The European Parliament has just declared a climate emergency. A few days before the celebration of the World Climate Summit in Madrid (COP 25) and still digesting the bad news that the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) gave this week, warning that in 2018 records were broken in the concentration of greenhouse gases , comes this wake-up call to take urgent measures to help curb global warming .
Continuing with current policies, the Earth’s temperature is expected to rise by more than three degrees by 2100 . The devastating consequences of this include mass extinctions and large areas of the planet becoming uninhabitable .
To reach the set target of a global temperature increase of a maximum of 1.5 degrees, emissions would need to be reduced by 7.6% each year from 2020 . According to the IPCC special report that was published at the end of 2018, if the global temperature exceeds 1.5 degrees, the consequences will be catastrophic.
Europe is the first continent to pass a resolution recommending action now to avoid disaster. However, it is one thing to pass a resolution and quite another to act accordingly. The ball is now in the measures carried out by the political classes.
On November 25, the WMO warned that the concentration of greenhouse gases broke a new record in 2018. If the trend continues to rise for a long period of time, the effects will be increasingly serious, considering the increase in greenhouse gas emissions. temperatures, the existence of more extreme meteorological phenomena, water stress (occurs when the demand for water is greater than the quantity available or when its use is restricted due to its low quality), the rise in sea level and the alteration of marine and terrestrial ecosystems .
Greenhouse gases are those that are part of the atmosphere in a natural and anthropogenic way (emitted by human activity) and whose presence contributes to the greenhouse effect. A small amount of them is necessary, otherwise the temperature of the Earth would be around -18 ºC. However, human activity is triggering its emission, so the greenhouse effect has done nothing more than warm the planet.
When we speak of emission, we refer to the amount of gas emitted into the atmosphere. With concentration we will refer to the amount of gas that remains in the atmosphere after the different interactions that take place between the atmosphere, the biosphere, the cryosphere and the oceans.
The main greenhouse gases are CO2, methane and nitrous oxide, but there are more. CO2 can remain in the atmosphere for centuries and in the oceans even longer . Its average concentration reached, according to the WMO Bulletin on Greenhouse Gases , 407.8 parts per million (ppm) in 2018, a concentration comparable to that which occurred between 3 and 5 million years ago , when the The temperature was between 2 and 3 degrees higher and the sea level between 10 and 20 meters higher than today. Regarding the concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide, the Bulletin reflects that they have grown faster than in the last ten years.
“There is no indication that there will be a slowdown, much less a decrease, in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere despite all the commitments made under the Paris Agreement on climate change”, stated the Secretary General of WMO, Petteri Taalas. “We have to translate commitments into action and raise the level of ambition for the future well-being of humanity, ” he said.
