Loss of moist broadleaf forest in Africa has turned a carbon sink into source

77 pointsposted 2 days ago
by PaulHoule
(nature.com)

30 Comments

Herring

2 days ago

Humanity being the first species to go extinct because it was more profitable than continued existence.

wwweston

2 days ago

Not so much profit as a particular failure of accounting. Focus on privatization of profit with socialization of costs allows making staggering and possibly fatal costs someone else’s problem.

Loughla

2 days ago

We've turned the tragedy of the commons into an economic practice.

MrSkelter

15 hours ago

This is a common misconception. Commons are well maintained in healthy societies. Over extraction being punished by the group.

Moreover private owners optimize for wealth under capitalism, not preservation. Look at why oil companies want to do to the sea and arctic. Or the replacement of Amazonian forest with pasture for beef grazing.

African countries suffer under the poverty created by colonial extraction of both resources and people, followed by being charged for the privilege of having their resources taken, and saddled with unpayable loans. Those loans also placing them in a position where they are forced to allow western countries to continue to extract, and are prevented from protecting their national interests.

If Africa was allowed to own its wealth and develop without negative interference (assassinations, extraction, the world bank, foreign militaries) it would be the richest region on the planet.

phtrivier

2 days ago

Let's emulate world class leadership from the greatest country on earth, and immediately stop funding those alarmists doomsayers.

Anyway, I read on HN that AI was about to solve climate change any time now. I'm sure prompting LLMs the right way will harness the world knowledge to generatively hallucinate a way for trees to grow better.

BLKNSLVR

2 days ago

I think Elon is working towards colonizing Mars because once it's all worked out, that's what Earth's environment will be like.

kibwen

2 days ago

Nope, it's Venus that we're racing towards.

timr

2 days ago

Humanity is not going extinct.

wolvoleo

a day ago

Not directly because of climate change no. Some areas will be fairly unaffected or might even improve for human use (eg Siberia).

However it will cause ecosystem collapse which we rely on for food due to too rapid change which nature can't handle, and it will change which areas are viable for human habitation and agriculture. Meaning many many people will have to move.

And of course mass forced migration combined with shrinking resources is a recipe for global war. See how popular migrants are now in many countries, and consider half the world having to migrate to survive. Poor people living in areas that become uninhabitable (and who never caused the problem in the first place) will move to a better place where it's likely the current inhabitants will protest.

And a global war is very likely to lead to extinction with the WMD tech humanity has now.

All we need to do is stop trying to be richer than everyone else and to work together :(

timr

17 hours ago

> However it will cause ecosystem collapse which we rely on for food due to too rapid change

Citation absolutely required. This is not in the IPCC reports, which are already quite extreme in their projections.

The IPCC sixth assessment report has an entire section on ecosystem impacts, and while a number of changes are projected with varying degrees of confidence, the word “collapse” is nowhere to be found, except for the following sentence:

> It is not known at which level of global warming an abrupt permafrost collapse…compared to gradual thaw (Turetsky et al., 2020) would have to be considered an important additional risk.

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/chapter/chapter-2/

dr_dshiv

2 days ago

Happened in Finland too— forests becoming net carbon producers.

https://www.icos-cp.eu/news-and-events/news/finlands-forests...

jabl

2 days ago

Notably, politically the notion of forests as carbon sinks have been a very convenient fig leaf for politicians not wanting to reduce emissions in other parts of society.

timr

2 days ago

The link you are replying to is explicit that forests are carbon sinks (which is just a scientific fact), and that the change here is due to logging.

Planting more trees than you cut down is an effective way of offsetting CO2 emissions.

dr_dshiv

2 days ago

And… “increased logging, rising emissions in peatland forests and declining carbon sink of mineral soils.”

timr

2 days ago

Yes, “increased logging” means logging. It’s the primary change cited by the paper.

mc32

2 days ago

Isn't there an age-of-tree related curve? Up until XX years they are net producers -afterwards they become sinks.

PaulHoule

2 days ago

That’s what people thought 20 years ago, careful accounting seems to show climax ecosystems of all kinds still capture carbon if undisturbed, I met someone who helped prove it by measuring trees with calipers year after year.

padjo

2 days ago

At a certain zoom level we appear very similar to bacteria that undergoes a population explosion, destroys its host and ultimately dies out.

tbrownaw

2 days ago

They measure/model aboveground biomass, and present the change in that measurement as being a source/sink in the carbon cycle, ie as coming from / going to the atmosphere.

But I also see multiple places they mention the changes as being at least partly due to logging or wood harvesting. Which seems like biomass being removed and yet not going into the atmosphere.

BadBadJellyBean

2 days ago

I don't even want to read these anymore. The whole climate crisis made me feel so powerless. I try to vote, I try to educate, I try to be vocal but it's all for nothing because ... I'm not even sure. I think it's stupid and greedy people.

BLKNSLVR

2 days ago

It feels as if the more I go in one direction, the more the rest of the world goes in the other.

My in-laws are a lost cause. I can make immediate ground in most discussions, but give it a day and they're back to their same FUD arguments that I'd just taken down the day before.

The pitiable thing about their position is, I think, that they want the lifestyle they lived for their kids and grandkids, and think that this "green scam" will impoverish and threaten the viability of their extending family.

Unfortunately the future could be much worse than that, but for basically the opposite reason.

It's surreal watching human denial working in real-time.

roldie

2 days ago

This is really sad to read. Unfortunate that it will likely keep happening as forests disappear, seas acidify, and climate keeps warming. Very scary.

timr

2 days ago

The change here is due to logging, not some inevitable climate feedback loop. Cut down fewer trees than you grow, and the situation reverses.

In fact, the natural feedback cycle of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is for greenery to increase, not decrease.

BLKNSLVR

2 days ago

Easy solution then, let's just cut down on logging.

...waits 50 years...

timr

2 days ago

or plant more trees. immediate.