What took two billion years to build is being reversed in two centuries. This is not a political opinion. It is high school chemistry.
This is the first of three posts on climate change. We will return to our regular coverage of the enablers afterward - though, as you will see, the two subjects are not unrelated.
We usually write about people - the senators who say “I am concerned” and then confirm, the generals who pull their punches, the cabinet officers who know better and stay quiet. The human architecture of enabling.
Climate change has a different kind of quisling problem. The people enabling the denial are human, but what is being denied is chemistry. And chemistry, unlike a senator, does not negotiate.
Before we get to the enablers - and we will - we need to establish what they are enabling the denial of. Not as a matter of opinion. As a matter of documented, peer-reviewed, ninth-grade science.
Where Oxygen Came From
Most people think of the atmosphere as a permanent feature of the planet. It is not. It is the product of two billion years of biological and chemical work - and it is possible to undo that work far faster than it was done.
For the first half of Earth’s existence, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. The air was a thick mix of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen - hostile to virtually every form of life that exists today. What changed was photosynthesis. Microscopic organisms learned to consume CO2 and sunlight and exhale oxygen as a byproduct. Over hundreds of millions of years, they charged the atmosphere like a slow battery.
But for that oxygen to stay in the air, the carbon they stripped from the CO2 had to go somewhere permanent. And it did.
Between roughly 360 and 300 million years ago - the Carboniferous period, named for what it left behind - vast forests covered the low-lying swamps of what is now Europe, North America, and Asia. When those trees died, they fell into oxygen-poor water and were buried before they could fully decompose.
The carbon stayed underground. The oxygen stayed in the sky.
Atmospheric oxygen peaked at around 35 percent - compared to 21 percent today. Insects grew to the size of hawks. The buried forests became coal. That coal is what we have been burning since the Industrial Revolution.
The oxygen you are breathing right now is the legacy of forests that died 300 million years ago. The coal we are burning is their carbon. We are running the process in reverse.
The Chemistry of Reversal
When we dig up coal, oil, and natural gas, we are excavating that ancient buried carbon. When we burn it, we are combining it with atmospheric oxygen - the same oxygen those forests produced - and releasing it as CO2. This is not a theory or a model or a projection. It is a chemical equation taught in every high school on the planet.
Carbon plus oxygen yields carbon dioxide. Every ton of carbon burned produces a mathematically precise increase in atmospheric CO2. The only variables are how fast and how much.
The current CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is approximately 425 parts per million - higher than at any point in at least the last 800,000 years, and almost certainly in the last three million. Before industrialization it was around 280 parts per million. That increase - 52 percent in roughly 200 years - represents the carbon released from roughly 375 billion tons of fossil fuels burned since 1750.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It traps heat. More of it means more heat trapped. This too is not a theory. It is physics established in the 1850s by a woman named Eunice Newton Foote, and independently confirmed by John Tyndall shortly after. The mechanism has been understood for 170 years.
The debate among scientists ended decades ago. What you are watching is not a scientific debate. It is a political performance staged on behalf of the people who profit from the burning.
The State of the Consensus
Between 97 and 99.9 percent of peer-reviewed climate scientists agree that climate change is happening and that human burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause. This is not a close call. In medicine, structural engineering, or aviation, a consensus of that magnitude would be treated as settled fact. No engineer designs a bridge that ignores gravity because a handful of outliers question Newton.
The manufactured appearance of a 50-50 debate is itself a documented strategy. Internal documents from major fossil fuel companies - Exxon, Shell, and others - show that their own scientists reached conclusions consistent with the scientific consensus as early as the 1970s and 1980s. The public-facing denial campaign came later, modeled explicitly on the tobacco industry’s playbook for manufacturing doubt.
We are not re-litigating that history here. It has been re-litigated extensively elsewhere. What we are noting is that the people currently stripping sensors off satellites, purging the words “climate change” from government websites, and defunding the agencies that measure what is happening to our atmosphere are operating in a tradition with a documented origin and a documented purpose.
What Is Currently Being Dismantled
The administration has moved systematically to reduce the United States’ ability to measure its own atmosphere. The specific actions are documented and on the public record:
NASA planned to decommission the Orbiting Carbon Observatories - OCO-2 and OCO-3 - the only federal satellites specifically built to track greenhouse gas concentrations. Both are in good condition and operating at low cost. The standalone satellite would be allowed to burn up in the atmosphere. Scientists who developed the missions described the plan as taking the United States “out of the information-generating game.” Congress has so far resisted full defunding, but the administration continues to press.
The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program - operating since the 1960s and providing roughly 50 percent of all available microwave data for hurricane forecasting - terminated its data distribution in mid-2025. Meteorologists called it “insanity.” It happened in the middle of hurricane season.
NOAA’s Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database - the primary public record of major weather events and their economic costs - was quietly shuttered. The website now carries a banner stating it will no longer be updated.
The terms “climate change” and “global warming” have been systematically removed from the mission statements and public-facing websites of NASA, NOAA, the EPA, and the Department of Defense.
At least 4,000 NASA employees and 1,500 NOAA staffers have left or been forced out - cuts of roughly 20 percent at each agency. The administration has proposed eliminating NOAA’s entire research arm.
“The principle seems to be that if we stop measuring climate change it will just disappear from the American consciousness.” - Michael Mann, climate scientist, University of Pennsylvania
Why This Belongs in a Series About Quislings
Our series is about the people with the power, the information, and the constitutional authority to object - and who choose not to. Climate is the largest example of that pattern in human history.
The science is not in dispute among people who study it. The economic consequences of inaction are not in dispute among people who model them. The specific financial interests being protected by denial and delay are documented - in corporate filings, in lobbying disclosures, in the fossil fuel industry’s own internal research.
What is happening now - the dismantling of the measurement infrastructure, the purging of the vocabulary, the defunding of the agencies - is not a policy disagreement about how to respond to climate change. It is an Orwellian attempt to prevent the public from seeing how far along the process already is.
Breaking the thermometer does not cure the fever.
It just means you don’t know how sick you are until it’s harder to do anything about it.
Next in this series: The Latitude Trap and Its Consequences - why civilization was built for a climate that no longer exists, and what the bill looks like when it comes due.
If this matters to you, send it to someone who is still on the fence.
Notes
On the Carboniferous period and atmospheric oxygen: National Geographic, “Carboniferous Period” www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/carboniferous
On current and pre-industrial CO2 levels: NOAA Climate.gov, “Climate Change: Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” (updated 2025) www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide (Current level: 422.8 ppm in 2024, up from 280 ppm pre-industrial. Rate of increase is 100 times faster than any previous natural increase.)
The Keeling Curve, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego keelingcurve.ucsd.edu
On Eunice Newton Foote: American Physical Society, “August 1856: Eunice Newton Foote and the Greenhouse Effect” www.aps.org/apsnews/2023/07/carbon-dioxide-atmosphere-eunice-foote
NOAA Climate.gov, “Happy 200th Birthday to Eunice Foote, Hidden Climate Science Pioneer” www.climate.gov/news-features/features/happy-200th-birthday-eunice-foote-hidden-climate-science-pioneer
Public Domain Review, “First Paper to Link CO2 and Global Warming, by Eunice Foote (1856)” https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/first-paper-to-link-co2-and-global-warming-by-eunice-foote-1856/
On scientific consensus (97-99.9%): Cook et al., “Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming,” Environmental Research Letters, 2016 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002
On NASA OCO satellite decommissioning: CNN, “The perfectly fine, already-paid-for satellites Trump wants to destroy in a fiery atmospheric reentry,” August 13, 2025 www.cnn.com/2025/08/13/climate/nasa-satellites-trump-budget-cuts-weather
NPR, “Trump administration takes aim at satellite that measures carbon dioxide and crops,” August 4, 2025 www.npr.org/2025/08/04/nx-s1-5453731/nasa-carbon-dioxide-satellite-mission-threatened
PBS NewsHour, “Trump moves to end NASA missions measuring carbon dioxide and plant health,” August 7, 2025 www.pbs.org/newshour/science/trump-moves-to-end-nasa-missions-measuring-carbon-dioxide-and-plant-health
On NOAA Billion-Dollar Disasters database shutdown and workforce cuts: NOAA.gov official site (database banner confirms discontinuation) www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/
On the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program data termination: https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/messages/2025/06/MSG_20250625_1735.html
A few objections to climate science come up repeatedly, and they're worth addressing directly.
"It's only 0.04 percent of the atmosphere - how can that have any effect?"
Small concentrations produce large effects all the time. Check any medicine bottle. Ozone - which shields us from ultraviolet radiation - makes up about 0.00006 percent of the atmosphere. The dose, not the percentage, is what matters. CO2 at 425 parts per million absorbs and re-emits infrared radiation with well-documented efficiency. The physics has been understood since the 1850s.
"Volcanoes put more CO2 into the air than we do."
One large eruption can briefly exceed the daily emissions of every car in Los Angeles - true. But look at the CO2 record. It shows a steady, uninterrupted upward curve, not the abrupt spikes you would expect if volcanoes were the driver. Volcanic events show up as noise; the long-term trend is something else entirely. That trend correlates precisely with industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels beginning in the late 1800s. Carbon burning yields CO2. We have burned an enormous amount of carbon. The CO2 curve reflects that arithmetic exactly.
The graph doesn't lie. Volcanoes don't explain it. We do.
Looking forward to the next two installments. The Michael Mann quote is spot on! I wish the media would spend more time investigating and reporting on these issues and their implications than on the TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) headline of the day. Trump is a master at distracting us on the one hand with some manufactured controversy, while the other hand is busy doing the sort of things this article mentions, which will have serious long term consequences for the country and the world.