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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 civ­i­liza­tion and “tur­bo-charg­ing” 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 U.N.’s an­nu­al cli­mate con­fer­ence, that C02 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.