Plants and Forests Absorbed Almost No Carbon Last Year, Shocking Climate Scientists

“We are lulled into a comfort zone — we cannot really see the crisis.”

Sink Collapse

The Earth’s natural defenses against carbon emissions could be breaking down.

Our planet has historically been home to natural “carbon sinks,” or sites like forests and oceans that naturally remove potentially atmosphere-damaging carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

But as The Guardian reports, preliminary data from an international team of researchers shows that 2023 — the hottest year on record — saw an alarming lapse in the Earth’s innate ability to swallow and neutralize carbon, with trees, soil, and plants together absorbing next to no carbon.

In other words: in 2023, it seems that some of Earth’s natural carbon sinks stopped working.

As The Guardian notes, the study’s findings echo other research, such as a 2023 study on zooplankton, which found that fast-melting ocean glaciers could hinder the ocean’s ability to capture and repurpose carbon.

Humankind’s still-overwhelming reliance on fossil fuels has put a huge amount of stress on natural carbon sinks to clean up after us. And while the environment has shown incredible resilience and adaptability over time, this growing body of research could signal a consequential breaking point — and scientists are sounding the alarm.

“This stressed planet has been silently helping us and allowing us to shove our debt under the carpet thanks to biodiversity,” Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told The Guardian. “We are lulled into a comfort zone — we cannot really see the crisis.”

Imperfect Models

It’s worth noting that carbon sinks are complex and notoriously hard to measure, and models show variability in terms of timeline.

“Overall, models agreed that both the land sink and the ocean sink are going to decrease in the future as a result of climate change,” Andrew Watson, who helms the marine and atmospheric science group at Exeter University in England, told The Guardian. “But there’s a question of how quickly that will happen.”

Watson added that most models “tend to show this happening rather slowly over the next 100 years or so,” but also pointed out that most models don’t incorporate seemingly consequential factors like worsening wildfires and deforestation.

Regardless of whether it takes a decade or a century to get there, carbon sink models showing collapse over time are a daunting sign that global warming could soon accelerate.

“Climate scientists [are] worried about climate change not because of the things that are in the models but the knowledge that the models are missing certain things,” Watson told The Guardian.

More on the climate crisis: Scientists Horrified by What They Found Under the Doomsday Glacier