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what you're looking for is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equatio...

A predator-prey model is essentially never just a stable population for both. Instead, you go through periods of increasing prey -> increasing predators -> decreasing prey -> decreasing predators.

Here the prey would be atmospheric carbon dioxide and the predators would be the plankton.

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So atmospheric carbon breeds?

Its an anlogy, not a syllogism. It would seem enought that Co2 may be correlated with breeding. Which may or may not be technically correct, but its at least a coherent thought.

Well, plankton does. Atmospheric carbon increases and (potentially) decreases, and the question I responded to wanted to know why plankton didn't respond to an increase in supply by having already come into existence in the past so that the atmospheric concentration never varied. It's because (just like the predator-prey model) it's difficult for the feeding population to respond in the present to an increased future supply of food.

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