Sun Shifts May Cause Global Warming

Most leading climate experts don’t agree with Henrik Svensmark the 49-year-old director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen. In fact he has taken a lot of blows for proposing that solar activity and cosmic rays are instrumental in determining the warming (and cooling) of Earth. His studies show that cosmic rays trigger cloud formation suggesting that a high level of solar activity—which suppresses the flow of cosmic rays striking the atmosphere—could result in fewer clouds and a warmer planet.

This Svensmark contends could account for most of the warming during the last century. Does this mean that carbon dioxide is less important than we’ve been led to believe? Yes he says but how much less is impossible to know because climate models are so limited.

There is probably no greater scientific heresy today than questioning the warming role of CO2 especially in the wake of the report issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

That report warned that nations must cut back on greenhouse gas emissions and insisted that “unless drastic action is taken . . . millions of poor people will suffer from hunger thirst floods and disease.” As astrophysicist ?Eugene Parker the discoverer of solar wind writes in the foreword to Svensmark’s new book The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change “Global warming has become a political issue both in government and in the scientific community. The scientific lines have been drawn by ‘eminent’ scientists and an important new idea is an unwelcome intruder. It upsets the established orthodoxy.”

We talked with the unexpectedly modest and soft-spoken Henrik Svensmark about his work the criticism it has received and truth versus hype in climate science.

How do you see your work fitting into the grand debates about the causes of global warming and the considerations of what ought to be done about it?

I think—no I believe—that the sun has had an influence in the past and is changing climate at the present and it most certainly will do so in the future. We live in a unique time in history because this period has the highest solar activity we have had in 1000 years and maybe even in 8000 years.

And we know that changes in solar activity have made significant changes in climate. For instance we had the little ice age about 300 years ago. You had very few sunspots markings on the face of the sun that indicate heightened solar activity between 1650 and 1715 and for example in Sweden in 1696 it caused the harvest to go wrong.

People were starving—100000 people died—and it was very desperate times all coinciding with this very low solar activity. The last time we had high solar activity was during the medieval warming which was when all of the cathedrals were built in Europe. And if you go 1000 years back you also had high solar activity and that was when Rome was at its height.

So I think there’s good evidence that these are significant changes that are happening naturally. If we are talking about the next century there might be a human effect on climate change on top of that but the natural effect from solar effect will be important. This should be recognized in the models and calculations that are being used to make predictions