I am trying to find out where the carbon in oil, coal and gas would have gone eventually if we had not excavated and used it, so I would be grateful if a climate scientist could tell me if the following is correct. I have searched the 2007 IPCC report but have not found an answer there:
1. Trees and other plants which died and were then squashed and degraded to make oil, coal and gas took CO2 out of the atmosphere when they grew.
2. Under a natural cycle covering tens of millions of years, the oil, coal and gas would have degraded back to elements and compounds useful to life and been taken up by plants. Carbon would have been incorporated in those compounds.
3. Some of the carbon would therefore have been released as CO2 when metabolised and exhaled by people and animals eating the plants. (The remainder would have stayed in the soil for use by new plants as structural material.)
4. What we are therefore doing by burning the oil, coal and gas in large quantities is (a) speeding up the whole carbon cycle very considerably and (b) releasing more carbon into the atmosphere from oil, coal and gas than would have happened naturally because we are using it for more than just metabolism, and not using it for structural functions.
