Never mind fighting climate change. Or adapting to it. The Washington Post surveys the cool spring and general lack of crisis around it and says it’s all over, we passed the tipping point and are all going to die. “The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere last year grew at the fastest rate in recorded history – a dramatic spike that scientists fear may indicate that Earth’s ecosystems are so stressed by warming they can no longer absorb much of the pollution humanity emits.” Never mind global greening. Plants are all dead etc. and so forth blah blah blah.

Of course to a journalist with professional heatstroke everything looks like CO2, so instead of admitting that (a) government policies to limit GHG emissions failed or, in much of the world, were never even attempted and (b) nature is just weird, the Post concludes that we did ourselves in:

“Though the vast majority of planet-warming gases come from people burning fossil fuels, a separate study released Tuesday suggests that last year’s sudden spike was likely driven by a different force: the deterioration of rainforests and other land ecosystems amid soaring global temperatures.”

Among other things this sentence alone reveals that the people newspapers choose to comment on climate do not have a background in climate, formal or informal, and have no real interest in getting one. In fact the “vast majority of planet-warming gases” come from nature; despite all the hoohah the carbon cycle continues to consist of 95% natural and 5% human or thereabouts.

BTW do not assume that just because the diagrams contain numbers in red anyone knows with any real degree of exactitude what they actually are, not least because various cartoonish depictions of the cycle contain quite different numbers, even within the same article. And do not assume the person who wrote this article, their “Climate and science reporter”, knows or cares about such things, since she has a “B.S. in International Culture and Politics” from Georgetown. (We would not have advised them to call it that, but evidently it is a “Bachelor of Science” though how one gets such a thing in “International Culture and Politics” is beyond the capacity of parody to illuminate.)

In any event nuance isn’t exactly her stock in trade. She’s more in the “experts say” line, implying that everyone who’s anyone agrees with her. Including that old chestnut that:

“The land and oceans have historically taken up about half of the greenhouse gases people emit.”

Admittedly then-Prince Charles said the same thing in his book. But it really makes no sense, and not only because it’s a suspiciously round number. There’s also the question of why that figure would not vary as the amount of CO2 released by humans increases, and of how nature tells ours from theirs and thus can harmoniously and effortlessly absorb all the sweet creamy natural stuff and spit out the sour lumpy human kind. A much more logical approach would be to look at the total CO2 emitted by natural processes from oceans degassing to plants decaying, and the far smaller fraction humans give off, and then at the total absorbed, and conclude that nature has, say, absorbed 97.5% of all the carbon given off without fear or favour, and that 2.5% has accumulated.

It would then be an interesting question why a certain amount accumulates. It could have to do with lags in the natural cycle, which after all is huge and complex not simple and busted. But such things are not for the legacy media, which think all the natural carbon is absorbed, whatever that quantity may be, and half the human stuff is, whatever that quantity may be, because um uh science is hard.

Thus instead of subtlety or genuine curiosity we get this hooey:

“The preliminary analysis published Tuesday shows how extreme drought and raging wildfires unleashed huge amounts of carbon from forests last year, effectively canceling out any pollution they might have absorbed. While not final, the findings have sparked concern among scientists who have been tracking the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere for years.”

So in fact it’s just one paper making tentative suggestions. And unreasonable ones since, we know, there’s been no trend in drought that the IPCC can detect in recent decades, and wildfires are actually far less common and massive today than they were two or three centuries ago.

In trying not to admit that nobody actually knows what happened or why, the author writes:

“Nor do researchers think the rising carbon concentrations came from the ocean, which has historically absorbed about 25 percent of the pollution that people emit. Carbon dioxide usually moves from the atmosphere to the ocean when it is taken up by photosynthetic plankton or becomes dissolved in seawater; scientists have not yet observed significant changes in either process.”

But leaving aside that the relevant question here might well be carbon dioxide moving from the ocean to the atmosphere, since it is well-known among people who actually follow climate science and indeed basic chemistry that warmer oceans can dissolve less of the stuff, where did we suddenly get this figure that the oceans historically absorb just a quarter of the “pollution that people emit” if nature as a whole absorbs half? And why, again, this highly improbably round number?

Incredibly, it gets worse:

“Carbon sinks on land are especially vulnerable, researchers say, because they rely on biological processes that can change a lot year to year. When growing conditions are good, plants will suck up billions of tons of carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. This carbon is then locked away in wood or buried in the soil, where it can stay sequestered for centuries.”

Riiight. But as we know, and if you don’t then see our video on the subject, the planet has greened dramatically in the last 40 years. So in the world of mere facts, rather than “experts say” or “some small group of scientists guessed wildly”, these biological processes are on the whole going very strong indeed given the outstanding “growing conditions” of more CO2 and more warmth, so instead of “breaking down” and dooming us all, Earth’s ecosystems are booming.

Still, if you like doom and gloom, the Washington Post serves it up regularly, as carbonated pablum.