Comments on: The Carbon Footprint Fraud – Part 3 That Nasty Old Sun If it is not man-made carbon dioxide that warms our planet, what could it be? Surely it couldn’t be the sun! After all, how could a huge flaming ball affect our climate more than a gas that is four hundredths of one percent of our atmosphere? In recent years climate science has been one of the “in” places for the scientific community. Why? Because it’s where the money is. You see, scientists, just like the rest of us, have to make money. In some ways this has been bad, because the Left has embraced man-made global warming as it’s cause celebre and the leftist contributors have been throwing money to support this view and to provide a fulcrum to leverage it to gain more political power. But it has also had the blessing of bringing in money from other sources and thereby inspiring genuine scientific research that has resulted in massive amounts of data being collected. It is that data that is now pointing to the sun as the source for global warming. It’s a pity for the alarmists because they can’t tie increased solar heat to driving an SUV. Let’s look at the science. First, let’s look at climate history. Has the climate ever been stable. No. The only climate constant is change. In the past temperatures have been far higher than today. They have also been colder. 3,000 years ago it was three degrees centigrade warmer than now, without the help of carbon dioxide. In the middle ages it was so warm that Vikings settled in Greenland and farmed there. No one worried about the disappearing Greenland ice cap. In the 17th and 18th centuries we went through a mini ice age. All with no human producing carbon dioxide except by breathing. And what is the one constant in all of this climate change? Scientific data continues to consistently find correlations between the regular fluctuations in the brightness of the sun and our climate. This is validated in hundreds of studies using every possible source from tree rings in Russia, to water levels of the Nile. Shocking, huh? But there’s a problem (Alarmists prepare to be temporarily pleased). The fluctuations in actual solar energy created by the sun was not enough to cause the amount of climate change (cold or hot) that the planet exhibited. However, that still doesn’t explain how climate change occurred without the internal combustion engine and power plants. So what happened? Recent groundbreaking work from a variety of scientists not playing in the man-made warming sandbox has provided an answer. Starting in 2002 a number of papers from a variety of sources have identified the culprit as the sun’s own solar wind. I don’t provide footnotes (links), but here are a few names to Google: Veizer, Shaviv, Carslaw, and Svensmark. So, how does the solar wind cause climate change? We are under a constant bombardment of cosmic rays from deep space that can penetrate the earth’s atmosphere. When they do, they accelerate cloud formation which has an overall cooling effect on the planet. When the sun is brighter (hotter) it generates stronger solar winds that block a significant amount of the cosmic radiation. Cloud formation is reduced. Combined with the increased heat from the sun, this effect accounts for our current global warming phase. So, now you know how we got into this latest warming trend. Next, the evidence of why it’s either ended or ending and we’re starting to cool. Just another site Tue, 01 Nov 2011 15:03:45 +0000 hourly 1