CO2 RISE IS NOT CAUSED BY HUMANS
I thank Warwick Smith
@RecoEco for concisely presenting the standard IPCC / TROLL / “useful idiot” FALSE, confused, and misleading arguments designed to make you believe humans are causing atmospheric CO2 rise.
They are all ROOKIE ERRORS. Here's why.
Warwick,
In order by your confused panels from your cartoon attached below.
Panel 1. "The fingerprints are fine."
You accept the measured numbers. Good. Then you claim the disagreement is about "what happens to the carbon after it is added." WRONG. The Keeling intercept measures the fingerprint of what is being added, at the moment it is added. It is arithmetic on air measurements. Nothing about "after" enters the discussion. You have accepted the data and rejected the arithmetic that follows. ROOKIE ERROR.
Panel 2. "The air isn't a sealed jar."
You say the Keeling plot "assumes nothing is swapped." FALSE. The intercept measures the net signature of everything entering the air, cycling included. Ocean and plants swap >200 GtC each way, AND that swap is already inside the measurement. It is not left out. It cannot be left out. The intercept already incorporates that. ROOKIE ERROR.
Panel 3. "Why the intercept says minus 13."
This is your central ERROR. You say the ocean and plants send back "older, heavier" carbon that drags the fingerprint back toward minus 13.
Look at the sclerosponge record, the DATA. The Keeling intercept was already at minus 13 in the year 1500. Look at Law Dome. Its Keeling intercept was also minus 13 for more than 900 years. Fossil-fuel burning back then was ZERO.
Fossil emissions have grown more than ten thousand times since 1500. If fossil carbon were any real part of the addition today, the intercept would have slid dramatically toward minus 28. It did not. It is still minus 13. Your "disequilibrium" story requires a heavier source of CO2 carbon that DOES NOT EXIST, and it fails the time test. The Keeling intercept cannot sit unmoved for five centuries while the fossil-fuel CO2 input grows by four orders of magnitude. You miss the obvious fact that CO2—ALL CO2—cycles out of the atmosphere in under 4 years. ROOKIE ERROR.
Panel 4. "Fixing the paint analogy."
Your analogy needs a white tub at minus 8. There is no white tub. The tub was minus 13 in 1500. It is still minus 13 today. You are painting into a bucket that was already the "mixed" color five hundred years before the first coal fire. ROOKIE ERROR.
Panel 5. "Other fingerprints agree."
Four claims, none of them attribute the rise to fossil-fuels. ROOKIE ERROR.
Radiocarbon. The total fossil-fuel generated CO2 content of the atmosphere is about 4% of today's air, given the measured and well-known four-year residence time. The bomb spike from 1950 to 1963 gave us the actual relaxation time directly: 18.4 years. Not centuries. If your Bern-model "centuries" were right, the bomb pulse would still be sitting in the atmosphere. It is long gone.
Oxygen. Confirms that fossil burning emits CO₂. Nobody denies this. Emitted is not retained. Says nothing about attribution.
North-South gradient. Any Northern-heavy source produces it. Land mass, ocean geometry, and outgassing asymmetry produce it. It does not attribute.
Ocean gaining and acidifying. The ocean is a sink at present partial pressure because pressure rose. Henry's law. It tells you nothing about the origin of the rise. Warmer ocean also outgasses. Every data set shows CO₂ follows temperature.
Four consistency checks. Zero attribution. ROOKIE ERROR.
Panel 6. "The fingerprint did change."
Yes. The atmospheric δ¹³C moved from about minus 6.5 to about minus 8.5. That drop is essentially entirely due to biospheric expansion (including the ocean). Nothing else.
The biosphere has grown by roughly 30% since 1900 (satellite greening data, free-air CO₂ enrichment experiments, direct leaf-area measurements, and ocean measurements). Plants preferentially take up light carbon and release, on decay, carbon at their own fingerprint near minus 26. An expanding biosphere pumps light carbon into the atmosphere on net as the standing pool of plant carbon turns over at a higher throughput. That is where the two-per-mil atmospheric drop comes from. It is not from fossil fuel combustion.
If the drop were fossil, the Keeling intercept of what is currently being added would be near minus 28. It is minus 13. The intercept measures the source. The source is not fossil. The atmospheric mean is drifting toward the source fingerprint, which is around minus 13, and biospheric turnover accounts for essentially all of the observed atmospheric change.
You are confusing the signature of the bulk atmosphere with the signature of the NET CHANGE in the atmosphere over 500 years. The two-per-mil drop points to the biosphere, NOT fossil-fuels. You don't even understand the Keeling intercept. ROOKIE ERROR.
Panel 7. "It really is just arithmetic."
This is the Engelbeen-Hannon-Burton (2024) mass-balance-identity fallacy. It is tautology, not physics. The identity collapses non-fossil sources and non-fossil sinks into a single net term. It cannot tell "small source and small sink" from "large source and large sink." Fossil input is about 10 GtC per year. Gross ocean and biosphere exchange is greater than 200 GtC per year each way. Fossil carbon is about 5% of the influx and 5% of the outflux. Molecules cycle on four years. "Net sink so cannot be the source" is a category error. Reservoirs are large sources and large sinks at the same time. The net says nothing about attribution. No accounting identity is ever evidence of causation. Logic 101. ROOKIE ERROR.
Panel 8. "What's actually happening."
Your bank analogy assumes the Bern impulse-response function. The Bern IRF is a computational construct with four preset timescales and hand-tuned weights, one of them effectively infinite. Its "centuries" is an assumption baked into a model, not a measurement. The bomb-¹⁴C data measure the actual isotopic relaxation directly: 18.4 years, single exponential. It connects directly to the roughly 4-year bulk CO2 relaxation time by the bridge equation. A bank balance persists by ledger convention. Air CO₂ persists by partial-pressure equilibrium with ocean and biosphere. There is no ledger. Molecules do not carry origin tags. ROOKIE ERROR.
Your bottom line.
"Nature soaked up half." That is the annual-growth-over-annual-emission ratio (ABF_C). It ranges from 17.9% to 77.4% year to year, coefficient of variation 28.7%. It is unstable. The IPCC glossary defines airborne fraction as cumulative-still-airborne over cumulative-emitted (ABF_L). Under proper routing with a 3.8-year residence time, ABF_L is about 6%, not 50%. Your "half" is WRONG.
"Essentially ALL." The isotopic mixing math rules this out. For fossil share to be even 50%, the non-fossil source would need δ¹³C = +1.6. No such source exists. For 80%, +46. For 90%, +120. For 100%, infinite. YOUR claim requires carbon sources that do not exist on Earth. ROOKIE ERROR.
Warwick.
Every one of these errors has been addressed in my published work and dismantled in detail on my X threads. The three-way convergence forces the answer: Scripps 1978 to today at minus 13.2, sclerosponge 1500 to today at minus 13, Law Dome 1500 to today at minus 13. Three materials, three labs, five centuries, one number. Fossil-fuel share of the rise is essentially zero within measurement error.
You have been handed the standard consensus package and you are repeating it like a dutiful, brainwashed "useful idiot" without checking whether the arithmetic works. It does not.
Read the preview paper:
bit.ly/NoHumanCO2**.
You are not defending science. You are defending a slogan. It is wrong. ROOKIE ERRORS ALL.