Abstract Despite decades of research, hundreds of peer‐reviewed papers, and considerable relevance to Earth's future, the rapid global warming and tremendous CO 2 input at the start of the Paleocene‐Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) remain highly debated. Cael and Foster (2026, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025gl120456 ) present a statistical treatment of Cenozoic benthic foraminifera (BF) stable isotope data, which confirms and confounds PETM knowledge. They show that Cenozoic BF stable isotope anomalies, after removing long‐term trends, generally conform to Laplace distributions. They then demonstrate deviations in BF stable isotopes across the PETM lie outside this distribution, statistically signifying an extreme. Cael and Foster (2026, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025gl120456 ) reason this necessitates a special mechanism, propelling an idea of “super‐volcanism” and external carbon injection. But neither their statistics nor recent papers support such inference. The paper highlights basic issues regarding the PETM and ultimately an urgency for a fuller understanding of Earth's carbon cycle.
Gerald R. Dickens (Sat,) studied this question.
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