Oceans Giving Back a Little C02. The Good News from Bud Bromley’s Zoom Webinar on ANZAC Day

Carbon dioxide is indeed the ‘stuff of life’, underpinning photosynthesis, boosting plant growth, enhancing agricultural yields, and enabling practical applications in industry. While discussions so often focus on its role in climate change, CO₂’s contributions to life in ecosystems is profound and undeniable, making it a cornerstone of biological and other planetary processes.

CO₂ is a central component of the global carbon cycle, linking the atmosphere, oceans, land, and biosphere. It is cycled through processes like respiration, decomposition, and calcification, as in the Thermal-Acid Calcification Hypothesis (TAC).

Indeed, the vast ocean carbon reservoir, some 50-60 million gigatons of carbonates represents a colossal ‘hoard’ built by calcification over eons, dwarfing atmospheric and terrestrial carbon pools. The release of even a tiny fraction of this carbon as CO₂ due to ocean warming is arguably good news.

In my zoom webinar with Bud Bromley on Friday afternoon (Anzac Day in Australia), it was hypothesised that the oceans are indeed the origin of the increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Further Bud Bromley explained how minuscule this increase is, only measurable because of the sophisticated equipment and non-standard methodology developed by Charles Keeling involving measurement taken at night some 3,600 metres (11,000 feet) up a volcano in the central northern Pacific.

I really appreciated the detail that Bud Bromley went to in our zoom webinar, to explain how dry samples are taken and reported as molecules per million molecules of air (ppm) after water vapour is removed. For example, 420 ppm means 420 CO₂ molecules per million dry air molecules.

Water vapor is removed because its concentration varies significantly (0–4% of air volume) due to humidity, temperature, and weather, and so the inclusion of water vapour would not make for such a neat seasonal and annual pattern in CO₂ increase, particularly given C02 is such a minuscule percentage of air relative to other gases such as oxygen and water vapour.

Bud Bromley repeated made the point that the annual atmospheric increase as measured at Mauna Loa is currently only a fraction of the total atmospheric concentration that is measured in parts per million. The increase is some 0.5% annually that is one third of the seasonal variation.

Bud Bromley is not only a chemist, with a significant knowledge of ocean chemistry, he is also a keen scuba diver, and our discussion began with reference to Boyle’s Law that is why scuba divers must not hold their breathe on ascent least they explode their lungs, and from that there was explanation of the relevance of Boyle’s Law and the Ideal Gas Law and Henry’s Law to knowing that current increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide are natural, and from the vast reservoir of carbon in our oceans.

It is surprising that this fundamental law, Henry’s Law, critical to understanding how CO₂ solubility in the oceans affects atmospheric levels, that Henry’s Law is not considered relevant by the IPCC reports, or even discussed in the report by Will Happer’s C02 Coalition authored by Ferdinand Engelbeen that claims to provide multiple lines of proof that human emissions are responsible for increasing atmospheric concentrations, while their hypothesis is that the ocean is a net sink.

Henry’s Law is key to understanding how much gas dissolves in a liquid, like CO₂ in seawater. It says the amount of gas dissolved is proportional to the pressure of that gas above the liquid:

C = k * P

C is the concentration of dissolved gas, P is the gas’s pressure in the air, and k is a constant that depends on the gas and temperature. If the ocean warms due to natural changes in circulation, k gets smaller, meaning less CO₂ stays dissolved, and more escapes to the atmosphere.

This is central to my hypothesis, leveraging Henry’s Law directly by linking temperature-driven changes in calcite solubility to shifts in seawater CO₂ solubility.

There have been various claims made, not during the zoom webinar, but on social media etcetera since I’ve begun promoting TAC, that Henry’s Law has limited direct application because of the ocean’s complex, non-equilibrium chemistry, at last acknowledging this may be drive by carbonate buffering, calcium supersaturation, and biotic processes. For sure, true equilibrium is unattainable due to continuous inputs (e.g., limestone dissolution, runoff) and the dynamic interplay of forward and reverse reactions. However, dismissing Henry’s Law is nonsense, as it remains critical to understanding the air-sea flux, in combination with kinetic and carbonate systems.

We had just over 80 guests register for the zoom webinar that was the fourth in my new series Towards a New Theory of Climate Resilience. Just under 40 joined the live event.

I am so grateful to everyone who did joined in. As something of a last minute change of plan, I made the second hour more panel discussion than Q&A, as I was so pleased to see Ferdinand Engelbeen join the webinar and I was keen to understand in more detail his disagreement with Bud Bromley’s thesis; the disagreement has been long running and at times acrimonious. I was keen to understand this, because Bud’s thesis focused on Henry’s law are critical to my emerging new Theory of Climate Resilience. This new theory will not focus on CO₂ as a driver of climate (not at all), but nor will I dismiss CO₂ because it is fundamental to life on Earth and its abundance in the atmosphere and the oceans does vary with climate. This is important to understand if we are curious about life on Earth, and how life changes sometimes dramatically because of natural climate cycles.

I was interested to hear that Ferdinand did not dispute Bud’s figures or engage with Henry’s Law or other aspects of the ocean’s physical chemistry that was the focus of this zoom webinar. Rather Ferdinand continued with his narrative that essentially draws a correlation between human emissions of CO₂ and increasing atmospheric levels of CO₂ somewhat complicated by respiration from northern hemisphere forests as a source while insisting, despite the Mauna Loa data, that oceans are a net sink. Ferdinand’s report can be downloaded from the CO₂Coalition website and is entitled ‘The Human Contribution to Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide’ (December 2024).

Then there were Ferdinand Engelbeen’s comments during the seminar about oxygen, as though it is only produced by northern hemisphere forests. In fact, phytoplankton’s oxygen production is more significant, as their dual role in photosynthesis and calcification significantly influences ocean degassing, potentially overshadowing abiotic processes like TAC in productive regions like the Great Barrier Reef that is also a net emitter of carbon dioxide as I will explain in a future webinar.

The interplay of external (e.g., solar-driven temperature changes) and internal (e.g., phytoplankton blooms, ocean circulation) drivers further complicates our understanding of these important processes. Seasonal cycles, as emphasised by TAC, are critical, but longer-term drivers (e.g., upwelling, climate oscillations) also shape degassing. Phytoplankton’s dominance in oxygen production is under appreciated, certainly their role in public discourse is largely ignored compared to forests. These are all topics I want to explore going forward as I further develop my new Theory of Climate Resilience.

The next zoom meeting as part of this series is planned for Saturday 24th May across three different time zones with three different sessions, more details to be announced in the next week or so. This webinar on 24th May will be less formal in structure than my interview with Bud Bromley, or the panel session than followed; at least that is the plan. (I have received various emails requesting more potential for interaction between participants for future webinars.)

Also, I have tentative agreement from Ferdinand Engelbeen for a webinar on Saturday 12 July, at which I will attempt to understand his perspective that so far, I mostly see as unsophisticated curve-fitting though I do appreciate that his perspective accords with not only the C02 Coalition reports but also the IPCC. I appreciate that my view, and also Bud Bromley’s, are in the minority.

I am grateful to Bud Bromley, and many others including Brendan Godwin, Alex Pope, Robert Weller, Case Smit, Philip Mulholland, Ric Werme, Christopher Game, Ivan Kennedy who did join the zoom webinar on Friday and took the time to consider our very different perspective.

William Henry, confirmed by John Dalton and thousands of other scientists since them, discovered that a gas partitions between a liquid and a volume of gas in contact with that liquid, and that the partition ratio is a physical property like a boiling point or specific heat; these are properties which are not changed by the amount of matter present. Henry demonstrated that the partition ratio is a function of the absolute temperature of the liquid. That is, colder liquids absorb more gas than they emit and warmer liquids emit more gas than they absorb.

In other words, adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels does not increase the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A carbon dioxide concentration in air which exceeds the Henry’s Law ratio for a given water temperature will be absorbed by water.

Any carbon dioxide removed from air will be replaced from water and water containing surfaces everywhere until the Henry’s ratio is restored for the local water temperature. Life evolved under this dynamic condition.

Quoting Bud Bromley.

For further reading Bud recommends: https://henryslaw.org
There is also more information at https://budbromley.blog/

When Bud and I agreed on the date and time (2pm on 25th April) I did not realise that was ANZAC Day afternoon. I did begin our zoom webinar acknowledging the sacrifices of my grandfathers, and also my uncle John Edward Turnour.

ANZAC Day is a national day of remembrance for those who served and died in wars, conflicts and peace keeping operations. My great uncle John Edward Turnour, enlisted along with three brothers on 1st September 1914. He died from wounds in a field in Belgium/Polgon Wood on 28th September 1917 and he is buried at a Commonwealth War Cemetery in Flanders.

I am sure that John Edward Turnour would not have minded us discussing climate science on ANZAC Day afternoon. He would not approve, though, of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, or equivalent institutions in the UK, US and Europe, also changing the historical temperatures from back then. For sure it was hotter in many places for weeks at a time during the 1930s, and there were some very cold winters during the 1940s.

One of the most pervasive effects of weather on World War I was the relentless rain. At the Western Front, the relentless rain transformed trenches into mud and misery. Torrential rainfall in 1915, 1916 and 1918 had a decisive role in major battles such as Verdun and the Somme, contributing to the death of over a million soldiers. Many times, large ridges of high pressure over Russia would produce extreme cold in the eastern part of Europe and result in a repetitive pattern of low pressure systems for western Europe, bringing little to no sunshine and heavy rainfall.