> By using your exact same logic I can easily "prove" that the massive increase in CO2 that has happened in the past 150 years is impossible.

No. You cannot. You see, you are not asking the right questions and are giving in to folklore.

This is a fair question, yes:

How were we able to screw this up so badly in just 150 years? How is that even possible when we've only been significant, at an industrial scale, for just a few centuries?

This is an excellent question and one that should lead to further inquiry rather than dismissal. Well, I asked myself this very question years ago, as I begun my attempt to understand what was real and what was not.

The answer first requires that we understand how it is that atmospheric CO2 fluctuated by about 100 ppm on a roughly 100K year cycle when humanity was virtually insignificant.

The answer to this question is brutally simple:

Massive continental scale fires burning without any artificial controls, well, forever.

Over somewhere in the range of 25,000 years they provided enough CO2 to increase atmospheric concentration by 100 ppm.

This is a reality today. For all the political bullshit floating around, nobody is talking about the elephant in the room, in the form of wildfires.

Globally, wildfires today consume about 450 millions hectares of forest and other plant life. This translates into about 13.5 billion metric tonnes of carbon.

The entire industrial base of the world today produces about 10 billion tonnes of carbon a year.

Keep in mind that this is with humanity actively fighting forest fires to contain them to the extent possible. Right this minute we have a massive fire in northern CA, where an army of firefighters is battling the flames to gain control.

Not too many centuries ago humanity lacked the capability to go up against forest fires at any significant scale. And so, they burned and burned and burned. And, over tens of thousands of years, they regularly produced a 100 ppm increase in CO2 concentration.

And yet, this does not answer the question. Right? How did we do it so quickly?

Again, simple: We burned entire forests (and more) at a rate never before seen in the history of this planet. Except, this time, the forests came in the form of highly dense oil, petroleum. Petroleum is the result of millions of years of brewing dead plants, dead animals and other chemicals with an unimaginable amount of energy. The same is true of coal, peat and natural gas.

When we burn a gallon of oil we are, in effect burning an end product that is the result of compacting millions of trees and other biomass into the thick black good.

We were able to do in a few hundred years what it would normally take nature a lot longer. In fact, without us burning "forests" this way, it would have taken nature about 25,000 years for a 100 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration.

OK, then, why can't we reverse it just as fast then?

For one thing, Conservation of Energy and the realities of the task at hand.

Simple thought experiment:

You are on a spacecraft the size of a large modern warehouse, like a Home Depot. The idea is that there are no external inputs other than solar and other radiation. The air you have is it.

You make a pile of wood in the center of this space and light it up.

How much energy did it take you to start this fire? Very little. The energy it releases is in the wood. All you had to do is ignite it.

So now you have smoke, particulate matter and all kinds of gasses spreading all over your very large spacecraft. The particulate matter is coating everything. The gases are going everywhere.

You are now tasked with reversing your ecosystem to where it was before you burned the pile of wood.

Will it take more or less energy than that which the wood pile released when ignited?

More. A lot more. Ten times more. A hundred times more. A thousand times more. It is actually hard to even begin to calculate how much energy this cleansing this simple ecosystem would require. I can walk around your house spreading flour all over the place with very little effort. Removing that sugar requires far more energy and effort than what was expended causing the mess in the first place.

In super simple terms, that's the problem with CO2.

It is easy to create a mess by burning stuff. It takes no effort. If you light-up the entire Amazon forest and just let it burn you will generate more CO2 than likely generations of humans could possibly produce. Taking back that CO2, cleaning the mess, is a far more difficult, resource intensive task that requires an unimaginable amount of energy. To put it simply, it would likely be impossible.

So, no, my conclusion and the observations that led to this realization are not incongruent with how we contributed to the problem. It is really important to apply just a little bit of science to this before voicing opinion. If one is observant enough and understands natural processes, it really isn't that difficult to understand how we got here and the fact that we do not have the ability to get out. We have to live with it. Which is where we should be focusing, not on the "save the planet" bullshit that will lead to nothing good.