Even as human carbon emissions have stabilized in the past few years, researchers are seeing an increasing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Scientists are worried that the Earth’s carbon “sponges,” including its forests and oceans, aren’t capturing the gas as efficiently as they once did.
“Should [the sponges] weaken, the result would be something akin to garbage workers going on strike, but on a grand scale: The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would rise faster, speeding global warming even beyond its present rate,” says The New York Times. “It is already fast enough to destabilize the weather, cause the seas to rise, and threaten the polar ice sheets.”
Some suspect the shift is in part because of cyclical weather patterns, like El Niño, which would have dried out forests and made it harder for trees to absorb carbon. El Niño-caused forest fires in Indonesia, for instance, pumped huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. But El Niño ended early last year, and the high carbon measurements have persisted into 2017.
So far, scientists say it’s too early to be sure about what’s happening, in part because the equipment used to monitor global climate change is not up to the task. That situation could become worse if the Trump administration succeeds in making its proposed cuts to federal climate change research, says the Times.