Are Earth's Forests Losing Their Ability to Absorb Carbon Dioxide?

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post:Earth's land lost much of their ability to absorb the carbon dioxide humans pumped into the air last year, according to a new study that is causing concern among climate scientists that a crucial damper on climate change underwent an unprecedented deterioration. Temperatures in 2023 were so high - and the droughts and wildfires that came with them were so severe - that forests in various parts of the world wilted and burned enough to have degraded the ability of the land to lock away carbon dioxide and act as a check on global warming, the study said. The scientists behind the research, which focuses on 2023, caution that their findings are preliminary. But the work represents a disturbing data point - one that, if it turns into a trend, spells trouble for the planet and the people on it... Philippe Ciais [a scientist at France's Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences who co-authored the new research] and his colleagues saw that the concentration of CO2 measured at an observatory on Mauna Loa in Hawaii and elsewhere spiked in 2023, even though global fossil fuel emissions increased only modestly last year in comparison. That mismatch suggests that there was an "unprecedented weakening" in the Earth's ability to absorb carbon, the researchers wrote. The scientists then used satellite data and models for vegetative growth to try to pinpoint where the carbon sink was weakening. The team spotted abnormal losses of carbon in the drought-stricken Amazon and Southeast Asia as well as in the boreal forests of Canada, where record-breaking wildfires burned through tens of millions of acres.

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