Does Warmth Follow CO2 or Does CO2 Follow Warmth?

Australian Climate Scientist Says Warmth Raises CO2, and Claims to Have Proof

Professor Murry Salby, chair of climate at Macquarie University, has unleashed on global warming alarmism in a lecture this week to the Sydney Institute.

Salby has worked at leading research institutions, including the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, Princeton University, and the University of Colorado, and is the author of Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics, and Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate, due out in 2011.

Salby’s argument is that the usual evidence given for the rise in CO2 being man-made is mistaken. It’s usually taken to be the fact that as carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere increase, the 1 per cent of CO2 that’s the heavier carbon isotope ratio c13 declines in proportion. Plants, which produced our coal and oil, prefer the lighter c12 isotope. Hence, it must be our gasses that caused this relative decline.

But that conclusion holds true only if there are no other sources of c12 increases which are not human caused. Salby says there are - the huge increases in carbon dioxide concentrations caused by such things as spells of warming and El Ninos, which cause concentration levels to increase independently of human emissions. He suggests that its warmth which tends to produce more CO2, rather than vice versa - which, incidentally is the story of the past recoveries from ice ages.

You can listen to the lecture he gave here.

This is a real significant threat to anthropogenic global warming orthodoxy.  The author is a serious climate scientist, the results are coming out in a peer reviewed journal, and other serious climate scientists have evaluated his arguments and have been unable to find the flaw.

If you're interested, I urge you to listen to the pod cast.  The man is a decent speaker, and makes his argument quite well.  Some of it is a bit technical (how the carbon isotopic ratios were used to untangle the relative magnitude of the source of anthropogenic CO2 and CO2 increases brought on by warming from other sources), but it's worth the time.  It's too bad this hasn't come out on YouTube, it would be better with the graphs he's referring to.  If this holds up, it's basically the death of anthropogenic global warming.

Found at Watts Up With That.