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(impossible?) to get CO2 concentrations down,” says Lee Simons, a climatologist.
But the trees themselves are physically in danger as a result of the extreme temperatures. One of the consequences of global warming is more wildfires that run out of control.
Yakutia, a Republic in Russia’s Siberia, is currently dealing some of its worst wildfires ever, with over 350,000 hectares on fire forcing the regional authorities to declare a state of emergency. And last year’s extreme fires in Canada put 2.1 gigatonnes of CO2 back in the atmosphere in 2023.
To put these numbers into context, the 2.1 gigatonnes added to the atmosphere by the Canadian wildfires is more CO2 than is produced by any country in the world, other than the three biggest emitters of China (11.4 gigatonnes), US (5 gigatonnes) and Russia (2.8 gigatonnes). It is also about a third of all the carbon that is absorbed by all the threes on the planet each year. If the CO2 emissions from the wildfires in the US, Russia and SE Asia that are currently burning are taken into account, then it appears a large proportion of the carbon dioxide that should be removed each year by trees is being returned to the atmosphere by burning trees.
This is before other factors are included. For example, the Amazon forest, the “lungs of the world”, suffered from a severe drought last year that also impeded plants’ ability to
fix CO2 and also accounted for a large fall in the carbon sink effect in 2023, according to Philippe Ciais, a climatologist with Laboratory of Science, Climate and the Environment (LSCE) at the Versailles Saint-Quentin en Yvelines University in France, that has raised similar concerns.
“The regions with the hot temperatures are losing the most carbon in 2010-22,” says Ciais. “Those losses were even higher in 2023, especially in the Tropics... Even if 2023 was a transition from a La Niña (good for carbon sinks) to a moderate El Niño, we see a sudden drop of the land carbon sink from extreme warming and Amazon mega-drought.”
“The decline of the northern sink was masked by recent good conditions in the Tropics absorbing CO2, but in
the coming years if this decline continues, we may see a rapid acceleration of CO2 and global warming which was unforeseen in future climate models projections,” Ciais adds.
The findings of this research are worrying scientists as plants' falling ability to fix carbon dioxide is not included in the models. It has already become clear that the climate models are wrong as global warming is already accelerating faster than the most pessimistic scenarios, partly due to their failure to take account of the warming affect owing to the removal
of aerosols from the atmosphere in the last few years. Now burning tree and coughing tree factors will have to be added to the calculations.
Earth records hottest year since records began bne IntelliNews
Sunday, July 21 was the hottest day ever recorded globally in 100,000 years according to the EU climate monitoring service Copernicus, warning that the Climate Crisis is accelerating.
According to preliminary data from Copernicus’ ERA5 dataset, July 21 was the hottest day in Earth's recorded history, with an average global surface air temperature of 17.09°C (62.76°F).
The temperatures were significantly higher than any temperature for millennia, according to paleoclimatologists, who study Earth's natural environmental records recorded in sediments at the bottom of the oceans and preserved in the rings of trees, amongst other sources.
Last year was already the hottest on record as temperatures exceeded the long-term pre-industrial average benchmark by more than 1.5C in every month of the year in 2023. However, July 21 sets a new all-time high for the mid-summer peak in temperatures, above last year’s peak.
However, 2023 didn’t breach the 1.5C limit set by the Paris Agreement as when seasonal fluctuations, caused by weather phenomena such as El Niño, the adjusted average temperature was 1.3C. The 1.5C limit is considered breached
Daily global surface air temperature
Data: ERA5 1940-2024. Credit: C3S/ECMWF
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