Text 27115, 134 rader
Skriven 2007-02-11 18:27:00 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: The religion of global wa
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How dare someone actually attack or question the institution of global 
warming...



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 likelyö 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?ö 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 changeö. 

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. It is available for £9.89 
including postage from The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585


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