For science quickly, I'm Meg Duff.

Last week, if you missed it, I was up in Harvard Forest learning about a hidden economy.

Underneath our feet, plants and fungi are constantly trading carbon and nutrients.

Trees use carbon as currency to trade with fungi.

Scientists have figured out that they can watch this nutrient economy in action

by reading the chemical signatures in the leaves of trees.

Those signatures help predict what's going on in the soil,

where trees trade with micro-risal fungi through their roots.

Next, scientists are planning to get that underground fungi data from space using satellites.

We will be able to immediately know what does a micro-risal look like in the whole planet, which is pretty exciting.

That's Renato Braghieri, a climate scientist who models how carbon cycles through forests.

These modeling advances are super exciting.

We could start asking questions about are these micro-risal types actually shifting in space as we predicted?

On one level, we already know what these models will show us.

We are expecting that the system will crash because the system will change or the conditions for this similar relationship will change in the near future,

in terms of environmental conditions, and also the locations of the planet that they are.

Because we keep burning fossil fuels and adding extra carbon to the atmosphere, plants are starting to experience inflation.

If their nutrient economy slows down, forests won't be able to pull as much carbon out of the atmosphere.

That means we have less leeway to keep adding it.

I think if we add more data into it, we will have a better answer in terms of certainty, but not a better answer in terms of the time we have to take action and actually limit our carbon emissions.

Renato isn't super optimistic about our ability to limit emissions quickly.

But I'm just a climate scientist. We're not very optimistic with the future just because of what our model still tells us.

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