Normally I don't post articles that require a paid subscription but the Author has unlocked three of his articles for everyone to see in full, I am a paid subsciber because he is very good writer and rational scientist.
I chose this one to post.
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Irrational Fear
Is It Really Our CO₂?
New Evidence Questions Humanity’s Role in the Carbon Cycle
Dr. Matthew Wielicki
Jun 21, 2025
Excerpt:
Questioning the Fundamental Basis of Climate Science and Policy
As an isotope geochemist, I’ve spent years studying the subtle signatures that reveal Earth’s hidden stories. Isotopes, variants of elements like carbon, act as chemical fingerprints, tracing the movement, age, and origin of materials through time. They don’t lie, and they don’t bend to narratives. Early in my career, I was struck by the Suess Effect, a shift in atmospheric carbon isotopes that seemed to pin the rise in CO₂ squarely on fossil fuel combustion. The evidence was compelling: burning ancient coal and oil, devoid of radiocarbon (¹⁴C) and depleted in ¹³C, was diluting the atmosphere’s isotopic ratios. It didn’t make me fear catastrophic climate change, but it convinced me humans were reshaping the atmosphere.
Now, I’m not so sure. Recent discoveries and lingering contradictions suggest the story isn’t as clear-cut as we’ve been told. At the heart of climate science lies a critical assumption: we fully understand the carbon cycle, the complex dance of carbon through air, oceans, plants, soils, and rocks. This assumption underpins every climate model, policy, and trillion-dollar investment. But what if the foundation is shakier than we thought? What if nature is playing a larger role in rising CO₂ than we’ve accounted for?
Let’s explore the cracks in this narrative and ask a critical question: Are we really responsible for the carbon in the atmosphere?
Cracks in the Foundation
The carbon cycle is Earth’s grand accounting system, tracking how carbon moves between vast reservoirs: the atmosphere (850 petagrams of carbon, PgC), oceans (38,000 PgC), soils, vegetation, and fossil fuels. According to the
IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6, Working Group 1, Chapter 5), natural processes like photosynthesis, respiration, and ocean-atmosphere exchange shuffle hundreds of gigatons of carbon annually, orders of magnitude more than human activity, which adds roughly 9.5 PgC per year through fossil fuel combustion and land-use changes.
Figure 5.12 in the IPCC report illustrates this beautifully, with yellow arrows showing natural fluxes and pink arrows marking human contributions. The deep ocean alone holds 40 times more carbon than the atmosphere, and natural fluxes dwarf our emissions.
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