The greenhouse gas bulletin comes ahead of the COP28 UN climate change conference, which starts in Dubai in two weeks. Fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – account for most of the greenhouse gas emissions that trap the sun's heat, leading to global warming and climate change. Last year, global average concentrations of the most important greenhouse gas - carbon dioxide (CO2) - were a full 50 percent higher than in the pre-industrial era, a first, and they will continue to rise in 2023. Methane concentrations also rose and levels of nitrous oxide, the third leading gas, saw their highest year-on-year increase on record from 2021 to 2022. “Despite decades of warnings from the scientific community, thousands of pages of reports and dozens of climate conferences  we are still moving in the wrong direction," said Petteri Taalas, WMO Secretary General. The current trajectory “puts us on a path to increase temperatures well above targets of the Paris Agreement by the end of this century," he added, referring to efforts to limit the increase in global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius.