The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere jumped 3.05 parts per million in 2015, the largest annual growth rate increase ever recorded at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last week. “Carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster than they have in hundreds of thousands of years,” Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network, said in a release. “It’s explosive compared to natural processes.”
The release said 2015 was the fourth consecutive year in which CO2 concentration grew more than 2 parts per million, another first.
The increase is due, in part, to the current El Niño weather event, according to NOAA. “The largest previous increase occurred in 1998, also a strong El Niño year. Continued high emissions from fossil fuel consumption are driving the underlying growth rate over the past several years,” the release says.