The carbon "cycle" is not a cycle at all, it is a one way street.
If left undeterred, the Earth's carbon process will ensure all the earth's carbon will land up as a sequestered shale, lime or dolomite (magnesium) deposit at he bottom of the ocean, as it mostly is now, the aggregation of all the Earth's dead skeletal coccolithofores, (phytoplankton) clams, snails etc.
In this ongoing, one way process, and effectively every last bit of carbon will join these deposits oneday permanently & forever.
When that process is complete all the plant-life that has sustained life for almost 540 million years will simply die.
That includes all the carbon utilised by the world's current relatively 'starved' biomass. A trivial quantity, when compared to the early Cambrian when CO2 in the atmosphere and biomass was 17 times higher than it is today.
Today 100,000,000 billions tons of carbonaceous rock holds 99.9% of all carbon ever found on the planet.
The process is almost complete!
Volcanoes once used to allow the accumulation of carbon on the Earth's outer surface when it was out-gassed from the Earth's core, in the billions of years leading up the point, 540 million years ago.
That's when tiny little f*ers evolved, and learned to utilise the stuff in plant material and other life forms.
Since then it has been a one way street, and we are very, very close to its end.
Putting CO2 back into the atmosphere, reverses the process, albeit somewhat Quixotically, as the demands are huge, and if man quadrupled his CO2 emissions annually, into the future, for a duration say, back to the time that he started walking upright, say 7 million years ago, say, to our earliest Australopithecusians it is still doubtful 1% of the entire carbon process will have reversed.
By that time, modern homo sapiens may have evolved into another totally unrecognisable being altogether. By then South Australia's wind turbines may seem rather trite.
So the task is indeed enormous... despite what the Greens adjure.
