Heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere jumped by the highest amount on record last year, soaring to a level not seen in human civilisation and “turbocharging” the Earth’s climate and causing more extreme weather, the United Nations weather agency said Wednesday.

The World Meteorological Organization said in its latest bulletin on greenhouse gases, an annual study released ahead of the UN’s annual climate conference, that carbon dioxide growth rates have now tripled since the 1960s, and reached levels that existed more than 800,000 years ago.

Emissions from burning coal, oil and gas, alongside more wildfires, have helped fan a “vicious climate cycle”, and people and industries continue to spew heat-trapping gases while the planet’s oceans and forests lose their ability to absorb them, the WMO report said.

The Geneva-based agency said the increase in the global average concentration of carbon dioxide from 2023 to 2024 amounted to the highest annual level of any one-year span since measurements began in 1957. Growth rates of carbon dioxide have accelerated from an annual average increase of 2.4 parts per million per year in the decade from 2011 to 2020, to 3.5 ppm from 2023 to 2024, it said.

“The heat trapped by CO₂ and other greenhouse gases is turbocharging our climate and leading to more extreme weather,” said WMO Deputy Secretary General Ko Barrett in a statement. “Reducing emissions is therefore essential not just for our climate but also for our economic security and community well-being.”

What is disturbing is not just the increase in greenhouse gases, but that it may be signalling a problem in the long-standing and delicate carbon cycle, where humans, industry, cars and animals spew carbon dioxide into the air and forests and oceans pull much of it out of the air, reducing some of the potential warming effect, WMO senior scientific officer Oksana Tarasova said.