The Amazon is Slowing Down

An article was recently released about the effectiveness of the Amazon rainforest. The Amazon rainforest is one of the main carbon dioxide "sinks" in the world, in that it soaks up half of the CO2 that we produce throughout the world. What this article was addressing was how the effectiveness of the Amazon is starting to slow down. The Amazon has played an unparalleled role in taking in carbon dioxide in the world for decades. This is a huge role in the world because it has limited global warming that would otherwise be caused by all of the carbon dioxide emissions that we produce.

The initial response to the rising carbon levels was that the forest kept up. In 1990, the highest recorded record of the intake of carbon dioxide was met with 2 billion tons of it being absorbed. Since then, the intake has been cut down by half. At first, increasing carbon levels caused increased plant growth. This caused an increase in metabolism in the trees. While this may seem like a good thing at first, this also means that while the trees will take in more carbon dioxide, they will also die quicker.

While the Amazon is starting to slow down in its carbon intake, much of the world's forest is still up to pace. Most of the forests are still outputting much less carbon than they intake. But what will happen if they suddenly start to go down like the Amazon? We all know that there are tons of different projects and missions out there to cut down on CO2 emissions, such as electric cars. But if we rely too heavily on the trees to take out all of the carbon from the air, then eventually they will all fail and we will have to sharply cut down on our carbon emissions or we will risk accelerating global warming and losing our atmosphere.