No, The Carbon Sinks Aren’t Sinking
18 hours ago Willis Eschenbach
The usual font of misinformation, the Guardian, has an article claiming the following:
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.
Hmmm, sez I as my bad number detector starts ringing … sounds fishy. Something on the order of 55% of emitted CO2 is sequestered and 45% remains airborne. Of this, some 75% is sequestered on land. So if land sequestration has “collapsed”, we should see an immediate jump in airborne CO2 of about 75% * 55% ≈ 41%. But I don’t recall seeing that in the data … hmmm.
And indeed, this jump in atmospheric CO2 is what the “preliminary findings” paper linked above uses as the basis of their claims about the carbon sinks, viz (emphasis mine):
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/10/22/no-the-carbon-sinks-arent-sinking/
