Won’t Forests Save the Planet From Overheating?
Published by Todd Bush on July 7, 2026
It appears that the role of trees in combating climate change has been overestimated.
Trees may not be capable of absorbing as much of the carbon that is warming the planet as previously thought.
>> In Other News: California’s First Carbon Capture Project Is Up and Running. Environmentalists Are Still Trying to Stop It.
A study has been published suggesting that photosynthesis does not always lead to tree growth. Researchers studied 137 forest sites in the U.S. and found that trees stopped growing several months before photosynthesis ceased for the year, according to The Guardian.
Forests do, after all, protect the planet during the climate crisis, but their ability to mitigate global warming depends in part on how much carbon dioxide they can convert into wood.
It is wood that keeps the molecules that warm the planet out of the atmosphere for decades and centuries.
Other forms of carbon storage typically last much shorter periods.
“Currently, most scientific models assume that if there is photosynthesis, there is wood growth. We found that this is not the case,” says Mukund Palat Rao, a carbon cycle specialist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the study’s lead author.
– The fact that photosynthesis is increasing does not necessarily mean that trees will grow faster in the future.
“Earth system climate models that assume a constant, close link between photosynthesis and tree growth may overestimate the future ability of forests to sequester carbon as atmospheric dryness increases.”
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