By INVESTOR'S
BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, February 07, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Climate Change: Not every scientist is part of Al
Gore's mythical "consensus." Scientists worried about a new ice age
seek funding to better observe something bigger than your SUV — the sun.
Back
in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the
Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back
centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.
To
many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking
additional funding for more and better "eyes" with which to observe
our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth's climate than all the tailpipes
and smokestacks on our planet combined.
And
they're worried about global cooling, not warming.
Kenneth
Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for
Solar
activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has
been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the
beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every
couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.
Such
an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed
extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year
cycle.
This
solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around
1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive
crop failures, famine and death in
Tapping
reports no change in the sun's magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that
if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of
that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and
severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.
Tapping
oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a
"stethoscope for the sun." But he and his colleagues need better
equipment.
In
As
we have noted many times, perhaps the biggest impact on the Earth's climate
over time has been the sun.
For
instance, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in
R.
Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada's
Rather,
he says, "I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently
finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and
earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate
source of energy on this planet."
Patterson,
sharing Tapping's concern, says: "Solar scientists predict that, by 2020,
the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe
cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on
Earth."
"Solar
activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely
will again," Patterson says. "If we were to have even a medium-sized
solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than 'global
warming' would have had."
In
2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov made some waves — and not a few enemies in the
global warming "community" — by predicting that the sun would reach a
peak of activity about three years from now, to be accompanied by
"dramatic changes" in temperatures.
A
Hoover Institution Study a few years back examined historical data and came to
a similar conclusion.
"The
effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures
fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that,
statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in
100," according to
The
study says that "try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship
between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global
temperatures."
The
study concludes that if you shut down all the world's power plants and
factories, "there would not be much effect on temperatures."
But
if the sun shuts down, we've got a problem. It is the sun, not the Earth,
that's hanging in the balance.