Carbon Dioxide Emissions Are Mostly from the Arctic Ocean

Counterpoint #7. What You Didn’t Know

They speak endlessly about C0₂ and how it is all our fault, the emissions. Meanwhile, I hypothesis that the Arctic’s slow melt is belching CO₂ from organic decomposition like a hibernating bear waking up grumpy!

If I am correct, the implications are significant. For sure, atmospheric levels of CO₂ are likely to continue to go up, perhaps even accelerate, and there is nothing you can do about it.

CSIRO, that is meant to do the science for all Australians, they claim as headlines that emissions of C0₂ from fossil fuels make the largest contribution to climate change — with nay a breadcrumb of data to back it up. As implausible, they go on that 90% of the world’s carbon emissions come from the burning of fossil fuels (https://www.csiro.au/en/research/environmental-impacts/climate-change/Climate-change-QA/Sources-of-CO2).

When I download the available data, it soon becomes obvious that the Arctic Ocean is the main source of the recent global increase in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.

If we assume the signal — the concentration of a gas — will get larger towards the source, then most of the excess carbon dioxide is from the Arctic Ocean and Australia is as irrelevant as Antarctica.

I understand that none of this is common knowledge. In fact, much of what I am going to write below is new, and some of it contracts what we are told about historical levels of C0₂ and temperature.

Let’s thaw this mystery together, a mystery that probably has an origin in natural climate cycles. How unfashionable!

The Arctic was cooling to the 1970s, then the situation reversed.

The Arctic Ocean’s ice cover has shrunk by about 13% per decade since the late 1970s, and permafrost is also thawing at a glacial pace.

This isn’t a sudden flood but a gradual reveal, exposing 1,300-1,600 billion tons of organic carbon locked in frozen soils and shallow undersea shelf sediments. As temperatures rise (perhaps 2°C over recent decades), the ice melts into fresh water, diluting the Arctic Ocean.

This slow thaw, captured in NOAA’s 3D CO₂ map (https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/) with its northern spring spikes, hints at a lot of carbon beneath the ice.

In the Arctic’s shallow undersea shelves (averaging 48-58 meters deep) microbes feast on ancient carbon—dead plants, algae, and muck preserved for millennia.

They break it down through respiration, converting organic carbon (C) into CO₂ and water (H₂O) via aerobic processes, or into CO₂ and methane (CH₄) anaerobically where oxygen is scarce.

Current estimates suggest 50-150 million tons of CO₂-equivalent annually, but as the melt continues, this could rise significantly. That is my hypothesis.

The shallow depths let the CO₂ bubble up fast, amplifying the northern hemisphere’s seasonal signal that is one of increase, year on year, in the seasonal amplitude of C0₂ degassing. But perhaps the situation will reverse soon, as it did in the early 1940s. (CSIRO will tell you atmospheric CO₂ concentrations have been increasing with emissions since 1850, and they are not at all reliable with all the remodelling of the data that they do.)

That is what I have been thinking about, that I am now sharing as my Monday Counterpoint.

Then there is the ocean chemistry I have been learning from Ivan Kennedy, who has been focused on Hawaii and specifically the measurements from Moana Lao the apparent gold standard in global CO₂ measurements.

We are now joint authors on a paper that has been lodged with Cornell University as a preprint, while the next journal knocks it back. You can download and read it here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.06253, entitled ‘A thermal acid calcification cause for seasonal oscillations in the increasing Keeling curve’ by Ivan R. Kennedy, John Runcie, Angus N. Crossan, Ray Ritchie, and Jennifer Marohasy.

It has been from this work with Ivan, and watching the foam at my local beach through summer from the freshwater runoff, that I have had the idea that meltwater isn’t just a passive bystander—it’s acidic relative to seawater!

I’m proposing, the Arctic is a bit more complicated than Moana Loa. While thermal acid calcification may dominate in the central Pacific Ocean as I have written with Ivan, it might coexist with a more dominant regional effect via organic decomposition especially where there is permafrost and shallow shelve interactions in the Arctic Ocean.

Pure water from melting ice has a neutral pH of 7, but as it mixes with CO₂ from decomposition, it will form carbonic acid.

This lowers the pH (to around 6-7 in melt zones), making it more acidic than the Arctic’s typical seawater pH of 8.1. This acidity, I hypothesis, will accelerate the dissolution of any calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) in sediments—releasing more CO₂ as CaCO₃ breaks into calcium (Ca²⁺) and bicarbonate (HCO₃⁻). While CaCO₃ content is low (0.5-5% in shelf sediments), this feedback loop could amplify outgassing, especially where permafrost meets the ocean.

Down Under, by which I mean here in Australia, where the CO₂ signal is almost non-existence considering the global datasets, CSIRO’s human-centric claim feels as implausible as a platypus in a beauty pageant, as reliable as a dingo guarding a pen of sheep, as ridiculous as a wombat winning at high jump—without nay a breadcrumb of data to back it up! And I’m repeating myself.

The Arctic’s contribution, driven by melting decomposition and thaw, is what should be taxed. To be clear, I’m proposing it’s a major source of CO₂ , rivalling human emissions.

Let’s demand an “Arctic Thaw Audit”—with ice-proof sensors, pH probes, and another look at the carbon isotope numbers.

Towards this end, I will be in conversation with geophysicist Philip Mulholland this Thursday, specifically focused on the issue of isotopes that is another nonsense claim used by CSIRO, amongst others, to insist that C0₂ is all your fault.

If you would like to listen into this discussion, you will need to register. The plan is that I will ask Philip questions beginning with 1. what exactly is an isotope, and then 2. is it possible to know whether the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is originally from the burning of a fossil fuel, or perhaps organic decay in the Arctic.

In order, to register, click this link. It is a rather late 11pm where I live, but at a time that suits Philip in Scotland. There is more information about Philip and his interest in carbon isotopic fractionation at my blog, click here.

This will be the sixth zoom webinar in my series ‘Towards a New Theory of Climate Resilience’ and likely to be the last for this year. Next month, I plan instead to begin releasing edited audios from previous zoom webinars, perhaps each month through until the end of this year.