Posted on 03/20/2006 11:45:53 AM PST by Daralundy
OTTAWA - Stars, not greenhouse gases, are heating up the Earth.
So says prominent University of Ottawa science professor Jan Veizer.
He knows challenging the accepted climate-change theory may lead to a nasty fight.
It's a politically and economically loaded topic. Yet, he is speaking out about his published research. "Look, maybe I'm wrong," he said. "But I'm saying, at least let's look at this and discuss it.
"Every one of these things (parts of his theory) has its problems. But so does every other model" of how Earth's climate behaves.
Veizer says high-energy rays from distant parts of space are smashing into our atmosphere in ways that make our planet go through warm and cool cycles.
Cosmic rays are hitting us all the time -- a well-known fact. What's new is that researchers are asking what cosmic rays do to our world and its weather.
- Last year, the British science journal Proceedings of the Royal Society published a theory that cosmic rays "unambiguously" form clouds and affect our climate.
- Florida Tech and the University of Florida are jointly investigating whether cosmic rays are the trigger that makes a charged thundercloud let rip with lightning.
- In 2003, scientists from NASA and the University of Kansas suggested that cosmic rays "influence cloud formation, can affect climate and harm live organisms directly via increase of radiation dose," an effect they claim to trace over millions of years of fossil history.
Veizer has published his theory in Geoscience Canada, the journal of the Geological Association of Canada. The article is called Celestial Climate Driver: A Perspective from Four Billion Years of the Carbon Cycle.
In his paper, he concludes: "Empirical observations on all time scales point to celestial phenomena as the principal driver of climate, with greenhouse gases acting only as potential amplifiers."
The idea is that cosmic rays hit gas molecules in the atmosphere and form the nucleus of what becomes a water vapour droplet. These in turn form clouds, reflecting some of the sun's energy back to space and cooling the Earth.
Yet the numbers of cosmic rays vary.
When there are more cosmic rays the Earth is colder. When there are fewer cosmic rays the Earth is warmer.
"The question is, therefore, 'Where do we have lots of cosmic rays?' "
Most rays come from younger stars, which are clustered at some regions in the galaxy through which our solar system has passed its 4.5-billion-year history.
Our own sun deflects some of these rays away, but the sun's activity grows stronger and weaker. All of these factors can change the number of cosmic rays that hit us.
The Earth's magnetic field also blocks some cosmic rays. Scientists can reconstruct records of that field for the past 200,000 years, and he argues there's an extremely close match between cold times in our climate and times when the magnetic field allowed more cosmic rays to hit us.
Even in recent times he argues that other cosmic factors can affect our climate as plausibly as carbon dioxide, or more so. The warming of Earth in the past 100 years -- about 0.6 degrees Celsius -- matches a time of the sun's growing intensity, he says.
Questioning the fundamentals of climate change -- the theory that man-made gases such as carbon dioxide are building up and warming our climate -- is a fast way to start a nasty, personal fight in the science world.
But Veizer's credentials make it tough to challenge his findings.
The recently retired professor still holds a research chair and supervises grad students and postdoctoral fellows. A native of Bratislava, Veizer left because Russian troops entered Czechoslovakia in 1968. He's been building up honours ever since in the field of geochemistry -- learning about Earth's past by the chemistry preserved in rocks and sediments.
The Royal Society of Canada called him "one of the most creative, innovative and productive geoscientists of our times," and added: "He has generated entirely new concepts that have proven key in our understanding the geochemical history of Earth."
He won the 1992 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, worth $2.2 million Cdn, representing the German government's highest prize for research in any field. The prize ended up financing his research.
The judges said he "has in front of his eyes the overall picture of the Earth during its entire 4.5 billion years of evolution," and he is "one of the most creative ... geologists of his time."
Yet, for years he held back on his climate doubts. "I was scared," he says.
But who gets to control the thermostat? In my house, there is a 5'F temerpature difference for my wife and I. Guess who has to live on the warmer side of things!
KRIKIES!! According to that last chart, we seriously over-due for a MAJOR cool down.
Wouldn't that just be fitting. The whole world is going ga-ga (sp?) over Global WARMING just at the time we're heading into a long-term ice age. Brilliant!
Exposure to cosmic rays can also make you become invisible, stretchy, on fire, or a big pile of strong orange rocks.
It makes more sense than a trace element of CO2 having such a drastic affect on the climate. Any other theory is worth considering than the CO2 theory.
Why do you keep posting this 'science' stuff.
It is man that is heating the planet to the boiling point and killing all the whales and stuff!
Don't try to take the blame off George Bush and Standard Oil and put it on Gaia and the Universe!
You are only confusing the people with facts.
/sarc
However, I think we'd better spend our time finding ways to directly control the Earth's energy budget.
So what are "cosmic" rays....are they only X-rays, or
other wavelengths, and in what proportion do they
hit the earth, can they be blocked by O2, CO2, nitrogen,
dust, ozone...are they uniformly distributed?
Is it seasonal, or dependant on sunspot activity, or
what??? Enquiring minds want to know...
Maybe global warming is due to lots of other factors(including
cosmic rays, which in combination with cow gas, human gas, mammal gas,
cause global warming.......
Buy her a sweater.
:-)
bttt
MSM headlines: Cosmic rays cause global warming..George Bush's fault .... Cosmic Ray Threat to Earth, woman and minorties affected most.... Republican policies blamed for the shortage of tinfoil for protective hats....Cosmic Rays, a Haliburton Connection?
To my knowledge, no one has advanced this theory of global warming so I'm proud to claim the idea. Cosmic rays, indeed!
IT'S CLOBBERIN' TIME!
Cosmic dust causes high level cloud formation?
Thanks for the ping. With the (ahem) lovely, (and I use the term loosely) March weather we've been having, I'd take some global warming right now. (And not the kind you can shovel)
Dust is necessary for water droplet formation. There has to be something for the water vapor to condense on. So it would make sense that if there was less dust in the atmosphere, cloud formation would be inhibited.
FWIW, I just saw an article on spacedaily.com that said geomagnetic activity is highest during the spring/autumn
seasons, meaning auroras are seen more often, which should mean the charged particles are directed towards the poles,
rather than messing up your DNA and magnetic storage mediums, let alone the climate.... :)
Good find, thanks for posting this.
Aha! So this is how Karl Rove's diabolical weather control machine works.
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