It was April and moreover a beautifully warm sunny sunny day (yes, I do live in the northern hemisphere) with which to begin the month. My thoughts turned to the prospect of global climate change¹ and how we might be able to use computer models like the one run by the UK's Hadley Centre² to predict the future climate of the world.

I was amazed to find that despite the apparent precision of modern computer models, the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the past century has only been proceeding at about two-thirds of the rate which is predicted by calculations based on known sources of the gas and known mechanisms for its fixation. This has become known as The Missing Carbon³ anomaly.

I therefore began to look for some possible explanations for The Missing Carbon. I have found a number of research projects including one by the UK's Natural Environment Research Council⁴. After considerable effort, I have come up with a range of competing and intriguing hypotheses which I have tested out on a number of acquaintances with interesting results.

• some aerial and satellite surveys have shown that there are more trees in Africa than are identified by ground surveys - so the missing carbon could be a data artefact due to a time varying but systematic under-estimate of the number of trees in Africa. This could be due to a rapid growth in the African population of "hidden trees". Hidden trees, like intergalactic dark matter⁵, cannot, of course, be detected by normal means but they can obviously be detected by the aerial and satellite surveys which have exposed this anomaly. That may be because such surveys prevent them hiding as easily and effectively as when approached laterally by ground survey crews.
• while some may regard the hidden tree hypothesis as an unlikely explanation, a distinct possibility is that the missing carbon is being abducted by alien space-craft from Venus. Those space-craft probably scoop up carbon dioxide on a routine basis from our atmosphere to maintain the concentration in the atmosphere of their planet⁶. Starting from much higher initial concentrations than we have experienced in the recent past, their potential problem is likely to be global cooling resulting from the inverse greenhouse effect of lower carbon dioxide levels.
• some of my acquaintances have expressed caution about both the preceding hypotheses and so more recently I have been exploring an equally plausible explanation based on the geological history of planet earth. It is fairly common ground that the next ice age can hardly be more than half a million years away. It could therefore be that time travellers⁷ are collecting the missing carbon dioxide and taking it back to the their time period with them. They are presumably doing this in order to increase the carbon dioxide concentrations in their atmosphere, so harnessing the greenhouse effect to release the planet earth of their era from the grip of the next ice age.

You might wonder where all this is leading. Well, it may surprise you, but some people have managed to read this far without realising that everything above is a leg-pull apart from the first two paragraphs - as signalled by the date (1 April) given in the first sentence.

It is amazing how credulous some people can be about apparently scientific theories especially if there is a dash of flying saucers and time travel added into the mix. And yet when we turn to the realities of the Christian faith, they say that is all too difficult to believe. Flying saucers are believable but a God who made them and loves them - that stretches their credulity too far. Yet, one day even the deepest sceptic will find that it is God himself who transcends space and time - not any created being!