“So CO2 levels in the atmosphere and the ocean, at all depths, are supposed to be in ‘equilibrium’, but no one wonders why the oxygen levels in the atmosphere and the ocean, at all depths, are not at all in ‘equilibrium’.”
How many PPM is the O2 concentration, compared to CO2?
But more salient than that is the arrow of entropy. What on earth do we expect to happen when we unearth huge deposits of previously sequestered carbon and turn that into CO2? Clearly, that CO2 has to make it slowly back to a similar sequestering site, with the only catalyst or accelerator available the evolution of the biotic system to take advantage of the excess. As it stands the central limit theorem says that billions of entities will not instantaneously change the rate of CO2 update. It will remain the same until evolution occurs, and since that can take an indeterminate amount of time, we have to wait for the sequestering adjustment time to pass
AJ is right, some of us understand how the carbon cycle works.
BTW, no one really cares about the semantic haggling over “steady-state” versus “equilibrium”. That is a deadly bore.