lead to a tipping point that will accelerate global warming.
Methane retains at least a hundred times more heat than CO2, but is much rarer and breaks down in the atmosphere after about ten years. It is considered the most important greenhouse gas after CO2.
At the climate summit in Glasgow last year, more than 100 countries agreed to reduce methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030 compared to 2020. However, the agreement is not legally binding, and major emitters such as China, Russia and India did not sign.
Also the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere rose further in 2021, to about 414 parts per million. “Carbon dioxide and methane concentrations continue to rise every year, with no signs of slowing down. These greenhouse gases are the main drivers of climate change,” said Vincent-Henri Peuch, director of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. In 2021 there was almost one and a half times as much CO2 and more than two and a half times as much methane in the atmosphere as before the Industrial Revolution.
Hitterecord
The C3S annual report also discusses the weather of the past year. The past seven years were by far the warmest seven years on record worldwide, 2021 comes in fifth place. The temperature in 2021 was on average more than 1.1 degrees higher than pre-industrial level. The goal of the Paris climate agreement is to limit this increase to 1.5 degrees.
In Europe, the summer of 2021 was the hottest ever recorded, and in Sicily the old European heat record of 48 degrees was smashed at 48.8 degrees Celsius. As the rest of the year was relatively cool, 2021 was outside the ten warmest years ever recorded in Europe.
Weather extremes
C3S also points to the high number of weather extremes around the world, such as the floods that hit large parts of Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands in July. Other examples of such extremes mentioned in the report are the June North American heat wave, when several local heat records were broken by several degrees, and the Mediterranean heat wave in July and August. In both cases, the heat waves led to severe forest fires. More CO . came in North America2 free from forest fires than ever since the start of the measurements in 2003.
2021 was another year of extreme temperatures with the hottest summer in Europe and heat waves in the Mediterranean, not to mention the unprecedented high temperatures in North America, concludes C3S director Carlo Buontempo. “These events are a bad sign of the need to change the way we do things, to take decisive and effective steps towards a sustainable society, and to reduce our carbon emissions.”
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