Plants aren't absorbing carbon anymore

Question

Guardian article excerpt (claim bolded): 

This activity is one of thousands of natural processes that regulate the Earth’s climate. Together, the planet’s oceans, forests, soils and other natural carbon sinks absorb about half of all human emissions.

But as the Earth heats up, scientists are increasingly concerned that those crucial processes are breaking down.

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.

Comments

It seems like you spend a lot of time fact checking this and your source is valid enough. At the same time checking other articles your fact is true!

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Great job finding a corroborating source this is a super interesting phenomenon that I was unaware of

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I found your post to be very informative and helpful! I did some research into the author of the article, and I believed him to be very credible.

Answer 1

After a thorough fact check, I am now able to determine that this statement is false. I was not able to find anything really remotely realted to there being no more CO2 in plants. However, what I mostly found was just reports on CO2 being much lower in plants than normal in recent years. I was also able to find a little bit of information about the author, but not much showed a difference for this article not being a true piece of information. That is why my evaluation has come to the conclusion that this is a exaggerated and misleading news article.

Answer 2

The article claims that plants have absorbed significantly less CO2 from the atmosphere in recent years. It seems that the claim is true, the CO2 absorption rates have had a massive decline. The author is a verified environmental reporter and is listed on LinkedIn with proper credibility. Most statistics align with other sources, for example, he mentions how carbon pollution reached 37.4 billion tons in 2023 which is the same number mentioned here. The article also talks about the idea of carbon sinks, their importance, and the cause of their sudden disappearances which is similar to the findings in a report from the U.S Department of Agriculture. Overall, the content seems to be true with multiple sources backing up the same claims.

Sources:

https://wmo.int/media/news/record-carbon-emissions-highlight-urgency-of-global-greenhouse-gas-watch#:~:text=Total%20carbon%20dioxide%20(CO2)%20emissions,to%20the%20Global%20Carbon%20Budget.