UK Met Office Expects Record YOY Increases In Atmospheric CO2 In 2019
The amount of climate-damaging carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is likely to reach another record in 2019, driven by an increase in fossil fuel use and a decline in the area of the planet covered by forests, the British Met Office said. The U.K.’s official weather forecaster said the gain this year is likely to be one of the largest since it began measuring emissions 62 years ago.
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The prediction is the latest evidence that a lull in the upward path of emissions has finished and that concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are now at levels comparable to those before the last ice age, when ocean levels were significantly higher.
The findings will focus more attention on deforestation, especially in Brazil, where scientists were hoping that protecting the Amazon rain-forest would help absorb more of the most damaging emissions.
“Each year’s CO2 is higher than the last, and this will keep happening until humans stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere,” said Richard Betts, a professor at the Met Office Hadley Centre. "This has been a particularly bad year for carbon emissions from tropical forests. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon increased to around 8,000 square kilometers in 2018, which is equivalent to losing a football pitch of forest every 30 seconds,” said Jos Barlow, Professor of Conservation Science at Lancaster University.
EDIT
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-25/global-carbon-emissions-is-seen-reaching-another-record-in-2019