In a year when climate made headlines following the IPCC report warning of a ‘code red for humanity’ and all eyes turning towards Glasgow for the COP26 climate summit, 2021 has now entered the record books as the fifth hottest year ever recorded.
Picture: Getaway Gallery
This perhaps serves as an indictment for COP26, where environmentalists and the wider public all waiting to hear how the international community plans to tackle climate change, only to be disappointed by the reluctance of governments to move away from fossil fuels.
According to a report by Time Magazine, a substantial rise in methane levels helped push global temperatures to the highest ever recorded.
A report released by the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service on 10 January 2023 revealed that last year was the warmest in the 52-year European record.
After the United Nations report released in August said with ‘unequivocal’ confidence that human-induced pollution is the cause for global warming, yet COP26 denigrated to a political squabble that was incapable of agreeing on an action plan to keep the global average rise in temperatures below 1.5°C.
Along with China and India being slagged in the media for the reluctance to move away from coal, the United States held the largest-ever auction of oil and gas drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico’s history, which will potentially release 600 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
This is the largest oil and gas sale in US history, which comes against the backdrop where the country had one of its worst heatwaves ever recorded, the planet has just recorded its hottest year in history, and there is unequivocal evidence that fossil fuels are cause for global warming.
The U.S remains the world’s biggest CO2 polluter and shows no sign of abating despite the White House ambition to halve 2005 emissions by the end of the decade. According to Time Magazine, last year’s emissions suggests the U.S. is moving in the opposite direction, with greenhouse gas emissions rising by 6.2%—a faster rate than gross domestic product growth of 3.8%.
According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, methane is a lesser-known culprit, where 2021 saw 1 876 parts per billion, where methane remains problematic because the greenhouse gas has 80 times more initial warming than CO2.
Fortunately, that’s why more than 100 countries signed on to a methane-cutting pledge at the recent UN climate talks in Glasgow.
Even though 2021 was the hottest on record, a more worrying observation is that every decade since the 1960s has become increasingly warmer.
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