Solar warming?

Climate change might be more controlled by solar radiation than by greenhouse gasses.  At least that’s the news that would be reaching your TV if the media weren’t so committed to repeating and promoting the mantra that humans are the cause of the recent climactic changes.

You might have read recently that new reports revealed that humans in fact were the cause of the greenhouse effect.  But that report, which has yet to officially see the light of day, says that scientists are only 90% certain that that’s the case.

The small print explains “very likely” as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain’s top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latter-day Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.

But some scientists, who have better track records predicting climate changes, think that the sun and the stars affect our climate more than we ever could.

The only trouble with Svensmark’s idea — apart from its being politically incorrect — was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.

In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.

So it’s not a closed case, is it?  If there’s one scientist on earth who can provide a convincing argument, or a repeatable experiment, that contradicts the theories of the majority of scientists, then it’s not a closed case.  That’s science.  The meme that Al Gore and the press would have you believe, that the debate on global warming is over, is politics.

Hat tip to Instapundit.