In 2024, for the second year running, forests stopped acting as a carbon sink

And the Trump regime covered up NOAA's findings of a record CO₂ increase.

PHOTO Caption: NASA.

In 2024, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere increased by the fastest rate in recorded history. A recent analysis by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the top weather and climate agency in the US) found that CO₂ concentrations increased by 3.75 parts per million.

The previous largest increase in CO₂ concentrations came in 2015 with an increase of 2.96 parts per million. 2024’s increase was 25% larger than the previous record.

PHOTO Credit: NOAA.

NOAA’s cover up

Despite the importance of the findings, E&E News reports that “NOAA officials took steps to minimize the announcement”. NOAA did not publish a press release. There is no article on NOAA’s website about the record increase in CO₂ concentrations.

Instead NOAA posted the news on Twitter and Facebook, without mentioning that the increase was record breaking.

Chelsea Harvey, a journalist with E&E News, writes,

According to a source with knowledge of the 2024 analysis, NOAA staff prepared a public web story this year as usual. But officials nixed the report at the last minute, instead releasing the findings only on social media. The source was granted anonymity because they feared reprisal from the Trump administration.

This is all part of the Trump regime’s attack on climate science.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s far right playbook for Trump’s second presidency, describes NOAA as “a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity”.

Obviously, the idiots at the Heritage Foundation are incapable of thinking about the impacts of the climate crisis on future US prosperity.

Project 2025 adds that NOAA “should be broken up and downsized”.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.

The Trump regime’s attack on NOAA

On 27 February 2025, 880 workers at NOAA were sacked. More than 1,000 NOAA employees have since taken early retirement deals. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has terminated or partially terminated 42 NOAA contracts.

In March 2025, as a result of the staff cuts, NOAA announced that it would stop its monthly climate press calls. During these calls, NOAA scientists discussed global climate conditions during the previous month.

An April 2025 White House memo calls for a more than 27% cut in funding to NOAA. NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research would be shut down. The Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research is fundamental to the agency’s climate, weather, and oceans research.

The memo came from the White House Office of Management and Budget. The director of the OMB is Russell Vought who wrote Chapter 2 of Project 2025.

It’s one thing to deny the science behind the climate crisis. But it requires an entirely different level of idiocy to attempt to stop climate science itself.

A Trumpian level of idiocy.

Forests absorbing less CO₂

One possible reason for the jump in CO₂ during 2024 is even more disturbing that the Trump regime’s attempt to cover up NOAA’s findings.

A study released earlier this month found that the world’s forests and lands are absorbing less CO₂ from the atmosphere. This could explain the large increase in CO₂ concentrations in 2024.

Another study published in October 2024 found that the world’s forests stopped acting as a carbon sink in 2023. Many of the same scientists were involved in both studies.

2024 was the hottest year since records began. While CO₂ emissions from burning fossil fuels increased in 2024, the increase was only 0.8% from 2023. That’s not enough to explain the large jump in CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere.

Forests usually remove about 30% of the world’s CO₂ emissions annually. The new study (which has not yet been peer reviewed) shows that extreme drought and wildfires released huge amounts of carbon from forests last year. The CO₂ that forests and land absorbed was effectively cancelled out.

John Miller, a carbon cycle scientist at NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory, told the Washington Post that, “What this is showing is that climate change itself is having an impact on the terrestrial carbon sink.”

And Nancy Harris, research manager for the Global Forest Watch programme at the World Resources Institute, said that,

“From a selfish humanity perspective, we’ve continued to rely on these forests to buffer our emissions. If we don’t have that sink to rely on, climate change is going to get even worse than it is now.”

Philippe Ciais, associate director of the French Laboratory for Climate and Environmental Sciences, is one of the authors of both studies. He explained the problem in simple terms: “This tropical dryness is basically shutting down CO₂ uptake.”

El Niño, drought, and wildfires

An El Niño event started in July 2023 and ended in June 2024. During El Niño, hot conditions in the Pacific Ocean tend to increase global average temperatures. The warm water in the Pacific decreases rainfall in tropical forests, particularly the Amazon.

The most recent study analysed the data up to June 2024 when El Niño finished.

Ciais told the Washington Post he was even more concerned by what happened after El Niño. Usually, rainfall increases when El Niño finished. But in the second half of 2024, extreme drought in the Amazon increased — covering almost 40% of the rainforest. Wildfires burned an area covering more than 42 million hectares.

And the rainforests in central Africa faced a severe drought. Satellite measurements revealed that trees were dying or becoming too stressed for photosynthesis to take place.

This could be a sign of a feedback loop. Higher temperatures result in forests releasing more carbon. Which in turn causes more global heating.

The fact that the world’s forests are heading towards becoming a source of CO₂ should be the end of trading the carbon stored in forests against continued burning of fossil fuels. Carbon trading is part of the problem.

We need to leave fossil fuels in the ground. And stop the destruction of the rainforests.

Trump is doing everything he can to accelerate the extraction of fossil fuels. He has withdrawn the US from the Paris Agreement (again).

Meanwhile, his tariff war with China could result in increased deforestation in the Amazon. The US currently supplies about 30% of China’s soybeans. If Trump’s tariffs remain, in place China is extremely likely to import more soybeans from Brazil, exactly as it did in 2018, during another Trump trade war.