It must know something. And in the wacky world of climate, it must be bad, right? Hence when you read in New Scientist that “Rivers around the world are leaking ancient carbon back into the atmosphere” you just know that the settled science will be worse than the settled scientists thought and humans will be to blame. Oh yeah. “The finding has taken scientists by surprise and suggests human activities are damaging the natural landscape far more than first thought.” QED. Or not, because as Charles Rotter writes on Watts Up With That, it actually deals a body blow to an idea he too had long accepted, “the long-standing assumption that carbon isotope ratios (δ¹³C and Δ¹⁴C) provide unambiguous proof that the rise in atmospheric CO2 is almost entirely anthropogenic.” Because this old-tyme CO2 has the same carbon isotope signature as the stuff from fossil fuels… but it is natural. And here’s the kicker: Rotter admits he was wrong and apologizes for believing and repeating something mistaken. Can you imagine what would happen if that habit leaked out into the world of climate science orthodoxy?

Unfortunately here New Scientist earns its name and not in a good way. Old scientist worked from hypothesis via evidence to acceptance or rejection. New scientist works from politics via evidence back to politics. Their article says:

“Researchers already knew rivers released carbon dioxide and methane as part of the global carbon cycle – the short-term movement of gases that happens as living things grow and decompose. They are thought to emit around 2 gigatonnes of this carbon each year.”

But a new study by the University of Bristol’s Josh Dean and colleagues says actually about 60 percent of those emissions are millennia old.

So first surprise:

“Ancient carbon is trapped in rocks, peat bogs and wetlands. The findings suggest that as much as 1 gigatonne of it is being released back into the atmosphere each year through rivers. That means plants and soils are probably removing around 1 gigatonne more CO₂ from the atmosphere each year than first thought, to counteract this impact.”

Though if you have been following our work you already knew that the numbers thrown around for the carbon cycle are speculation disguised as calculation. And surely more sequestration is good if you fear the dreaded “carbon pollution”. But no, because when it comes to climate alarmism nothing is good. Instead (drum roll please):

“The pressing question now is why rivers are releasing so much ancient carbon. It could be due to climate change and other human activities disrupting the natural landscape, says Dean, pointing out that the carbon being released by rivers seems to have been ‘getting older’ since the 1990s.”

Now this claim is bunk, and for an obvious reason. The story already said:

“‘This is the first global synthesis of how old CO₂ emissions from rivers are, which is pretty cool,’ says Taylor Maavara at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York.”

In which case how do we know it’s “getting older”? Oh see well um we’re all going to die, maybe:

“rising temperatures caused by climate change could be triggering the release of carbon from thawing permafrost, or accelerating the rate of rock weathering. Other activities, such as the draining of peatlands or drying out of wetlands, could also be contributing. Dean stresses that more work is needed to determine the extent to which human activity is driving this process, and how the release of carbon is changing over time.”

Yeah, yeah, must get more grants is indeed settled science. As is could and might adding up to a crisis. But now for something the author of that piece did not think to do, namely look at the other side. Namely Rotter’s view.

He had already commented on this study that:

“The recent Nature study titled ‘Old carbon routed from land to the atmosphere by global river systems’ is not only a rigorous piece of scientific work – it’s also a spectacular indictment of the so-called ‘settled science’ of climate change. This 2025 paper is a flaming arrow into the heart of carbon cycle certainty, unearthing yet another inconvenient truth: over half of the CO2 emitted from rivers comes from carbon sources that are hundreds to thousands of years old – not from recent fossil fuel emissions or current biological activity.”

And frankly researchers into climate should thank anyone who attempts to free them from the shackles of this entirely political claim about “settled science”. Though they probably didn’t. Meanwhile they kept shouting and he kept thinking. And a day later he had something important to add, including that weird bit where he admits to error and repents:

“For years, I’ve maintained that anyone challenging the anthropogenic origin of the CO2 increase had to address the isotope fingerprint argument before their work could be taken seriously. Submissions that didn’t engage with the Δ¹⁴C or δ¹³C evidence were declined, often with little further discussion. That confidence, I now recognize, was misplaced.”

How misplaced? Very:

“Let that sink in. Climate models and carbon budgets, paraded as settled science by every bureaucrat, green politician, and eco-apocalyptic influencer on Earth, have been built on the foundational assumption that riverine CO2 is part of a contemporary, short-term biosphere loop. Turns out, they’ve been routing old ghosts through a new story.”

And it really does show not that just as we thought it’s worse than we thought and getting worse still. On the contrary:

“Over half of these emissions are from old carbon stores – carbon that, until now, was presumed stable, buried, and irrelevant to modern emission tallies. In other words, nature has its own deeply entrenched carbon leaks, and our modern instruments are just now getting around to noticing them.”

Right. We only just noticed it, so contra New Scientist this study doesn’t prove something we already knew is getting worse as we knew. It proves we didn’t know what we thought we did, which isn’t a great reason to keep saying we knew it all along.

How bad is it? Very. As in house-of-cards-collapses bad:

“The entire idea of a ‘carbon budget’ depends on the assumption that we can accurately track all natural and anthropogenic carbon sources and sinks. The paper’s authors explicitly state: ‘This previously unrecognized release…equates to 1.2 ± 0.3 Pg C yr⁻¹, similar in magnitude to terrestrial net ecosystem exchange’. Translation: We were missing a carbon leak as big as the net carbon uptake of all land-based ecosystems. That’s like losing a financial ledger entry equivalent to your annual revenue and still claiming your books balance. This isn’t a rounding error. This is a previously invisible carbon flux at a planetary scale – entirely omitted from mainstream Earth system models.”

Oh darn. Or not, because it seems to have bounced off the alarmists entirely except those writing fatuous pieces about how it confirms our preconceptions by refuting them. And speaking of your ledger, Rotter goes on:

“Imagine building a trillion-dollar global policy framework on a dataset that left out half the equation. It would be funny if it weren’t tragic.”

Here at CDN we beg to differ slightly on that point, because we’re great believers with G.K. Chesterton that the opposite of “funny” isn’t “serious”, it’s “not funny”. But yes, a lot of people’s research grants, and economy-smashing fantasy enterprises, are going to go bust in a hurry if this kind of thing, um, leaks out.

Which helps explain why the New Scientist piece went into that vague speculation about how maybe humans are adding yet more carbon by shaking up old rivers or whatever dumb clumsy wicked thing we’re doing, even though Rotter of all things quotes the actual study that:

“Whether or not anthropogenic perturbation has increased the leak of old carbon…remains a notable knowledge gap”.

But no. It must not be. Hence, Rotter adds:

“The study’s authors call for a reexamination of the terrestrial carbon sink and the role of rivers, noting: ‘This fundamentally changes our inference of where anthropogenic carbon resides within the main Earth system carbon reservoirs’. But don’t expect the IPCC, Net Zero campaigners, or ESG investors to acknowledge this. Their policy steamrollers are already in motion, powered by inertia and political leverage rather than scientific humility.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. It’s a sockdolager, all right. But that old climate alarmist industry just keeps rolling, it just keeps rolling along.

P.S. Our spellchecker didn’t recognize sockdolager either. We don’t care. It’s a great old word that leaked out of our pedantry.