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“The CO2 growth rate in 2015 was the largest since CO2 (recording) started in 1958,” wrote lead author Junjie Liu in an email to the National Post.

The study, published in the latest issue of Science, was possible thanks to a new NASA satellite, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2).

Launched in 2014, the 300-pound probe is designed to provide day-by-day observations on precisely where carbon is being emitted and where it’s being absorbed.

Using OCO-2 data, NASA scientists were able to zero in on three areas causing the unusual spike in emissions: the Amazon rainforest, Indonesia and a swath of tropical East Africa, including parts of Ethiopia and South Sudan.

As Scott Denning, an OCO-2 science team member, noted in an email to the National Post, each region had a “different problem.” The Amazon was unusually dry, which meant that heat-stressed plants weren’t consuming their normal diet of C02. Africa remained wet, but was unusually hot, which caused plant matter to rot quicker. Indonesia, meanwhile, was on fire.

Dry conditions caused Indonesia’s seasonal fires to spiral out of control in 2015, blanketing much of southeast Asia in a thick smoky haze.

The forests had all been hit hard by a particularly severe bout of El Nino, a naturally occurring period of global warm weather. However, it provides a clear example of what atmospheric scientists call a “feedback loop,” a phenomenon in which global warming can kick off natural processes that only serve to make the warming worse.