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New Study Shatters Supposed Scientific Consensus on Global Warming

Originally aired as CBC Radio One Commentary, Thursday 10 July 2003

Remember the vaunted scientific consensus on global warming, that it is a "fact" the slight warming the Earth has experienced in the past century is the fault of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses? If we didn't ratify the Kyoto accord and cork our factories, cars and cows, global warming would devastate life on the planet in the next century.

Remember that vaunted consensus?

Well, if it ever existed, it's gone now.

On July 1, the esteemed Geological Society of America published an earth-shattering - or make that Kyoto-shattering - study by Canadian scientist Jan Veizer of the University of Ottawa and Nir Shaviv, an astrophysicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Veizer and Shaviv discovered that nearly three-quarters of the variability in our climate can be attributed to the interplay between solar radiation and cosmic rays.

The cloudy tentacles of our Milky Way galaxy generate new stars in surprising numbers. Yet many of these stars are unstable and supernova very quickly. As they die in violent explosions, they spew out billions of highly charged cosmic rays. When these rays reach Earth, they change our climate by encouraging cloud formation, lowering our planetary temperature.

Incoming radiation from our own sun can have a profound effect, too, in the opposite direction. According to Veizer and Shaviv, over the past 500 million solar radiation, not greenhouse gasses, has driven up our global temperature. In other words, it is the S-U-N not SUVs that cause global warming.

This should surprise no one. Why shouldn't Earth warm when solar activity is at its peak? Or our planet’s temperatures fluctuate when we are being bombarded with cosmic rays from exploding stars?

Veizer's and Shaviv's explanation is far more plausible than the so-called consensus view. Supposedly, carbon dioxide, which makes up a tiny fraction of one percent of the atmosphere, is going to build up to such an extent that it triggers catastrophic - but as yet unidentified - reactions in the climate that raise global temperature beyond safe levels.

Veizer's and Shaviv's work has profound implications for federal climate change policy, too. If human activity is not the cause of global warming then all our prevention policies are useless. Capping and regulating industry and drivers - and spending billions of tax dollars subsidizing solar panels on everyone's roofs - will be futile. The warming is happening naturally and it won't be devastating, anyway.

If Veizer and Shaviv are right, then Ottawa's obsession with stopping global warming is no less ridiculous than the ancient English king, Canute, placing his throne in the surf and commanding the tide to stop.
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Lorne Gunter
Columnist, Edmonton Journal
Editorial Board Member, National Post
e-mail: lgunter@shaw.ca

See many other LifeSite reports on global warning by entering "Kyoto" into the LifeSite Search utility at: http://www.lifesite.net/search/search.html

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