For decades, the climatist establishment has tried to convince you that mankind’s contribution to atmospheric CO₂ is a planetary-scale crime. They talk in headlines, not in hard numbers. They trade in fear, not in math. But the numbers are not mysterious — they’re in the open. They come from physical accounting records: barrels of oil burned, tonnes of coal shipped, bags of cement produced, acres of forest cleared. No “consensus,” no computer models, no stitched-together proxy reconstructions — just hard tonnage.
Step One: The Known Human Contribution
From the dawn of the Industrial Revolution (~1750) through 2023, humanity has burned fossil fuels and produced cement equal to about 1,710 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO₂. Add to that land-use changes — deforestation, agriculture, and other disturbances — at roughly 680 Gt CO₂, and you arrive at a cumulative human emission total of 2,390 Gt CO₂.
A gigatonne is a billion metric tonnes, so our Industrial Age total is 2.39 trillion metric tonnes of CO₂ pushed into the air and oceans. This is not speculation — it’s basic economic and industrial bookkeeping. Whether you’re a coal baron or a Greenpeace accountant, the tonnage comes from the same ledgers.
Step Two: How That Stacks Against Nature
Here’s the part the climate fear-mongers avoid like sunlight to a vampire. Earth’s own carbon cycle is immense, moving colossal quantities of CO₂ through respiration, decay, ocean outgassing, volcanic activity, wildfires, weathering, and permafrost. These are gross flows — in the preindustrial world, they balanced each other over centuries. Over the same 1750–2023 window, these natural processes cycled about 169,085 gigatonnes of CO₂.
Now do the division:
Fossil fuels + cement only:
\frac{1,710}{169,085} \times 100 \approx 1.01\%
Including land-use change:
\frac{2,390}{169,085} \times 100 \approx 1.41\%
That’s it. All the smoke and fire over CO₂, and the entire human Industrial Revolution amounts to roughly one percent of the gross natural carbon flux over the same time frame.
Step Three: The Margin of Error
The best estimates for those natural fluxes have an uncertainty of about ±20% — which means the true number could be tens of thousands of gigatonnes higher or lower. And here’s the kicker: that margin of error alone is larger than the entire human contribution in percentage terms. Our 1–1.4% slice lives inside the uncertainty band.
Now, this does not mean human CO₂ vanishes without effect. In a delicately balanced system, even a small imbalance can change the stock over time — just like overfilling a bathtub even if the faucet is tiny. But it does mean the sheer scale of nature’s CO₂ engine dwarfs humanity’s, and any honest discussion must start with that proportion.
Step Four: The Reality Check
The entire modern climate narrative depends on you forgetting that natural CO₂ movement is measured in hundreds of gigatonnes per year. They want you to think only in terms of the net imbalance — and only after they’ve excluded or downplayed the size of the natural denominator. That is how they make “1 percent” look like “100 percent.” It’s not science. It’s stagecraft.
The math is not on their side. But the megaphone is.
Sources: Global Carbon Project; CDIAC historical emissions database; FAO land-use change estimates; IPCC AR6 WG1 natural carbon cycle tables; USGS volcanic gas emission reports; NOAA ocean-atmosphere CO₂ exchange data.
