El Niño plays big role in emissions jump: study

Despite humans finally getting a grip on their carbon output, a cuttingedge, new NASA study has found that the world’s El Niño-stricken forests single-handedly sent global emissions into overdrive.

In lush areas of Africa, South America and Indonesia, dried and rotting forests were responsible for the “largest annual increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration seen in at least 2,000 years,” reads an October statement issued by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The forests’ final tally, as recorded by a new NASA earth satellite, was 2.5 billion tonnes of extra carbon emissions. The sum is about on par with the annual humancaused emissions of India.

It’s about three-and-a-half times larger than Canada’s total emissions for 2015, 722,000,000 tonnes.

If the three tropical regions cited by NASA were a country, they would have ranked as the world’s thirdlargest carbon emitter, behind China and the U.S.

The study was possible thanks to a new NASA satellite, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2).

Launched in 2014, the 300-pound satellite is designed to provide day-by-day observations on precisely where carbon is being emitted and where it’s being absorbed.

Using OCO-2 data, NASA scientists were able to zero in on three areas causing the unusual spike in emissions: the Amazon rainforest, Indonesia and a swath of tropical East Africa, including parts of Ethiopia and South Sudan.

As Scott Denning, an OCO-2 science team member, noted in an email to the National Post, each region had a “different problem.”

The Amazon was unusually dry, which meant that heat-stressed plants weren’t consuming their normal diet of C02.

Africa remained wet, but was unusually hot, which caused plant matter to rot quicker. Indonesia, meanwhile, was on fire.

Dry conditions caused Indonesia’s seasonal fires to spiral out of control in 2015, blanketing much of southeast Asia in a thick smoky haze.

The forests had all been hit hard by a particularly severe bout of El Niño, a naturally occurring period of global warm weather.

However, it provides a clear example of what atmospheric scientists call a “feedback loop,” a phenomenon in which global warming kicks off natural processes that only serve to make the warming worse.

The classic example of a feedback loop is the release of methane trapped in the Arctic.

As the ice caps melt, tonnes of methane are freed from their prehistoric slumber, adding to the sum of greenhouse gases encircling the globe.

Ironically, the spike in emissions occurred just as humans seem to be curbing their fossil fuel diet.

Even as the global economy grew, human carbon pollution has only recently hit a plateau, fuelled in part by American and Chinese efforts to ditch coal.

“This huge increase in atmospheric CO2 growth rate happened when emissions were basically flat for three years. Bummer!” Denning wrote.

The year 2016 was the hottest on record.

Still, scientists remain unsure as to how much of the OCO-2 data was driven purely by climate change, and how much is by El Niño.

However, the NASA report hinted that the findings are likely a preview of coming attractions.

Many climate models anticipate a future of longer and more severe El Ninos.

What’s more, with temperatures continuing their climb everywhere, even normal conditions could one day resemble the heatwave afflicted conditions of 2015-16.

Normally, it’s the world’s tropical regions that are sucking in carbon, rather than emitting it.

For every tonne of carbon released by burning fossil fuels, roughly half is neutralized by forests or the ocean, while the other half ends up in the atmosphere.

However, the NASA study noted that under present forecasts, “the role of the tropical land as a buffer for fossil fuel emissions may be reduced in the future.”