The BBC, which is has been one of the stronger media forces reporting the risks of climate change, has an article today entitled
No Sun Link to climate change
The gist of the article is summarized in the first paragraph:
Scientists have produced further compelling evidence showing that modern-day climate change is not caused by changes in the Sun's activity.
More after the fold.
First, one brief comment - we should refer to the dangers of sea level and temperatures rising as climate change, not global warming. As most kossacks know, the problems are systemic, resulting from how all the different parts of the global climate interact. Warming one most notable general trend, but not only does it avoid some of the important problems (CO2 levels rising, ice caps melting), it provides a built in way for skpetics to point to record snowfall or freezing temperatures and joke about the DFH who talk about it. In fact, one theory (granted not one that is currently given a high likelihood of happening - more here) is that the gulf stream will disappear due to an influx of cold water from the melting poles and northern Europe will get colder.
But I digress. Most climate change skeptics are not scientists. Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe can barely form a coherent sentence, let alone come to a scientific conclusion. Rush Limbaugh is - well, Rush Limbaugh. Reasoning with them is pointless. But there are members of the scientific community who still believe it is all overblown, as well as other intelligent people who look at the work of such scientists and believe it. Such scientists include Bob Giegengack and Henrik Svensmark
It is important to dismiss these alternative "scientific" theories when possible. And several researchers in England have done just that. here's the meat of what they found:
The Svensmark hypothesis is that when the solar wind is weak, more cosmic rays penetrate to Earth.
That creates more charged particles in the atmosphere, which in turn induces more clouds to form, cooling the climate.
The planet warms up when the Sun's output is strong.
Professor Sloan's team investigated the link by looking for periods in time and for places on the Earth which had documented weak or strong cosmic ray arrivals, and seeing if that affected the cloudiness observed in those locations or at those times.
"For example; sometimes the Sun 'burps' - it throws out a huge burst of charged particles," he explained to BBC News.
"So we looked to see whether cloud cover increased after one of these bursts of rays from the Sun; we saw nothing."
Over the course of one of the Sun's natural 11-year cycles, there was a weak correlation between cosmic ray intensity and cloud cover - but cosmic ray variability could at the very most explain only a quarter of the changes in cloudiness.
And for the following cycle, no correlation was found.
Good news for the never-ending quest to hold the skeptics' feet to the fire, one at a time.