Saturday, September 17, 2011
The Other Climate Theory - WSJ.com
As the writer says, "Al Gore won't hear it, but heavenly bodies might be driving long-term weather trends"...
Anne Jolis writes about them in the Wall Street Journal:
"On the phone from Geneva, Mr. Kirkby says that Mr. Svensmark's hypothesis "started me thinking: There's good evidence that pre-industrial climate has frequently varied on 100-year timescales, and what's been found is that often these variations correlate with changes in solar activity, solar wind. You see correlations in the atmosphere between cosmic rays and clouds—that's what Svensmark reported. But these correlations don't prove cause and effect, and it's very difficult to isolate what's due to cosmic rays and what's due to other things."
In 1997 he decided that 'the best way to settle it would be to use the CERN particle beam as an artificial source of cosmic rays and reconstruct an artificial atmosphere in the lab.' He predicted to reporters at the time that, based on Mr. Svensmark's paper, the theory would 'probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole' of 20th-century warming."
