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Global Warming caused by a Manic Sun and Chilling Stars?From: Michael Winn
Subject: General
Date/Time 2007-02-12 06:53:59
Remote IP: 66.32.64.110
MessageExcellent piece on the herd tendency in science to railroad popular ideas. This is big cycle thinking, similar to Taoist ideas about heaven-earth-humanity together evolving destiny. Yes, human role is growing with our population and technology, but I personally accept the likelihood the sun, stars, and earth beings are still the biggest players in the climate game. Science in still in diapers....
michael
The Sunday Times [London]
{front page story}
February 11, 2007
An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate
change
Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the
orthodoxy must be challenged
When politicians and journalists declare that the
science of global warming is settled, they show a
regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were
treated to another dose of it recently when the
experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts
the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier
on climate change due for publication in a few months'
time. They declared that most of the rise in
temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely
due to man-made greenhouse gases.
The small print explains "very likely" as meaning that
the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about
it. Older readers may recall a press conference at
Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain's top
nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his
lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned
out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10%
uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for
any latterday Galileo or Einstein to storm through
with a better idea. That is how science really works.
Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised
in favour of one particular hypothesis, which
redefined the subject as the study of the effect of
greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits
essential for innovative and trustworthy science are
greeted with impediments to their research careers.
And while the media usually find mavericks at least
entertaining, in this case they often imagine that
anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global
warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a
result, some key discoveries in climate research go
almost unreported.
Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures
that heatwaves make headlines, while contrary
symptoms, such as this winter's billion-dollar loss of
Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to
the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds
in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent
warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you
that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape
petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites
around nine days later than they did 50 years ago?
While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978,
it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.
So one awkward question you can ask, when you're
forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is
"Why is east Antarctica getting colder?" It makes no
sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global
warming. While you're at it, you might inquire whether
Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it's confirmed
that global warming has stopped. The best measurements
of global air temperatures come from American weather
satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall
change since 1999.
That levelling off is just what is expected by the
chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives
climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse
gases do. After becoming much more active during the
20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly
level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of
possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the
lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300
years ago.
Climate history and related archeology give solid
support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century
episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a
long string of similar events produced by a
hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval
Warming.
The Chinese population doubled then, while in Europe
the Vikings and cathedral-builders prospered.
Fascinating relics of earlier episodes come from the
Swiss Alps, with the rediscovery in 2003 of a
long-forgotten pass used intermittently whenever the
world was warm.
What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such
emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold
periods, linked to solar activity and going on long
before human industry was a possible factor? Less than
nothing. The 2007 Summary for Policymakers boasts of
cutting in half a very small contribution by the sun
to climate change conceded in a 2001 report.
Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the
self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with
inconvenient discoveries about how the solar
variations control the climate. The sun's brightness
may change too little to account for the big swings in
the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since
Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a
much more powerful mechanism.
He saw from compilations of weather satellite data
that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic
particles are coming in from exploded stars. More
cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun's magnetic field
bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its
intensification during the 20th century meant fewer
cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the
other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the
lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world
cloudier and gloomier.
The only trouble with Svensmark's idea — apart from
its being politically incorrect — was that
meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be
involved in cloud formation. After long delays in
scraping together the funds for an experiment,
Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National
Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.
In a box of air in the basement, they were able to
show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming
through the ceiling stitched together droplets of
sulphuric acid and water. These are the building
blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after
journal declined to publish their report; the
discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the
Royal Society late last year.
Thanks to having written The Manic Sun, a book about
Svensmark's initial discovery published in 1997, I
have been privileged to be on the inside track for
reporting his struggles and successes since then. The
outcome is a second book, The Chilling Stars,
co-authored by the two of us and published next week
by Icon books. We are not exaggerating, we believe,
when we subtitle it "A new theory of climate change".
Where does all that leave the impact of greenhouse
gases? Their effects are likely to be a good deal less
than advertised, but nobody can really say until the
implications of the new theory of climate change are
more fully worked out.
The reappraisal starts with Antarctica, where those
contradictory temperature trends are directly
predicted by Svensmark's scenario, because the snow
there is whiter than the cloud-tops. Meanwhile
humility in face of Nature's marvels seems more
appropriate than arrogant assertions that we can
forecast and even control a climate ruled by the sun
and the stars.
The Chilling Stars is published by Icon.
- Global Warming caused by a Manic Sun and Chilling Stars?: (627) Michael Winn (1190) - - 2007-02-12 06:53 am
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