Due to the dangerous information being here presented, I recommend that this be read in a locked room with the curtains drawn.  People have gotten in trouble for less.

For starters, there’s this completely false portrayal of carbon (as in its dioxide version) rising up into the atmosphere and staying there.  What really happens is that atmospheric CO2 is voraciously consumed by plants.  I’m talking about forests, jungles, grasslands, gardens, farms, and the Big Kahuna: the oceans’ enormous component of phytoplankton.

Via the not so mysterious process of photosynthesis, plants combine carbon dioxide with water and other substances to create carbohydrates, such as wood and sugar, while also releasing free oxygen (O2) as a byproduct.  When left alone, these carbohydrates ultimately decompose into methane (CH4) among other substances.  When burned for various purposes, they cause the release of CO2 and water vapor, plus other products such as carbon monoxide.  When sugars are fermented from being digested by yeast cells, ethanol and carbon dioxide are the primary byproducts.  During a recent supply chain problem, CO2, which was needed to put the fizz in soda pop, was in short supply due to a slowdown in beer brewing.

Many of the photosynthetically produced carbohydrates linger on top of the Earth’s crust.  Some take the form of peat bogs, which are fields of sphagnum moss, that can be harvested directly in places such as Ireland to burn for home heating and electrical generation.  Some of it is also sent to Scotland to burn to distil and flavor scotch whiskey.  Should a bog fall under a blanket of sediment and become subject to geological forces, it may eventually turn into a coal deposit.  Yes, a “fossil” fuel.  Petroleum and natural gas have similar origins.

When CO2 is produced from fossil fuel combustion and is mixed back into the atmosphere, the cycle is completed.  The cycle, however, is interrupted and possibly avoided when certain types of biological activity occur.  Shellfish such as oysters and clams and also coral reef polyps feeding on phytoplankton produce shells and exoskeletons made out of calcium carbonate (CaCO3), which is CO2 added to calcium and a tad more oxygen.  These eventually settle to the bottom of the ocean, and as with peat bogs morphing into coal by way of long-term geological processes, biologic CaCO3 eventually morphs into limestone, which is essentially stable and not likely to re-enter the carbon cycle, at least anytime soon.

Limestone has long been used to make tiles and building blocks, besides classical sculptures.  (Marble is a form of limestone.)  A few thousand years ago, the Romans invented a still more convenient way to use limestone in construction.  Rather than laboriously carve limestone into desired shapes, they instead crushed it into dust, then baked it at high temperature.  The resulting substance was mixed with sand and gravel.  Just before use, water was added to make concrete.  Concrete can be molded and spread into all kinds of useful shapes, from pavement to cathedral domes.  A paragon of concrete used in Roman architecture is the dome of the Pantheon.  Since, back then, they didn’t have steel rebar to reinforce the dome, they instead substituted volcanic pumice for gravel to make the dome a lot lighter.  It remains today, almost two thousand years later, as the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome.

The catch with concrete is that it takes a lot of energy to cook it so it can be re-hydrated at the job site — so much energy that even in “green” California, the burning of coal has been used to make cement.  Meanwhile, as calcium carbonate continues to accumulate on the ocean’s floor, CO2 continues to be taken out of the atmosphere/biomass carbon cycle, at least for a while.

There really isn’t a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere to begin with — about 0.043% of the total, which is less than one part in 2,300.

The point is that some CO2 cycles around, and some gets buried as calcium carbonate.  Some also just oozes up from the volcanic bowels of the Earth.  Since all life, as we know it, is carbon-based, any expansion of the Earth’s biomass would imply a reduction of the ambient CO2 in the atmosphere.  Should those pesky shellfish keep adding to the limestone deposits, while the biomass continues to expand, then CO2 will become less and less available.  That would consequently slow down these processes, fortunately leaving us with no good reason to panic.

Were I to be a demagogue, that would, however, be bad news.

Image: max_gloin via Pixabay, Pixabay License.