By Maarten van Swaay

For many years I have been interested in the climate narrative, not as a climate researcher, but as a curious retired chemist/computer scientist. Eventually I recognized — and began to wonder about — the absence of discussion of one crucial aspect: the dynamic equilibrium between the atmosphere and “elsewhere.”

In the atmosphere, carbon is present almost exclusively as carbon dioxide, CO₂. Elsewhere it exists as vegetation, as dissolved gas in the oceans, from organic decay in soil, and of course as a product of the combustion of fossil fuels.

Both the historical record and chemical theory lead to the conclusion that the atmosphere must be in equilibrium with Earth. Over at least the past million years, atmospheric content has been largely stable, albeit with some minor variation. Statistically, it is very unlikely that this stability is accidental — it has to be maintained by an equilibrium process.

Students of chemistry hear about such equilibria in their first year of study, when they learn that a system is in equilibrium when the activity of each component is the same in all its forms. For components of a gas (such as air) that activity is directly proportional to their concentration. In simple language, we can say that the activity of a component (such as atmospheric carbon dioxide) is reflected in what drives that component to “go elsewhere” — for atmospheric carbon to leave the atmosphere. Similarly, what drives CO₂ in oceans, soil, combustion gases, etc. to enter the atmosphere is determined by the activity of the gas in those environments.

The major flows of carbon dioxide into and out of the atmosphere are not contested; those flows are enormous, more than 200 gigatons (GT, billion tons) each way per year — more than a quarter of the total amount of atmospheric carbon. Thus, the entire atmospheric content is exchanged in just four years. The atmospheric record at Mauna Loa clearly reveals that this equilibrium responds promptly and predictably to the (Northern) growing seasons. The oceans account for about half of the total exchange.

There is also general agreement that the combustion of fossil fuels adds about 4% of the natural flow into the atmosphere. Equilibrium theory leads us to predict that outflow from the atmosphere must therefore also increase by 4%. That, in turn, would require that atmospheric activity, i.e. concentration, must also increase by 4%, not cumulatively, but once, over the period during which fossil fuels have been in use.

That is not what we observe: since the beginning of the industrial age, atmospheric carbon concentration has increased not by 4% but by 50%, from about 280 parts per million (ppm) to about 420 ppm. Fossil fuels can account for less than 1/12 of that increase. It would be nice to learn where the additional carbon comes from, and what causes that.

One would think that such a large deviation from expectations would lead to lively discussion and extensive research. But I cannot recall ever seeing such discussion in mainstream media or elsewhere, and that has made me curious. The work of IPCC relies on thousands of scientists in many disciplines; surely chemists are well represented in that large crowd.

Did such discussions never arise, or were they perhaps suppressed? The data breaches at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit in 2009 and 2011 revealed extensive attempts to prevent publication of articles that challenge the prevailing narrative. Michael Mann resisted sharing the software and data from which he derived his hockeystick graph of exponentially rising temperature some 25 years ago with Rep. Don Barton, who at the time was chairman of the congressional Energy Committee. Shortly afterward, the hockeystick model was shown to be badly flawed by two Canadian scientists, McKinley and McKitrick. To my knowledge, Mr. Mann has never challenged that publication.

Comment about the exchange of carbon into and out of the atmosphere is easy to find: a search for “atmospheric carbon exchange” yields a long list of articles. At the top of this list sits an article in Wikipedia — admittedly not the most reliable source of scientific information, but even so widely consulted. The article contains telling contradictions that should be visible to even casual observers without much science background. Curiously, the article explicitly does refer to the “atmosphere/elsewhere” equilibrium but has some embarrassing contradictions. Among those: It contrasts “millennia” with “thousands of years” even though both refer to the same time interval. The article also admits that (individual) molecules of CO₂ exchange very rapidly, but then claims that the atmosphere can take a very long time to recover from an injection spike, such as may result from a volcanic eruption.

Another easily found page shows the observed variation of atmospheric content with the (Northern) growing seasons — clear evidence that atmospheric carbon adapts promptly, and predictably, to changing conditions on earth. Wikipedia does not explain this contradiction. Apparently, its readers are not curious about it either.

As I noted earlier, fossil fuels add about 4% of the natural carbon exchange to the total flow into the atmosphere. Equilibrium theory would require a corresponding increase of 4% to outflow. That, in turn, would require an increase of 4% to atmospheric carbon content -— since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The observed increase is more than 12 times as large, about 50%. Only a small part of that can be ascribed to fossil fuels. Why has there been no discussion about that large discrepancy?

The sterling reputation of science has been severely damaged by the failure to acknowledge or refute what basic equilibrium theory tells us, and by evidence that at least some who call themselves scientists have degraded that reputation. Similarly, no journalists seem to have seen fit to question the silence about the discrepancy between predicted and observed carbon content of the atmosphere. The historic record shows that temperature has generally led carbon content, not the other way around.

Dr. van Swaay is emeritus professor at Kansas State University, where he taught chemistry, electonics, computer science, and ethics. He retired in 1995.