Yves here. This latest climate sighting is a very big addition to a long and growing list of seriously unfavorable development, at least as far as the survival of something dimly resembling modern life looks like. It seems unlikely that carbon sinks becoming much less effective was contemplated in climate modeling. So this development amounts to a major accelerant.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
I very much dislike climate alarm posts these days for reasons already stated (see “Name the Damn Perp”).
But climate news posts, on the other hand, deserve our notice — in particular, posts about unanticipated changes in “crisis scheduling.” We’ve been taught by those who get rich from the oil economy that “worrying later is fine; the crisis won’t come for decades, if at all.”
Unfortunately for them and us, news that the crisis is not sticking to schedule seems always to appear. This is one of those stories.
Carbon Sinks Are Failing
From The Guardian we learn:
Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year. Is nature’s carbon sink failing?
The sudden collapse of carbon sinks was not factored into climate models – and could rapidly accelerate global heating
A carbon sink is a thing or a process that removes CO2 from the air. Our oceans are CO2 sinks. CO2 in the air dissolves in ocean water the same way it dissolves in regular water. There are other CO2-removal processes at work in the oceans. Like this one:
It begins each day at nightfall. As the light disappears, billions of zooplankton, crustaceans and other marine organisms rise to the ocean surface to feed on microscopic algae, returning to the depths at sunrise. The waste from this frenzy – Earth’s largest migration of creatures – sinks to the ocean floor, removing millions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year.
This activity is one of thousands of natural processes that regulate the Earth’s climate. Together, the planet’s oceans, forests, soils and other natural carbon sinks absorb about half of all human emissions.
After the obligatory “scientists are concerned” disclaimer that comforts the uncomfortable (more on that below), we see this:
In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team of researchers show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil – as a net category – absorbed almost no carbon.
There are warning signs at sea, too. Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets are melting faster than expected, which is disrupting the Gulf Stream ocean current and slows the rate at which oceans absorb carbon. For the algae-eating zooplankton, melting sea ice is exposing them to more sunlight – a shift scientists say could keep them in the depths for longer, disrupting the vertical migration that stores carbon on the ocean floor.
According to one of the scientists involved in the study, “Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end.”
After more disclaimers — this could be temporary; all could still be well — the writer says this:
The kind of rapid land sink collapse seen in 2023 has not been factored into most climate models. If it continues, it raises the prospect of rapid global heating beyond what those models have predicted.
Indeed.
A Note: ‘Scientists Are Concerned’
Paragraph three, high enough in the Guardian piece to be actually read, states: “But as the Earth heats up, scientists are increasingly concerned that those crucial processes are breaking down.”
This is a key part of the meta content of the story. This phrasing, while accurate, puts the focus on the scientists, not the problem, and emphasizes their “concern,” a mild emotion.
A better, more accurate statement is the following: “Those crucial processes are breaking down.” Period.
Because they are. The source of the Guardian article makes that clear. The authors say that “CO2 growth rate was … 86% above the previous year” (a fact), yet CO2 emissions only increased by “0.1 to 1.1 %” (another fact). Why the difference? CO2 removal has severely slowed or stopped.
It’s a simple equation. What goes into the air is a number. What remains is another number. The difference, a minus b, is what’s taken out. The amount taken out last year is vastly smaller than any previous year. The paper accounts for fluxes and latency. The data and scientists are clear: The carbon sink effect “is coming to an end.”
The Guardian, though, would rather mitigate your fear than give you straight facts. Thus “scientists are concerned,” not “here’s what’s happening.” The reader can decide who The Guardian is protecting.
Be Prepared
Another failure in the climate system says the crisis is ahead of schedule as our rulers define it. (Their projected schedule is whatever keeps you from feeling afraid.)
Warming is already nicely above the magic +1.5°C mark that the IPCC said spells disaster.
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According to the linked report the ocean sink works in quite a stable fashion and, if anything, it has increased carbon capture in the last decade (Page 13, Fig 1b). It is the land sink what shows volatility: Deforestation, wildfires, draughts etc. The very same heating seems to reinforce the process. Is the 2023 data on land sinks an anomaly or might it come the new normal? If the later is true we will see accelerated CO2 atmospheric growth even if we manage to somehow reduce fossil fuel emissions.
Without an all out effort to keep fossil fuels in the ground, one way or another, this was always the inevitable outcome.
I wonder where John Kerry, “US climate czar,” is on all this. Oh yes, he is raising dire concerns that the first amendment is protecting people’s right to think and speak (last week at the World Economic Forum). Well, I guess if we don’t speak about the climate crisis and other uncomfortable things, they will go away. I imagine that was always the plan.
As near as I can tell, the linked paper starts with an observed measurement (atmospheric CO2 at the Mauna Loa observatory), and from that point on every claim is based on models of the authors’ making.
I’m not saying this isn’t happening, but Neuburger’s article takes that wholly theoretical result and stipulates it as though it has been measured and proven.
I agree, two single measurement points. The question should be, what has happened in the local area
Disaster science, just like disaster news, sells best. Nuance and technical details are tedious.
Looking at the actual measurements it does appear that the sinks are not failing. From 1958 to date there has been a fairly constant annual cycle with peak CO2 in May, minimum Sept-Oct, with a spread of about 7 ppm every year. The rise in recorded CO2 has been an almost linear 1.5 ppm per year. This seems totally unbelievable as it suggests that despite variations in anthropogenic emissions, nuke bomb tests, wars, volcanoes, wildfires, deforestation etc etc we have steadily put out exactly the same amount of CO2 every single year for the last 65 years or so, and the planet’s sinks have mopped nearly all of it up, leaving exactly the same amount over every year to accumulate in the atmosphere.
For something with more observations and less model-based, one could look at this recent story from the Guardian, with charts based on measurements from Natural Resources Institute Finland.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/15/finland-emissions-target-forests-peatlands-sinks-absorbing-carbon-aoe
I was also much impressed with a recent article in the New Yorker, by Rebecca Solnit – she spent some time on the Greenland icecap, and also reports recent findings about ancient climate.
https://archive.md/xFmLU
This struck me:
“During the [last ice age, termed in the U.S. the] Wisconsin, Greenland was often unimaginably cold, with temperatures nearly thirty degrees lower than they are now. Then temperatures would shoot up, in some instances by as much as twenty degrees in a couple of decades, only to drop again, somewhat more gradually. Finally, about twelve thousand years ago, the roller coaster came to a halt. Temperatures settled down, and a time of relative climate tranquillity began. This is the period that includes all of recorded history, a coincidence that, presumably, is no coincidence.
Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State and the author of a book about the ice-coring project, summed up the findings as follows: ‘For most of the last 100,000 years, a crazily jumping climate has been the rule, not the exception.’ ”
And I think of a line from one of the Harry Potter movies: “Hang on, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
The New Yorker piece is by Elizabeth Kolbert.
Thanks for the correction. Gemini chatbot compares and contrasts these writers – Solnit is more philosophical and reflective, Kolbert more a practitioner of science journalism. I seem to have filed them in adjacent metaphorical slots in my memory.
So… all the trees are dead or dying, are they?
Sometimes, I think that people who write such reports should just look out of the window sometimes.
Watching for sunset luminescence should be a pretty straightforward process for any night time sailor or fisherman. I recall marveling them while working on a boat in the 70s in Alaska.
I wonder how they quantify the amount. Is sea surface temperature a determinant? What would be the effect of cooling the water through clouds?
If you monitor earth.nullschool.net (touch “Earth”, “Ocean”, “SSTA”), you can monitor various attempts at reducing sea surface temperature on a regional basis, such as experiments as the Russian seemingly successful containment of a major methane outbreak in the East Siberian Sea as announced in Putin’s Annual Address in 2021. This also may increase the ocean’s CO2 uptake. It’s pretty interesting, as by product, it appears to increase precipitation in areas downstream.
Seriously, I imagine it’s too little too late.
When you realize they deny climate change, because someone intends to get ahead of it with demand destruction… pandemic, then war? One hopes they didn’t skimp on the eugenicists (/sarc), a Hapsburg humanity would be doubly tragic, but knowing this economy…
From the study, this caught my eye;
Regional anomalies
To gain insights on which regions caused the large drop of the land sink and a coincident increase of the ocean sink in 2023,…
Ok, we were lucky that there was a “coincident increase of the ocean sink. The study goes on to name the chief suspect for this;
Particularly, the increased uptake was most pronounced in the eastern equatorial Pacific, consistent with suppressed upwelling of carbon rich waters during the developing El Niño
Will a developing La Nina give us cover as well?
On a different topic, I appreciate Neuburger’s takedown of the Guardians efforts to tame the urgency of the message, appeasing the once-lefties with soft deflections in a bedtime story voice.
Interestingly, the Guardian has dropped another climate crisis article of similar import, Global water crisis leaves half of world food production at risk in next 25 years. This caught my eye:
Demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by 40% by the end of the decade, because the world’s water systems are being put under “unprecedented stress”, the report found. Oh. This article is based on this report published by the Global Commission on the Economics of Water. (Their website is worth a look.)
Here’s the answer to the problem.
NOAA has redefined what a years is.
Willis Eschenbach’s rebuttal of this particular article is not “the answer to the problem.”
He is correct the this particular calculation seems to be an artifact of sampling noisy data. However, he ignores what is clearly evident in the first figure of his argument: the rate of change of CO2 in the atmosphere is steadily increasing, ie the rising CO2 is accelerating.
These articles also seem to be ignoring the increasing methane levels from direct anthropogenic causes (fracking, Nordstream, leaky infrastructure, CAFOs) and natural sources due to warming (melting of permafrost and offshore clathrates). Atmospheric methane may be relatively short-lived, but is a much more potent heat-trap.
Finally, from what I’ve heard for years, climate scientists are not “concerned”. They are family-blogging terrified.
The ice-core records clearly show that CO2 will increase as the climate warms since it is less soluble in warmer oceans.
A new paper shows that much of the recent increase in methane is due to organic sources, especially microbes.