11/04/2021

(AU) We Can’t Wait For This Government. Let’s Beat Emissions Together

Sydney Morning Herald - Ketan Joshi

Citizens, industry and communities need to pick up the slack from our politicians, who dropped the reins long ago. Here’s how.

Citizen activists: there has been a wave of climate change protests across the country. Credit: Paul Jeffers

Author
Ketan Joshi is an author and analyst based in Oslo, Norway.
His recent book Windfall: Unlocking a Fossil-Free Future (NewSouth Publishing) covers the past and next decades in Australian energy and climate.
There is a single emotion common to every climate discussion in Australia. It is not the sandbag of despair, or a sparkle of hope. It is the raw, unfiltered exasperation that comes from decades of inaction.

From the first climate negotiations in the late 1990s to the Paris climate agreement updates wrangled this year and last, Australia’s Liberal-National Coalition has mostly been in government.

It has mostly used that position to ensure fossil industries have the leeway to grow unhindered by responsibility for greenhouse gases discharged into our biosphere.

The people who dig up, transport, sell and burn fossil fuels are the proud beneficiaries of this subsidy-through-omission. An aggressive union of vested interests has created a haven for those who want to profit from an industry incompatible with human life.

“The resulting decades of inaction have eliminated our options for a gradual response,” Ian Dunlop and David Spratt, co-authors of Climate Reality Check 2020, wrote in The Canberra Times.

“The fact is that 10 per cent of the world’s population is responsible for half of the world’s carbon pollution, and Australia is firmly embedded in that 10 per cent. We have known about this inequity for three decades and done nothing to correct it.”

This is a deeply preventable catastrophe. Non-harmful alternatives to fossil fuels exist at a mature technological stage to eradicate the majority of Australia’s emissions, yet action has stalled. Inaction is common around the world, but Australia punches far above its weight in worsening the cause instead of enabling the solutions.

There is nothing stopping politically conservative parties from acting on climate. In Britain, the Conservative government has overseen a program of transformation, establishing clear, science-based five-year carbon budgets and attempting to shift the economy towards non-harmful alternatives to fossil fuels.

The country’s coal-fired power output has become a blip in annual totals. Germany’s conservative-led government, too, scraped in under its 2020 climate targets (albeit with help from the pandemic). Both are far from perfect or sufficient, but their shifts are injecting momentum into Europe’s broader, accelerating decarbonisation journey.

In terms of policy substance, Australia’s conservative leadership has only moved backwards since the days of Tony Abbott.

The marketing may have changed but the only systemic, long-running downward force on Australia’s emissions right now is the renewable energy industry, catalysed by the Renewable Energy Target of the ALP.

That target froze in 2020 (it would have been higher, had conservatives not fought aggressively to cut it in 2015), which means rising transport, gas mining and industrial emissions will all result in climbing totals.


Scott Morrison has expressed a “preference” to reach net zero by 2050. Yet we know exactly what someone with a preference to hit that goal would be doing in 2021.

They would be planning the closure of all coal power stations by 2030. They would be urgently commencing the transition from fossil-fuel cars to clean cars. They would be aggressively implementing energy efficiency schemes.

They would be figuring out ways to simultaneously wind down and decarbonise fossil fuel extraction, itself responsible for a sizeable chunk of Australia’s emissions (while protecting communities and workers reliant on the industry).

Hitting a 2050 target means doing the bulk of the heavy lifting prior to 2030, with a two-decade tail for the “hard to decarbonise” sectors. But power, transport, households and mining remain mostly untouched by the government’s policies.

 
Morrison and his Energy and Emissions Reductions Minister, Angus Taylor, are not doing these things.

Their flagship climate policy is a lengthy, wonky technological document aimed at incentivising fossil gas, carbon capture, hydrogen and energy storage. It is one-hundredth of a complete policy.

What are the chances of an about-face before the 26th Conference of Parties meeting in Glasgow this November? Morrison may announce a 2050 net zero target, but it won’t result in any real change to what happens in 2021 or 2022.

The exasperation that inaction brings is often followed by a question: is there anything that can be done? The democratic process of lobbying for change in federal policy can’t ever cease but the past three decades suggest that, in parallel, a bottom-up drumbeat of change must be maximised.

This means realising a near-term future in which citizens, industry and communities pick up the slack and end up in the history books as the visionaries and leaders who took the reins from those who dropped them long ago.

Give the people what they want

The deepest well of currently unrealised decarbonisation potential in Australia is citizen participation. This isn’t just changing your light bulbs and walking to the shops. This is climate action on a notable scale, enacted through people, communities and organisations.

A simple example has been the growth of rooftop solar photovoltaic panels in Australia. Australia is easily a world leader in rooftop PV deployment, both in per capita terms and as a proportion of total electricity generation.

In 2020, solar out-generated wind power for the first time ever, generating 19.7 terawatt-hours on Australia’s National Electricity Market (9.7 per cent of total). Thirteen terawatt-hours of that was rooftop solar. That’s 40 per cent of the total energy output of Australia’s brown coal fleet in 2020.

Consider what happened here. Several million people collectively decided to transform their homes into a distributed modular power station fuelled directly by the organic fusion reactor at the centre of our solar system.

And though this change was seeded through federal (during Labor’s brief tenure) and state government schemes, Australia’s solar prowess has proven resilient both to the fading of those subsidies and even the onset of a global pandemic.

Plenty more change will be needed if Australia is to hit decarbonisation goals aligned with the Paris climate agreement. One recent estimate by Climate Analytics suggests the grid needs to be near zero carbon by 2030.

Australia went from around 10 per cent renewable to 26 per cent over the past 20 years. It needs to go from 26 per cent to 97 per cent in the next nine. That means more than just wind and solar.

“In order to reach a highly renewable grid, we need greater investment in enabling technologies, in particular energy storage, demand response and transmission,” says Marija Petkovic, founder and managing director of consultancy Energy Synapse.


Much of this infrastructure will be large-scale. “Investing in transmission and in particular, strengthening the interconnection between different states will be vital in reaching a highly renewable grid,” says Petkovic.

“Large infrastructure projects like this tend to move quite slowly. We anticipate that many of these projects will need to be fast-tracked to keep pace with coal closures and the transition to clean energy.”

The massive infrastructure changes required could be boosted significantly by expanding the power of citizen participation. Helen Haines, the independent MP for Indi, has highlighted this in her community energy plan for regional Australia – in which “everyday people develop, build or benefit from an energy project like a solar installation, a wind farm or a large battery”.

In welcome news, the much-maligned but inarguably helpful Office of the National Wind Farm Commissioner is being expanded to batteries and new transmission lines, which should ease development issues for both.

Under stress: Great Barrier Reef corals face multiple threats, especially from climate change. Credit: Dean Miller, GBR Legacy

Australia already has successful community involvement in large-scale renewable projects like the Sapphire Wind Farm and the Solarshare project.

But community batteries are a growing option too. Somewhere between household storage and Tesla’s shiny “big batteries”, community-scale systems can serve to link people directly with the energy transition without the requirement of personal wealth or home ownership.

The impact of community participation and ownership in energy cannot be underestimated. Denmark, a world leader in use of wind power in its grid, mandated community ownership. Germany, second only to the offshore wind-blessed Britain among the top 40 consuming countries, also leans heavily into community-owned wind.

Converting energy systems to zero-carbon options brings benefits far beyond emissions reductions. Cleaner air, cheaper energy and newer technology are all benefits that can flow to those near Australia’s new power generation systems, and well beyond those with rooftop space to spare.

Power beyond the grid

While Australia’s electricity grid is the most pressing first step on climate action, many other sectors must also be decarbonised. Transport, homes, industry, agriculture and – perhaps most significantly – Australia’s export of fossil fuels to other countries.

While public pressure, personal choice and corporate decision-making can accelerate change on domestic emissions, it is fossil fuel exports that remains the most challenging area. When the fossil fuel products extracted in Australia and sold overseas are burned, the consequent emissions far outweigh those from fuels burned within Australia.

It is odd how controversial it is to talk about emissions caused by the fossil products sold by Australia, but none of the protestations change the raw physicality of the harm to human life.

If there is little appetite to tackle domestic emissions within Australia’s government, there is outright hostility from both major parties to reducing fossil fuel exports. It is another component of Australia’s emissions that must be dealt with by citizens.

In March this year, a group of teenagers sued the Australian government for approving the expansion of a coal mine, on the grounds that it provides a product that damages the future health of young Australians. The emissions associated with the coal extracted from that expanded mine will easily wipe out the emissions avoided by all of Australia’s renewable energy over the past decade.

Young Australians have been badly marginalised in the debate, not just from federal policy but within many mainstream venues for national discourse on climate and energy.

“When it comes to climate justice, stopping the mine is part of that. We here in Australia may not be feeling the effects of climate change as much as those in Third World countries are, and they will continue to be the most affected,” says Bella Burgemeister, one of the eight young activists engaging in that legal action.

“When considering this coal mine we have to consider those around the world who will feel the effects first and worst.”

Young WA activist Bella Burgemeister is passionate about climate change.

Bella hits on the heart of the problem, when talking about what a better future might look like: a future “where children don’t have to march on the street or take our government to court, where our leaders just act like leaders and we can just act like kids”.

To pick up the slack of stagnant leaders is exhausting, and is robbing young activists of both the future and the present. What the actions of these young Australians signify is a move beyond the numbers and accounting of global climate agreements, and a more literal, physical approach to the problem.

Every time fossil fuels are left in the ground, it can be banked as a climate win grounded in physical reality. But every coal mine expansion worsens the climate problem, no matter which spreadsheets account for that harm.

What you can do to promote clean energy
  • If you can, install solar, electrify your home (either when building a new one or retrofitting your existing one) and make your home more energy efficient (COVID-19 has shown that reduced demand turns the screws on fossil fuels in the grid like nothing else). 

  • Investigate whether community energy is an option where you live, or consider donating to community energy groups and supporting them on social media. 

  • Make a point of congratulating companies purchasing clean energy and let those dragging their heels know how you feel. The same goes for state and local governments.

  • Lend your voice to campaigns against projects that extract or burn fossil fuels (or that enable either of those things).

Community participation in clean infrastructure and aggressive activism on key climate issues are emerging as the lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to filling the void of federal climate action.

What will happen to our cities (and beaches) at 3 degrees of warming?
Once the government becomes truly isolated – domestically and internationally – they may have to begrudgingly accept the need to change, perhaps on the proviso that they get to revise history and pretend they were always on board. 

There remains the minuscule possibility of the government choosing to begin the big steps of decarbonisation today.

It would be miraculous, but the foundation of new energy on climate action is far more likely to be found in the hearts and minds of those with the most to lose, and the most to gain.

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(AU) ‘Uniquely Unsuited’: Government Accused Of Stacking Climate Body With Fossil Interests

Sydney Morning Herald - Nick O'Malley

Climate groups have criticised the appointment of former Origin Energy chief executive Grant King to lead the Climate Change Authority, the independent body that advises the government on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In making the appointment, Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor described Mr King as a “thought leader” with 40 years of experience in energy, finance, infrastructure and sustainability who had already contributed to the government’s emissions reductions policy.

The newly appointed chairman of the Climate Change Authority, Grant King. Credit: Philip Gostelow
Also appointed to the board were Susie Smith, chief executive of the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network, and banker John McGee. Mr Taylor said due to his industry and policy advisory experience Mr King was “perfectly suited” to the role.

Innes Willox, chief executive of industry organisation Ai Group, said the new appointees had deep experience in climate and energy policy, and a revitalised Climate Change Authority might provide an alternative to the body proposed in Ms Steggall’s climate bill.

“But neither will work unless the government listens, trusts and responds to the advice offered,” he said.
Barrier Reef doomed as up to 99% of coral at risk, report finds
Independent MP Zali Steggall, whose climate change bill is before a parliamentary inquiry, said the appointment was evidence that the government “continues to only listen to vested interests in fossil fuels.”

Dan Goucher of the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility said it was another example of the government “stacking” climate bodies with figures from fossil fuel industries.

“King is almost uniquely unsuited to any role at the CCA, much less its chairmanship,” he said.

“Under his leadership, Origin forcefully opposed credible climate policy. During his tenure on their boards, the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA) campaigned to repeal the carbon tax, the only effective policy Australia has ever had to reduce emissions.”

The prominent marine biologist Professor Terry Hughes, known for his expertise on the Great Barrier Reef, said via Twitter that, “after trying but failing to abolish the authority when Tony Abbott was prime minister, the government had effectively achieved its goal by appointing representatives of the leading opponents of effective climate action.”

The Australia Institute’s Richie Merzian described the appointment as “grossly inappropriate”.

“As chief executive of Origin Energy Mr King was responsible for initiating Asia Pacific LNG, the largest Queensland coal seam gas LNG project which has resulted in well over 200 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions already, which will rise to well over one billion tonnes over the life of the project,” he said.

Mr King was the author of the so-called King Review, exploring sources of low-cost carbon emissions abatement.

John Connor, chief executive of The Carbon Market Institute, was less critical of the decision.

“These appointments mark the further resuscitation of an important independent institution, with the considerable carbon market and industry experience of Grant King and Susie Smith in particular,” he said.

“However, now the CCA is out of the emergency ward it needs to do the work needed of it in 2021, and join international best practice, which includes analysing and recommending policies for five-yearly carbon budgets in a transition plan towards net-zero emissions before 2050.”

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(AU) A New Report Suggests Sea Creatures Are Fleeing The Equator!

The Guardian - First Dog On The Moon

Climate change is out of control! We’ll all be belly up soon

Cartoon by First Dog on the Moon
LARGE IMAGE

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10/04/2021

(USA) Intelligence Forecast Sees A Post-Coronavirus World Upended By Climate Change And Splintering Societies

Washington Post - Shane Harris

Student activists carry posters and shout slogans as they march against climate change in New Delhi on March 19. (Altaf Qadri/AP)

U.S. intelligence officials have little comfort to offer a pandemic-weary planet about where the world is heading in the next 20 years.

Short answer: It looks pretty bleak.

On Thursday, the National Intelligence Council, a center in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that creates strategic forecasts and estimates, often based on material gathered by U.S. spy agencies, released its quadrennial “Global Trends” report.

Looking over the time horizon, it finds a world unsettled by the coronavirus pandemic, the ravages of climate change — which will propel mass migration — and a widening gap between what people demand from their leaders and what they can actually deliver.

The intelligence community has long warned policymakers and the public that pandemic disease could profoundly reshape global politics and U.S. national security.

The authors of the report, which does not represent official U.S. policy, describe the pandemic as a preview of crises to come.

It has been a globally destabilizing event — the council called it “the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II — that “has reminded the world of its fragility” and “shaken long-held assumptions” about how well governments and institutions could respond to a catastrophe.

At the same time, the pandemic accelerated and exacerbated social and economic fissures that had already emerged. And it underscored the risks from “more and cascading global challenges, ranging from disease to climate change to the disruptions from new technologies and financial crises,” the authors write.

In language that will resonate with just about anyone who has tread water in the past year, the authors write of a “looming disequilibrium between existing and future challenges and the ability of institutions and systems to respond.”

Within societies, fragmentation is increasing — political, cultural, economic — and “large segments of the global population are becoming wary of institutions and governments that they see as unwilling or unable to address their needs,” the report says.

The effects of the pandemic will linger, and could shape future generations’ expectations of their governments, particularly as a warming world leads to new human conflicts, including, in the most dire scenario, global food shortages that spawn mass violence.

Global power was contested long before the pandemic, and those trends haven’t abated.

The report sees the international stage as largely being shaped by a rivalry between China and the United States, along with its allies. No single state is poised to become the dominant global force, the authors write. And competing powers will jockey for position, leading to “a more conflict-prone and volatile geopolitical environment.”

Technology, with all its potential to boost economies and enhance communication, also may aggravate political tension — as it already has.

People “are likely to gravitate to information silos of people who share similar views, reinforcing beliefs and understanding of the truth,” the report concludes.

Prediction is an inherently risky business, and intelligence practitioners are quick to emphasize that they can’t see the future. But the National Intelligence Council imagines five scenarios on a kind of sliding scale that may help tell us where the world is turning as we approach 2040.

On the rosiest end, a “Renaissance of democracies” ushers in a new era of U.S. global leadership, in which economic growth and technological achievements offer solutions to the world’s biggest problems and Russia and China are largely left in the dust, authoritarian vestiges whose brightest scientists and entrepreneurs have fled to the United States and Europe.

At the dark end of the future is “tragedy and mobilization,” when the United States is no longer the dominant player, and a global environmental catastrophe prompts food shortages and a “bottom-up” revolution, with younger people, scarred by their leaders’ failures during the coronavirus pandemic, embracing policies to repair the climate and tackle long-standing social inequality.

In this scenario, a European Union dominated by green parties works with the United Nations to expand international aid and focus on sustainability, and China joins the effort in part to quell domestic unrest in its cities affected by famine.

In between those extremes, the report imagines three other possibilities: China becomes a leading state but not globally dominant; the United States and China prosper and compete as the two major powers; and globalization fails to create a single source of influence, and the world more or less devolves into competing blocs, preoccupied with threats to their prosperity and security.

The present has a lot of say over the future. And there, the authors find reason for alarm.

“The international system — including the organizations, alliances, rules, and norms — is poorly set up to address the compounding global challenges facing populations,” the authors write.

But the pandemic may offer lessons on how not to repeat recent history. The authors note that although European countries restricted travel and exports of medical supplies early in the crisis, the European Union has now rallied around an economic rescue package. That “could bolster the European integration projecting going forward.”

“Covid-19 could also lead to redirection of national budgets toward pandemic response and economic recovery,” they add, “diverting funds from defense expenditures, foreign aid, and infrastructure programs in some countries, at least in the near term.”

But overall, the pandemic leaves the authors with more questions than answers — and humbled.

“As researchers and analysts, we must be ever vigilant, asking better questions, frequently challenging our assumptions, checking our biases, and looking for weak signals of change,” they write.

Their work is not all doomsaying. The forces shaping the world “are not fixed in perpetuity,” the authors say. Countries that exploit technology and planning, particularly those that plan ahead for the seemingly inevitable consequences of climate change, will be poised to best manage the crisis.

And countries that harness artificial intelligence could boost productivity and expand their economies in ways that let government deliver more services, reduce debt and help cover the costs of caring for aging populations.

Ultimately, the societies that succeed will be those that can adapt to change, but also forge social consensus around what should be done, the authors write. In a splintering world, that may be the hardest scenario to imagine.

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Third Of Antarctic Ice Shelves ‘Will Collapse Amid 4C Global Heating’

The Guardian - PA Media

‘Unimaginable amounts’ of water will flow into oceans if that temperature rise occurs and ice buffers vanish, warn UK scientists

A rift in the Larsen C ice shelf, Antarctica, revealed by British Antarctic Survey observations from February 2017. Photograph: British Antarctic Survey/AFP/Getty
More than a third of the vast floating platforms of ice surrounding Antarctica could be at risk of collapsing and releasing “unimaginable amounts” of water into the sea if global temperatures reach 4C above pre-industrial levels, UK scientists say.

Researchers from the University of Reading said that limiting the temperature rise to 2C could halve the area at risk and avoid a drastic rise in sea levels.

The findings, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, suggest that 4C warming could leave 34% of the area of all the Antarctic ice shelves – amounting to about half a million square kilometres – at the risk of collapse.

Ice shelves are permanent floating sheets of ice that connect to a landmass; most surround the coasts of Antarctica.

Ella Gilbert, a research scientist in the University of Reading’s meteorology department, said: “Ice shelves are important buffers, preventing glaciers on land from flowing freely into the ocean and contributing to sea level rise.

"When they collapse it’s like a giant cork being removed from a bottle, allowing unimaginable amounts of water from glaciers to pour into the sea.

“We know that, when melted ice accumulates on the surface of ice shelves, it can make them fracture and collapse spectacularly.

“Previous research has given us the bigger picture in terms of predicting Antarctic ice shelf decline. But our new study uses the latest modelling techniques to fill in the finer detail and provide more precise projections.”

Gilbert said the team’s work highlighted the importance of limiting the global temperature increases as set out in the Paris climate agreement, which promotes a global framework to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to less than 2C above pre-industrial levels.

As part of their modelling study, the researchers also identified Larsen C, the largest remaining ice shelf on the peninsula, as being particularly at risk in a warmer climate.

They said other ice shelves facing this threat included Shackleton, Pine Island, and Wilkins.

Gilbert said: “If temperatures continue to rise at current rates we may lose more Antarctic ice shelves in the coming decades. Limiting warming will not just be good for Antarctica – preserving ice shelves means less global sea level rise, and that’s good for us all.”

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(AU) Climate Change ‘A National Security Threat’: Report

The Australian - 

Robert Glasser has called for the federal government to urgently recognise the security risks of climate-induced famines, rising seas and mass migrations affecting hundreds of millions of people. Picture: AAP
Key Points

Federal, State and Local governments should begin preparing now for the unprecedented scale of climate change emerging challenges by:
  1. Scaling-up Australia’s efforts through greater investment in disaster risk reduction to prevent the effects from natural hazards, such as extreme weather.
  2. Increasing planning to financially assist communities and the economic recovery of States following disasters.
  3. Strengthening disaster response capacity and planning at all levels, including in the military which will play an increasingly important role in transporting firefighters and equipment, fodder drops from helicopters, the provision of shelters, etc.
  4. Establishing joint task forces to coordinate the Defence contribution, like the one established during the Black Saturday Victorian bushfires.
  5. Ensuring that flood and bushfire risk maps, building codes, planning schemes, infrastructure delivery and supporting legislation embrace climate change.
Rapidly escalating climate change impacts in Australia’s immediate region pose an unprecedented ­national security threat that has been “largely ignored” by strategic planners, a new report warns.

The former head of the UN ­Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, Robert Glasser, has called for the federal government to urgently recognise the security risks of climate-induced famines, rising seas and mass migrations affecting hundreds of millions of people.

He said sea levels in Southeast Asia were rising four times faster than the global average, while in Indonesia alone 165 million ­people lived in at-risk coastal areas.

Water shortages, heat waves, collapsing fisheries and devastating storms were imminent risks, Dr Glasser said in a report for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

“Any one of the increasing risks would be serious cause for concern for Australian policymakers, but the combination of them, emerging nearly simultaneously, suggests we’re on the cusp of an unprecedented and rapidly advancing regional crisis.

“Australia urgently needs to begin thinking about political, economic and security tipping points generated by climate change.”

The head of ASPI’s new Preparing for the Era of Disasters called for the government to prioritise investments in defence, foreign affairs, home affairs and intelligence agencies to assess climate risks and feed those assessments into strategic decision-making.

Defence’s posture, training and capabilities would also have to change to respond to more frequent, higher-impact regional natural disasters, while the aid program “will need to scale up its efforts to strengthen regional ­resilience”, Dr Glasser said.

He warned that the regional impacts could “overstretch our operational capacities to act” by requiring the ADF to simultaneously provide disaster relief and respond to a national security crisis.

Scott Morrison acknowledged climate change as a security risk for the first time following the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires, saying responding to natural disasters would have implications for the ADF’s structure, capability, command and training.

Yet the word “climate” appeared just once in the 2020 Defence Strategic Update, which said the region would face more pandemics and growing food and water scarcity.

“These threats will be compounded by population growth, urbanisation and extreme weather events in which climate change plays a part,” the key Defence planning document said.

Dr Glasser said accelerating climate change impacts meant “we can’t wait for the severity of the situation on our northern doorstep to become obvious before we act”.

He cited more frequent and intense fluctuations between El Nino and La Nina events as a key threat that would lead to more extreme droughts and floods, and food insecurity.

“Crop yields will be reduced by rising temperatures, changes in rainfall, the expansion of the reach of crop pests and shifts in predators that keep crop pests in check.

“The number and duration of heatwaves are increasing, disproportionately affecting maritime Southeast Asia, where hundreds of millions of people are already exposed to extreme heat, including in the agriculture sector.”

Dr Glasser said there was some cause for optimism, with Quadrilateral Security Dialogue countries — Australia, the US, India and Japan — establishing a climate working group to co-ordinate actions and policies.

US President Joe Biden’s new whole-of-government approach to dealing with climate change had also put the issue at the centre of nat­ional security planning, he said.

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09/04/2021

(UK) Carbon Dioxide Levels In Atmosphere Reach Record High

The Guardian - PA Media

Concentrations are 50% above pre-industrial levels despite dip in emissions during Covid pandemic

Smoke rises from a factory as a truck loaded with cars crosses a bridge in Paris. Photograph: Michel Euler/AP

Concentrations of climate-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have hit record highs, despite a dip in emissions during the Covid pandemic, scientists have said.

The latest measurements from the long-running recording station at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii, show global levels of carbon dioxide are 50% above what they were when the Industrial Revolution began in Britain.

The data released by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, shows atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas in March averaged 417.14 parts per million (ppm), a new record high.

The UK’s Met Office predicts monthly concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main driver of rising temperatures and the climate crisis, will peak in 2021 at about 419.5 ppm.

The previous record for monthly carbon dioxide concentrations at Mauna Loa in the Scripps dataset was 417.10ppm in May 2020.

Last year’s annual average figure was 413.94ppm – with 2021’s level forecast to be about 416.3ppm.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere fluctuate slightly during the year, dropping as some is absorbed during the spring and summer by plants growing in the northern hemisphere, before it rises again in autumn and winter.

But the long-term trend in rising concentrations of carbon dioxide is caused by human activity, mainly through the burning of fossil fuels and also from deforestation, the Met Office said.

Global emissions reduced temporarily in 2020 as a result of a drop in transport use and economic activity as the coronavirus pandemic struck.

But the emissions reduction in 2020 was not enough to substantially affect the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which continues to rise.

Much larger, longer-term reductions in emissions will be required to slow or stop the rise, the Met Office warned.

Projections from the UN’s climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that to halt global warming at 1.5C – beyond which the worst impacts of rising temperatures are expected – global emissions will need to reach net zero by around 2050, or sooner.

Reaching net zero involves cutting emissions to as near to zero as possible and taking steps such as planting trees to absorb any remaining pollution.

Commenting on the latest data, Prof Martin Siegert, of the Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, said the new record high was completely expected.

“Emissions may have been reduced but we are still emitting lots of carbon dioxide, and so its atmospheric concentration is bound to go up – and will continue to do so until we get to somewhere near net-zero emissions.

“Our path to net zero is obvious, challenging and necessary – and we must get on with the transition urgently,” he said.

Prof Simon Lewis, from University College London, said: “It is easy to forget just how much and just how fast fossil fuel emissions are affecting our planet.

“It took over 200 years to increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 25%, and just 30 years to reach 50% above pre-industrial levels. This dramatic change is like a human meteorite hitting Earth.”

But he added: “If countries make plans now to put society on a path of sustained and dramatic cuts to emissions from today, we can avoid ever-rising emissions and the dangerously accelerating impacts of climate change.”

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Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative