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.