A great unravelling: carbon soars, nature falters

There’s a single figure that encapsulates our climate predicament: the amount of carbon dioxide in the sky. It is surging into treacherous new territory and the size of the surge is even more disturbing: it soared by a record amount in 2024.

The fact that we set a new record for carbon in the atmosphere was an unwelcome, but predictable finding by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) when it released its annual stocktake ahead of the upcoming UN climate talks. The freaky part is that the rate of increase also set a record.

Last year, the global concentration of carbon dioxide jumped by 3.5 parts per million (ppm) and reached 424 ppm, the biggest jump since modern measurements began in the 1950s. The WMO says the blanket of heat-trapping gas is now at levels not seen in at least 800,000 years — much longer than homo sapiens has existed on Earth, let alone human civilizations.

And it’s the year-on-year jump that really stands out. Fossil fuel burning can only account for part of that increase — even though the world’s countries agreed to “transition away” from oil, gas and coal in 2023, they burnt 0.8 per cent more fossils in 2024. Not good. Still the wrong direction, but not the wild leap that would cause an all-time increase in carbon pollution.

What this means, in the jargon of climate scientists, is that the sinks are failing. Or, in lay terms, that nature is sick from cleaning up our crap.

The land and oceans have been working overtime to sequester the carbon we spew. In addition to all her other carbon cycling, Mother Nature has been squirreling away about half of our CO2 emissions (or, more accurately, zooplanktoning them away). So, only half has ended up in the atmosphere, trapping heat.

The WMO warns we are now fanning a “vicious climate cycle.” Nature’s storage is not permanent — drought impacts the land, forests burn, heat impairs the ocean. In the “vicious cycle,” oceans and land lose their capacity to absorb carbon while wildfires decimate forests and humanity keeps pumping the bellows with continued emissions of CO2.

“There is concern that terrestrial and ocean CO2 sinks are becoming less effective, which will increase the amount of CO2 that stays in the atmosphere, thereby accelerating global warming,” said Oksana Tarasova, an atmospheric physicist at the WMO, in a chilling example of scientific understatement.

New research about failing sinks is emerging from all over. Just this week, scientists published data showing that Australian tropical rainforests have switched from being a carbon sink to an emissions source. And the Netherlands Scientific Council warned that its forests and soils are absorbing drastically less carbon. Finland’s latest inventory estimated that its forests turned into a source back in 2021. The eastern Amazon is already a net source of carbon and the enormous rainforest as a whole is now teetering on the edge of becoming a source. Canada’s vast managed forestlands have shifted from a sink into a “flood” of CO2.

The oceans are still doing their best to help us out. They are still a net sink for carbon, but the seas are paying a corrosive price. Chemical absorption of CO2 forms carbonic acid, making seawater more acidic. And the heat is having devastating effects on the oceans. 

It is absolutely gut-wrenching but it appears that tropical coral reefs are now beyond their “tipping point.” The Earth has now passed this first catastrophic tipping point and warm water coral reefs are undergoing “widespread dieback,” according to an assessment by 160 scientists from 23 countries. Global heating would have to be reduced from today’s temperatures to 1.2C “as fast as possible” in order for coral reefs to survive “at any meaningful scale,” the scientists say.

Since 2023, the world’s tropical reefs have been suffering the worst global bleaching event on record, impacting over 80 per cent of reefs in at least 82 countries, spanning the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans.

“We can no longer talk about tipping points as a future risk,” said Tim Lenton, a professor at the University of Exeter and the Global Tipping Points Report lead author. “The first tipping of widespread dieback of warm water coral reefs is already underway.”

The scientists also estimate that some ice sheets may have crossed tipping points, committing the world “to several metres of irreversible sea-level rise,” and that the planet is “on the brink” of passing other tipping points, including the dieback of the Amazon.

“Change is happening fast now,” said Lenton.

Even cold waters are feeling the heat. New seeps of methane are being discovered at “an astonishing rate” as the Antarctic seabed warms (disclosure: cryospheric methane is my personal, hopefully irrational, 3 am cold sweat scenario). 

And the North Pacific Ocean has been outrageously hot. A marine heat wave, known as “The Blob” has been occurring every year since 2019 but this year’s Blob grew to stretch over 8,000 km across the Pacific, from Japan to North America’s West Coast, where it sprawled from Mexico to Alaska. 

Last weekend, the remnants of Typhoon Halong “absolutely devastated” two Indigenous communities in Alaska, sweeping houses into the ocean, flipping others entirely upside down and displacing 1,500 people. “It is catastrophic … It is as bad as you can think,” said the state’s incident commander. Scientists at the University of Alaska attribute the record-breaking storm surge to the Pacific heat wave.

The Trump administration had recently cut funds to mitigate disaster risks in the area (no projects with the illicit c-words allowed). Even Alaska’s two Republican Senators had to break with the party line and called on the Trump administration to take climate change impacts seriously. “Our reality is, we are seeing these storms coming on a more frequent basis and the intensity … accumulating as well,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski.

So here we are, deep in the age of tipping points, vicious cycles and feedback loops. Precisely the moment when no country can afford to backslide, especially one that has profited so handsomely from the fossil fuel party as Canada. 

"We are nowhere near the new normal at the current trend. Things are going to continue getting worse and worse until we actually solve the problem fundamentally,' says Damon Matthews, a climate scientist at Concordia University. Matthews is a member of the Net-Zero Advisory Body, set up by the federal government to provide independent advice, and is calling on the feds to resist further backsliding on climate action and bullying by President Trump. "We need to … cut our emissions globally in half and then keep decreasing them towards zero in order to keep levels stable," he says.

Dismantling or delaying climate policies, slowing the clean energy rollout, or doubling down on oil and gas expansion — all of it deepens our dependence on a system that’s turned against us.

The surge in carbon emissions and the failing of nature’s carbon sinks are the real-world context for every promise to “balance” the economy and the environment, for every policy decision, for every ribbon-cutting at a new pipeline or LNG terminal. The question is whether we’ll keep confusing the old economy for stability, or finally accept that the only balance worth striking is with the planet itself.