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Logging in the tropics means that trees continue to be lost throughout the world. Brazil alone has cleared enough forest since 1992 to rival all the growth of China, the EU, and the US combined. Still, the Earth’s forests as a whole may no longer be contributing to global warming. On net, they probably sucked about 200 million tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each year between 2011 and 2020, according to a 2021 study. Trees absorbed more CO2 than was emitted by deforestation by a narrow margin. This is the second-largest ocean decline after the 53.8 billion tons of greenhouse gases emitted in 2022. But this shows that not all climate indicators point to doom.
Remarkably, this may not be the first time that the world’s forests have expanded due to human activity. A 2019 analysis suggests that catastrophic population declines caused by war and disease after European colonization of the Americas may have caused global temperatures to drop between the 16th and 19th centuries. With the population reduced to about 10 percent of its previous size, indigenous peoples could no longer maintain an agricultural system based on clearing land by fire. As a result, 558,000 square kilometers of new forest grew, enough to trap around 27 billion tonnes of CO2.
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