How Climate Works. In Discussion with Philip Mulholland about Carbon Isotopes

We all know the story about the king who paraded with no clothes, as though everyone watching on was oblivious to the mistake. It is much the same with sources of C02, I mean C02 from factories versus C02 from natural sources. There is no definitive distinguishing feature.

Yet the IPCC’s official experts and their nodding sycophants will claim otherwise.

The bottom line is, the processes that created the isotopic signatures found in carbon from different fossil fuels are much the same processes at work today, especially in alpine plants, even fish in the sea.

I will be discussing all of this on Thursday 19th June @ 2pm Edinburgh time with geoscientist Philip Mulholland. This will be the sixth Zoom discussion in my series Towards a New Theory of Climate Resilience. You will need to register if you want to listen in for the first hour, and then in the second hour, there will be opportunity to join the discussion.

In order to register for this single session that will be at 11pm Brisbane time, ClICK HERE.

Philip Mulholland is a geoscientist with a profile on ResearchGate, where he is noted for interests spanning botany, meteorology, geology, and geophysics. He has published important research focused on geological and geophysical topics, and also more controversial work on Earth’s energy budget.

Philip has suggested the title be: Carbon Isotopic Fractionation Processes. There are three distinct processes:

1. Kinetic fractionation in methane formation, where microbes preferentially use ¹²C, leading to very negative δ¹³C (e.g., -60.00‰ in methane seep aragonite, citing Buckman et al., 2020).

2. Equilibrium fractionation in carbonate precipitation, where inorganic processes produce less negative or positive δ¹³C (e.g., +4.17‰ to +4.86‰ in Bahamian ooids, citing Geyman et al., 2022).

3. Biological fractionation in plants, with C3 plants (-33.00‰ to -24.00‰) showing stronger fractionation than C4 (-16.00‰ to -10.00‰) or CAM plants (-28.70‰ to -11.60‰).

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The feature image was drawn by the AI program Grok and I’m told by Grok shows a young Philip Mulholland on the deck of a ship in the North Sea, capturing his early career in the petroleum industry … linking Philip’s hands-on work to his expertise in geoscience.