Deepak Lal: Climate change - Sun & the stars vs C02 - I

When the sun shines more brightly, global temperatures will rise, and vice versa.

The world is being spooked by climate change. The great and the good, aided and abetted by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the Stern Report in the UK, have convinced themselves and large part of the electorates in the West that global warming is caused by human emissions of noxious greenhouse gases, particularly CO2. As India and China have the two largest human conglomerations, arising at long last from their pre-industrial slumber with rapid growth, their noxious emissions will inevitably rise. So that, even if the past concentrations of these pollutants were caused by the currently developed countries in their own escape from mass poverty, the future rise in emissions will come largely from the Asian giants. Hence the growing clamour by the developed countries to bring India and China into some global system of mandatory curbs on carbon emissions.

Previous columns have pointed out both the deep immorality of this embrace of the Green ideology, which in effect condemns the poor of these populous countries to continuing poverty, as well as noting that the scientific claims being made""in particular by the IPCC""as irrefutable were no such thing. Given the recent quasi acceptance by US President Bush and Australian Prime Minister John Howard of the current Western political orthodoxy that humans cause global warming, it will not be long before the gentle arm twisting of the Indian and Chinese PMs at G8 meetings will turn into something nastier in the form of trade sanctions, as some in the EU and US are already suggesting. Hence, this and the next column revisit the subject of climate change.

There is no dispute that global warming is occurring. The only question is: what is the cause? The current orthodoxy accepts the theory espoused by the IPCC that greenhouse gases, in particular the mushrooming CO2 emissions since the Industrial Revolution, are responsible. A vivid popular depiction has been provided in that redoubtable eco-warrior Al Gore's Academy award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. It has successfully linked CO2 emissions with catastrophic global climate change in the minds of the general public. Thus, one of the questions always asked by UCLA undergraduates in my sceptical lecture on climate change is: "What about the ice-core evidence?" For Al Gore makes much of the apparent correlation between temperature and CO2 concentrations as revealed in the Vostock ice core data for millions of years (see Fig.1). But, as I remind them correlation does not imply causation. When a correct lagged regression is done of this and other ice-core data: "on long time scales variations in Vostock's CO2 record lag behind those of its air-temperature record by 1.3 (+/-) 1.0k.a" [M. Mudslee, Quaternary Science Reviews, 20 (2001), p. 587].

So CO2 cannot be the cause of temperature changes. It is changes in temperature which seem to cause changes in atmospheric CO2. But how? The answer lies in the oceans, which are both the primary sink as well as emitters of CO2. By comparison the human contribution to global carbon emissions is negligible. When the oceans cool they absorb CO2, when they warm, they emit CO2. Given the vastness of oceans in the total surface area of the Earth, it takes a long time for the warming of the atmosphere to heat the oceans (and vice versa). Thence the lag between the rise in global temperature followed by a rise in CO2, shown by the millennial ice-core evidence.

But what then causes global temperatures to wax and wane, as they have done for millennia? The alternative to the CO2 theory is that changing levels in solar activity have caused changes in global climate over millennia. But, it was argued that these changes in solar radiation were not large enough by themselves to explain the observed warming of the earth by 0.6 degrees Celsius over the last century. Recent scientific work by Svensmark of Denmark, Shaviv of Israel, and Vezier of Canada, has now provided a fuller alternative theory of climate change which has been labeled "Cosmoclimatology" (see J Vezier: "Celestial Climate Driver," Geoscience Canada.32,1,2005; H Svensmark: "Cosmoclimatology," Astronomy and Geophysics 48, Feb. 2007 and the book by Svensmark and Calder: The Chilling Stars, 2007). They theorise that the climate is controlled by low cloud cover, which when widespread has a cooling effect by reflecting solar energy back into space and vice versa.

These low clouds, in turn, are formed when the sub-atomic particles called cosmic rays, emitted by exploding stars in our galaxy, combine with the water vapour rising from the oceans. The constant bombardment of the planet by cosmic rays, however, is modulated by a solar wind, which when it is blowing prevents the cosmic rays from reaching the earth and thence creating the low clouds. The solar wind in turn is caused by the varying sunspot activity of the sun. When the sun is overactive with lots of sunspots, and the solar wind is blowing intensely, fewer cosmic rays get through to form the low clouds, and the planet experiences global warming, as it is doing in the current transition from the Little Ice Age of the 17th-18th centuries. Thus, on this alternative theory, global temperatures would be correlated with the intensity of the sun. When the sun shines more brightly global temperatures will rise, and vice versa. This seems to be the case (fig.2).

But there is still a missing piece in the cosmoclimatology theory. It depends on a hitherto untested physical hypothesis that cosmic rays influence the formation of low clouds. In 1998 Kirkby at the CERN particle physics lab proposed an experiment called CLOUD to test this theory. There were long delays in getting funds, and the experiment will begin in 2010. Meanwhile, Svensmark and his physicist son set up a mini experiment in a basement of the Danish National Space Center in 2005, which found the physical causal mechanism by which cosmic rays facilitate the production of low clouds. When this is confirmed by the CERN CLOUD experiment, the final nail in the coffin of the CO2 theory of climate change will be in place. The sun and the stars will have been shown to control our climate and not the puny self-important inhabitants of planet Earth of current CO2 orthodoxy.