How a 1955 Guess Became the FALSE Foundation of Human-Caused Climate Science — and How One Paper in 2020 Cemented It as Unquestionable ‘Truth’
Suess proposed two mechanisms — fossil fuel combustion and natural oceanic exchange — joined by “and,” with no claim about which one mattered more.
The subsequent literature took Suess’s sentence, deleted the second mechanism (oceanic exchange), promoted the first (fossil fuels) from “can be attributed to” to “is caused by,” and named the result “the Suess effect” — as though Suess himself had identified fossil fuels as the sole cause. He had not. He had offered a two-part conjecture with no quantitative commitment to either part. But the simplified version was easier to cite, easier to teach, easier to build models around, and easier to fund. So the simplified version won. By the 1970s, it was in the textbooks. By the 1990s, it was in the IPCC reports. By the 2000s, it was treated as so obvious that stating it without evidence was considered sufficient.
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The remarkable thing about Graven et al. (2020) is that the authors are fully aware of the tool that would have tested their premise. They discuss Keeling plots — the very method Koutsoyiannis used — in Section 6 of their paper. They describe how the Keeling plot “quantifies the isotopic signature of a CO₂ source or sink by manipulating the CO₂ and ¹³CO₂ mass balance equations so that the isotopic signature is given by the intercept or slope of a regression fit.” They cite applications of this method at local and regional scales.
But they never apply it globally. They never ask what the Keeling plot intercept looks like for the entire atmosphere over the industrial period. They never check whether the net input signature has shifted. The one diagnostic that could confirm or refute their central claim — and it is a simple calculation, requiring only the data they already have — is absent from the paper. Instead, they proceed directly from assumption to model to projection, treating the assumption as established background knowledge too obvious to require verification.