The concentration of climate-heating greenhouse gases has hit a record high, according to a report from the UN’s World Meteorological Organization.

The jumps in the key gases measured in 2018 were all above the average for the last decade, showing action on the climate emergency to date is having no effect in the atmosphere. The WMO said the gap between targets and reality were both “glaring and growing”.

The rise in concentration of greenhouses gases follows inevitably from the continued surge in global emissions, which was described as “brutal news” for 2018. The world’s scientists calculate that emissions must fall by half by 2030 to give a good chance of limiting global heating to 1.5C, beyond which hundreds of millions of people will suffer more heatwaves, droughts, floods and poverty.

But Petteri Taalas, the WMO secretary-general, said: “There is no sign of a slowdown, let alone a decline, despite all the commitments under the Paris agreement on climate change. We need to increase the level of ambition for the sake of the future welfare of mankind.

“It is worth recalling that the last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of carbon dioxide was 3-5m years ago. Back then, the temperature was 2-3C warmer and sea level was 10-20 metres higher than now.”

Three-quarters of the emissions cuts pledged by countries under the Paris agreement of 2015 are “totally inadequate”, according to a comprehensive expert analysis published earlier in November, putting the world on a path to climate disaster. Another report has found that nations are on track to produce more than double the fossil fuels in 2030 than could be burned while keeping heating under 1.5C.

“The [CO2 concentration] number is the closest thing to a real-world Doomsday Clock, and it’s pushing us ever closer to midnight,” said John Sauven, head of Greenpeace UK. “Our ability to preserve civilisation as we know it, avert the mass extinction of species, and leave a healthy planet to our children depend on us urgently stopping the clock.”

The WMO report, published on Monday, found the global average concentration of CO2 reached 407.8 parts per million in 2018, up from 405.5ppm in 2017. It is now 50% higher than in 1750, before the industrial revolution sparked the widespread burning of coal, oil and gas.

Since 1990, the increase in greenhouse gas levels has made the heating effect of the atmosphere 43% stronger. Most of that – four-fifths – is caused by CO2. But the concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide, the two other key greenhouse gases, also surged in 2018 by a higher amount than the annual average over the past decade.

Methane, which is produced by cattle, rice paddies and fossil fuel exploitation, is responsible for 17% of the heating effect. Its concentration is now more than double pre-industrial levels.

Nitrous oxide, which comes from heavy fertiliser use and forest burning, is now 23% higher than in 1750. The observations are made by the Global Atmosphere Watch network, which includes stations in the Arctic, high mountains and tropical islands.

“The record rise in greenhouse gas concentrations is a cruel reminder that for all the real progress in clean technology, we have yet to even stop global emissions increases,” said Nick Mabey, chief executive of think tank E3G. “The climate system cannot be negotiated with. Until we stop new investment in fossil fuels and massively scale up green power the risks from catastrophic climate change will continue to rise.”

When the world’s nations agreed the Paris deal in 2015, they pledged to ramp up their promised emissions cuts by the annual UN climate summit in 2020, which will be hosted by the UK in Glasgow. This year’s summit needs to do vital preparatory work and begins on 2 December in Madrid, Spain. Chile had been due to host but cancelled because of civil unrest.

Richard Black, director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit in the UK, said: “This record level of greenhouse gases should act as a sobering reminder to governments that so far they are collectively reneging on the pledge they made at the Paris summit, of attempting to keep global warming to 1.5C. That window is closing, and Chile, Italy and the UK [must] use all the diplomatic tools they have to put emissions on a trajectory closer to what science recommends and the public want.”

Joseph Stalin (left), Franklin Roosevelt (centre) and Winston Churchill during the Tehran conference in November 1943. Photograph: STF/AFP via Getty Images

The couple moved to the Soviet Union in 1951 and had a long career as secret agents. The SVR – one of the successor agencies to the Soviet-era KGB – said they were involved in active intelligence work in “extreme conditions in many countries” but did not provide further details.

Gevork, who was decorated with the Hero of the Soviet Union award, died in 2012 aged 87. “Gevork used to say that of the five rays of his Hero Star, at least two belonged to his beloved Goar,” Ivanov said.

In June 2017, Vladimir Putin – himself a former KGB agent – visited SVR headquarters and praised secret agents including the Vartanians. “They are modest people, they don’t like to be called heroes,” said the Russian president.

Goar retired in 1986 but continued to train young agents.

The former Soviet spy Mikhail Lyubimov said he doubted that Russia would reveal further details of the couple’s operations “so as not to cause political scandals in the countries they worked”.

In his classic work The Idea of a University, the recently canonised St John Henry Newman described the core goal of higher education as “the cultivation of the intellect, as an end which may reasonably be pursued for its own sake”. Most of the lecturers who began just over a week of strike action on Monday will have entered academia hoping to play their part in that noble enterprise. Instead they find themselves in the vanguard of perhaps the most concerted and widespread wave of industrial action that our university campuses have known.

In February and March last year, staff at 65 universities voted to strike over changes to their pensions, which could have seen many lose considerable sums in retirement. That ongoing dispute is part of the explanation why lecturers are back on the picket line. But this year they are also protesting in large numbers at stagnating pay, insecure contracts, and an ever-growing workload driven by often unachievable targets. An argument that began on the arcane territory of pensions investment has morphed into a full-blown challenge to a marketisation process that has, over the last decade, transformed university life for those who study in it and those who teach in it.

From 2010 onwards, student tuition fees, introduced by Labour in 1998, became the chosen vehicle for an ideological revolution on campus. Tripling the cap to £9,000, David Cameron’s coalition government launched the era of the student consumer, tasked with shopping around for the best education deal. Universities, faced with huge cuts in funding from Westminster, responded accordingly by diverting huge resources into marketing and upmarket student accommodation. An architecture of competition was built, as limits on student numbers were lifted, pitting institutions against each other via a new bureaucracy of audits, assessments and satisfaction surveys.

The new emphasis on student experience was overdue and welcome; it gave undergraduates power and voice. But the perverse consequences of the marketisation process have become familiar. Huge levels of student debt built up, to be paid back at exorbitant interest rates by either the student or the taxpayer; a new breed of vice-chancellor emerged, aping the language and drawing the salary of a business CEO, and attended by a court of financial managers and marketing experts. There was a huge diversion of resources to sometimes risky investment in real estate.

In this brave new world, the almost forgotten fall-guys have been the academics whose job it is to deliver “the product”. According to research by the University and College Union, average academic pay has fallen by 17% in real terms since 2009, as investment priorities have been diverted elsewhere. An intellectual precariat has come of age, made up of millennials who stumble from year to year on temporary contracts, often part-time, wondering where the next teaching gig is coming from. The drive to keep student numbers buoyant has led to relentless micro-management of academic performance, much of it driven by questionable assumptions such as those of the teaching excellence framework, which a recent study found constructed “excellence” as the development of employability in students.

The world of our universities has become anxious, tense and, for many, chronically insecure. A YouGov poll found that four out of 10 academics had considered leaving the sector as a result of health pressures. In a sector intended to promote the life of the mind, this does not seem to be a good way to do business. So far these strikes have received an encouraging level of support from students, some of whom have reportedly been warned by university authorities to stay away from picket lines. Overturning the wrong-headed priorities of our universities would certainly have the support of St John Henry Newman.