Global Warming Finally in the Deep Freeze?
(Article first published as Global Warming Finally in the Deep Freeze? on Blogcritics.) It seems like anthropogenic global warming has been a hot topic forever, boiling away on the front burner of plant-fueled stoves everywhere. Proponents have long spoken of its existence as an established fact. Several years ago during an interview on the Today Show, Al Gore roasted the media for giving any print or airtime to contrary views. He continues that harangue today and it’s getting way beyond old. Mercifully, legitimate science should turn the lights out on this man-made drama by fall.
For it is then that the first results of the CERN CLOUD experiment are expected to hit scientific journals. CERN is the European Center for Nuclear Research. Founded in 1954 and located on the Swiss-French border, it is one of the world’s largest and most respected centers of physics research. Through the use of particle accelerators and detectors, CERN physicists discover the laws of nature and their interaction.
The CLOUD experiment tests the 1996 theory of Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish Technical University in Copenhagen. Svensmark and others, including the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control (IPCC), agree that clouds are a primary influence on climate. However, they disagree on what causes clouds to form.
Svensmark attributes global cloud formation to the interaction of the sun with cosmic rays near the earth’s atmosphere. Cosmic rays are high energy charged particles originating in Milky Way regions outside of our solar system. They travel at nearly the speed of light and strike our earth from all directions.
According to Svensmark, fluctuations in solar magnetic activity regulate the amount of cloud cover through corresponding variations in the sun’s ability to shield cosmic rays. The result is periods of global cooling (higher incidence of cosmic rays in our atmosphere) or warming (lower incidence of cosmic rays). Svensmark’s theory discounts carbon dioxide emissions as insignificant in cloud formation.
The IPCC disagrees with Svensmark regarding the cause of cloud formation. The anthropogenic crowd completely discounts solar activity, insisting that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are the determining factor. They ignore the Dane’s 2006 experiment showing cosmic rays and the sun’s impact on them as the main causes of our cloud cover. CERN did not show a similar disdain. Its CLOUD experiment, which began in 2009, determines the validity of the 2006 research.
Svensmark’s theory links global climate change to the production of cosmic rays during cyclic galactic activity, which explains occurrences overlooked by the IPCC. Like, why Mars, Jupiter, Pluto and Neptune’s largest moon are also warming. Unlike the discredited IPCC hockey stick model, it accommodates Medieval Warming, the ensuing Little Ice Age and the current cooling of Antarctic regions. Perhaps the loudest supporter of Svensmark’s theory to date is Al Gore. His Inconvenient Truth production is conveniently silent on it.
While it is a homerun for science, the CERN CLOUD experiment comes too late to be the first major mugging of anthropogenic global warming. The dismantling of Gore’s expensive altar to man-as-larger-than-nature is already under way, spurred by the sorry state of the economy. Last week’s sure-thing proposal to cut ethanol funding is just the latest hit to the climate change movement and a small one at that.
A much bigger bang is based on the fear of man-made global joblessness from the high cost of renewable energy regulations, supports and taxes. Among those singing the green blues are the British, the Australians, the Mexicans, the Americans, the Spaniards and others. And then there’s China, the globe’s biggest polluter, a country going happily into that fossil fuel burning night.
What does it all mean? We are facing real issues of pollution and the lack of practical renewable energy technology. But, at the end of the day, those dangers are ours, not the planet’s. It will do just fine without us.
See you in the mirror.