Wood Romances

Every once in a while a paper gets published in a low-to-no impact journal suggesting that the increase in CO2 concentrations was caused by the increase in global temperatures and not by human emissions. There are several blogs and unpublished manuscripts that make similar claims. Now for sure, since CO2 is less soluble in warmer water, increasing sea surface temperatures, so increasing temperature does cause an ocean-to-atmosphere CO2 flux. But can this explain why CO2 levels are increasing? Some say yes. The most recent paper [1] was published in a no-name MDPI journal called Sci, and Judith Curry promoted it on her blog .  Papers and arguments like this are obviously nonsense, but this paper is a little unique in that it includes the very evidence that proves its central thesis wrong. The following chart comes from the paper. It takes data from the IPCC AR6 accounting of the carbon budget, showing the ocean, land and human sources and sinks. From the numbers the authors included in

W. A. van Wijngaarden and William Happer (WH) have periodically attempted to circumvent publishing manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals and have instead taken to uploading manuscripts on the arXiv. As I understand it, the intended use for the arXiv is to allow pre-published manuscripts to be read and evaluated by scientists before the peer-review process is completed. This gives scientists faster access to the newest research, but with the caveat that these manuscripts may need to be revised significantly before being published, once going through the peer review process. Some may not even be published at all, so scientists often look at these manuscripts with interest but also with a grain of salt until the final version passes peer review. WH are apparently using the arXiv to store manuscripts for which they have no intention of submitting to any peer-reviewed journal. The manuscripts are formatted to look like scientific papers, but they will never see the light of day in an academ