New Delhi: Global warming induced climate change is currently wrecking real-time havoc on our planet. The effects with time have only exacerbated; the worries are endless but solutions none, rhetoric at large but action missing. Study after study is adding new chapters in the book of climate anxiety. The latest has recently come up which shows how the planet’s natural carbon absorbers are also slowly breaking down. As time progresses, they might cease to perform their function, adding more difficulty to this already insurmountable problem.
Unsurmounted tasks, added worries
While last year was the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by a team of researchers from around the world, found that the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The problem now has also reached our oceans, another major repository of captured atmospheric carbon.
Greenland’s glaciers and Arctic ice sheets are rapidly melting, disrupting ocean currents like the Gulf Stream. This results in slowing down the rate at which our ocean absorbs carbon. The ocean is full of algae-eating zooplankton which are major absorbers of carbon. Melting sea ice is exposing them to more sunlight which is disrupting their vertical migration that stores carbon on the ocean floor. Such carbon absorption by various agents of our natural environment have helped maintain the fine balance that regulates the planet’s climate. With both human-induced activity and the natural world out of balance, the problem of climate change is only compounding and redressal now looks more and more difficult.
The state of the climate crisis today is already unfathomable and extremely distressing. If Earth’s natural carbon absorbers cease to function, this would have a devastating effect on the already enormous problem. While carbon emission by us has not been scaled down, natural absorbers like trees and planktons in the oceans go a long way in absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. If this had not been the case, the current situation would have been even more dire.
Nonetheless the situation is dire enough, to mitigate it, reaching net-zero carbon emissions as soon as possible is seen as one of the most viable options. Reaching net zero, while still an upscale task, will become even more so without nature. With the growth in human civilisation, the amount of carbon we emitted only increased, more so after the advances made in the industrial revolution. This higher carbon emission for the largest times was absorbed by the natural environment, both on land and in the oceans. Without this safety net, it will be extremely difficult to halt the problem of global warming now.
Another major worry is that in most of the climate models this loss of natural carbon absorbers is not factored in. Possibilities of global heating warming beyond what previous models have predicted now becomes a real worry.
Only one thing is left for us to do now, which is to cut carbon emissions as swiftly and on as large a scale as possible. If that is not managed, there is nothing that can help in mitigating the problem as new factors keep coming making the task at hand more and more difficult.
