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Photosynthesizers (plants, algae, etc.) have chloroplasts that selectively fix lighter isotopes of carbon. Therefore, the act of burning their remnants (logs or in this case fossil fuels) releases CO2 with a mass that is a neutron or two lighter than the CO2 coming from other sources, including volcanoes.

The industrial revolution really got going around 1850. This correlates both with the beginning of our CO2 climb and with the dilution of our Carbon-13 percentage in the atmosphere as Carbon-12 percentage has risen.

So we have a so-called diminishing "C13/C12 ratio" for atmospheric CO2. That's new to this period. How can we know that? Because even though we never bothered to detect atmospheric CO2 masses before the last few decades, nature had all the while been producing fixed and dated records, waiting for us to become keen to notice.

Specifically, this can be well dated by the carbon make-up of tree rings and corals. These are organisms that build durable structures which can be read, almost like consecutive pages of a historical record, where instead of alphabets and syntax we see the chemical make-up of the environment as it existed when those structures/layers were built.

The record for trees that are aged to hundreds of years or older show a very stable C13/C12 ratio prior to ~1850. And then a sudden, consistent shift with C13/C12 lowering ever since. Perhaps there are other explanations than mankind, but volcanoes at least don't fit the isotopic facts.

Meeeeeeeanwhile: even if a person rigidly denounces anthropogenic climate change despite the evidence, being good to the planet "just because" also happens to be responsible. It also fits all kinds of identities, whether you're a left-leaning übercrunchy hippie believing it because your healing crystals said so or a right-leaning evangelical aiming to be a good steward of god's creation. It's also a philosophy that keeps our oceans low in plastic, our cities low in smog, and our drinking water low in toxins. Even if you disagree on the cause, caring (even caring A LOT) isn't that controversial.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcanoes-or-humans/

This argument that human-caused carbon emissions are merely a drop in the bucket compared to greenhouse gases generated by volcanoes has been making its way around the rumor mill for years. And while it may sound plausible, the science just doesn’t back it up.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the world’s volcanoes, both on land and undersea, generate about 200 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, while our automotive and industrial activities cause some 24 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year worldwide. Despite the arguments to the contrary, the facts speak for themselves: Greenhouse gas emissions from volcanoes comprise less than one percent of those generated by today’s human endeavors.



I've seen this multiple sites.

https://psmag.com/environment/the-planet-now-has-more-trees-than-it-did-35-years-ago

The key thing about trees and CO2 is that trees are close to net neutral.  When they grow they soak up CO2 obviously, the stuff we see in a tree is nearly all a combination of CO2 and water.  But when they die, the lie on the ground and rot and all that CO2 is returned to the air.

If they get buried, this changes the equation of course.  I have not done the calculations, but rather than try to remove CO2 from the air artificially (CO2 scrubbing), it could make more sense to grow them and then bury them where they won't rot.

Or make paper out of them and put than in sanitary landfills.

The idea of adding iron to portions of the ocean is interesting to me.

Algae require some effort to grow well, oddly enough.  Otherwise it tends to mat and suffocate itself.

Ocean currents and waves take care of this issue and the phyoplanta that die fall to the bottom of the pond and turn into limestone, which is a pretty good sink for carbon.

Algae require some effort to grow well, oddly enough.  Otherwise it tends to mat and suffocate itself.

Ocean currents and waves take care of this issue and the phyoplanta that die fall to the bottom of the pond and turn into limestone, which is a pretty good sink for carbon.

I'm nodding along to most of this. But agitation of fluids is not a foreign concept to biological laboratories. Outside the oceans, scale would be more of an issue, admittedly, but at less cost to human safety (in terms of swimming/boating through maitotoxin or global crashes in fish population due to toxic blooms). 

Also, in order to proportionately increase limestone formation, you'd have to be sure that iron doping  didn't disproportionately bloom Cyanobacteria or Prochlorophytes, which do not have carbonate shells, over the eukaryotic plankton, which do.