The Global Carbon Budget released its annual update this month revealing emissions from burning fossil fuels are projected to grow by an average of 0.6 percent this year to reach almost 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide or 10.1 petagrams of carbon. This is down from 1.5 percent in 2017, and 2.1 percent in 2018. Data collected, in part, from long-term surface ocean CO2 monitoring efforts, funded by NOAA’s Climate Program Office and the Ocean Acidification Program, indicate that the oceans removed about 10.7 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere this past year.

Please see the article by NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory for more information.