Posted by
John Ostrowski on Sunday, February 04, 2007 4:56:56 PM
Here is a very interesting article telling of one scientist's beliefs on human-driven climate change -- specifically, how he went from believer to skeptic, and why he changed his mind.
Two telling paragraphs from the story:
The
evidence from astrophysicists and cosmologists in laboratories around
the world, on the other hand, could well be significant. In his study
of meteorites, published in the prestigious journal, Physical Review
Letters, Dr. Shaviv found that the meteorites that Earth collected
during its passage through the arms of the Milky Way sustained up to
10% more cosmic ray damage than others. That kind of cosmic ray
variation, Dr. Shaviv believes, could alter global temperatures by as
much as 15% --sufficient to turn the ice ages on or off and evidence of
the extent to which cosmic forces influence Earth's climate.
In
another study, directly relevant to today's climate controversy, Dr.
Shaviv reconstructed the temperature on Earth over the past 550 million
years to find that cosmic ray flux variations explain more than
two-thirds of Earth's temperature variance, making it the most dominant
climate driver over geological time scales. The study also found that
an upper limit can be placed on the relative role of CO2 as a climate
driver, meaning that a large fraction of the global warming witnessed
over the past century could not be due to CO2 -- instead it is
attributable to the increased solar activity.
Of course, this sort of thing is bad for the consensus crowd. Why? Because if their consensus is shown to be meaningless, they lose their funding. It's that simple. It really has nothing to do with science.
At the same time, you may have heard a lot on the IPCC's latest report on global warming, and how sure they are that humans are causing their own destruction. Well, the story has this to say:
Dr. Shariv's digging led him to the surprising discovery that there
is no concrete evidence -- only speculation -- that man-made greenhouse
gases cause global warming. Even research from the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change-- the United Nations agency that heads the
worldwide effort to combat global warming -- is bereft of anything here
inspiring confidence. In fact, according to the IPCC's own findings,
man's role is so uncertain that there is a strong possibility that we
have been cooling, not warming, the Earth. Unfortunately, our tools are
too crude to reveal what man's effect has been in the past, let alone
predict how much warming or cooling we might cause in the future.