Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD
An estimated one billion people watched former Vice President Al Gore receive an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth. In this film about global warming, Gore uses slides from lectures he gives on this subject, personal anecdotes, and footage of collapsing Antarctic ice shelves, receding glaciers, and marooned polar bears to warn us that human-made greenhouse gases are heating the planet to dangerous levels. The principle greenhouse gas that humans make, burning coal, oil, and natural gas for energy, is carbon dioxide (CO2). (In 1750, at the beginning of the Industrial Era, the earth’s atmospheric CO2 concentration was 280 parts per million by volume. In 1960 it had risen to 315 ppmv, and it is now 383 ppmv.)
There is another theory of global warming and cooling that Gore does not address in An Inconvenient Truth. The Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory posits that cosmic rays, not humans, cause climate change. The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change (2007) by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder is the first book to be published on this subject. Svensmark proposed this theory in 1996 and supplies the scientific input for the book. Calder, a British science writer, "strung the words together," as he puts it. He does this very well and explains Svensmark’s theory in an engaging and easily understandable way. It will be published in the U.S. March 25 (I obtained my copy from the UK, where it was published last month).
The Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory says that cosmic rays make clouds. Exploding stars continually spray the galaxy with cosmic rays, which consist of protons, alpha particles (helium nuclei), electrons, and muons (heavy electrons). The muons in this mix of atomic bullets make low-level (below 8,000 feet) clouds. They do this by knocking electrons off atoms and molecules in the air, and these liberated electrons seed the formation "cloud condensation nuclei." Water vapor in the atmosphere condenses on these specks to form cloud water droplets. The wet clouds thus formed block sunlight and reflect its rays back into space, which has a cooling effect. In 2006, Svensmark and colleagues showed experimentally how it is done, which involves adding sulfuric acid to these condensation nuclei. (Plankton, microscopic plants in the ocean and to a much lesser extent volcanoes and fossil fuels, continually restock the atmosphere with sulfur
The sun’s magnetic field encloses its planets in a magnetic solar wind (the heliosphere) that shields us from many of the cosmic rays that exploding stars shoot our way. Sunspots, dark spots made by pools of intense magnetism seen through a telescope, indicate heightened magnetic activity, which deflects more cosmic rays away from Earth. During the 20th century the sun’s magnetic shield more than doubled, and the sun had a lot of sunspots. Fewer cosmic rays reached Earth to make clouds, and global temperatures rose. When the sun’s magnetic activity wanes and sunspots disappear, more cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere to make clouds; and the globe cools. The Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory of climate change explains observations made over the last 400 years since the advent of the telescope that correlate sunspots with global warming and cooling.
The Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory explains climate change on a geologic time scale. Our solar system in its rotation around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy passes through one of its spiral arms every 135 million years. These arms contain high levels of cosmic rays. Astrophysicist Nir Shaviv and geologist Ján Veizer in "Celestrial Driver of Phanerozoic Climate?" (Geological Society of America Today 2003;13:4-10) and Veizer in "Celestial Climate Driver: A Perspective from Four Billion Years of the Carbon Cycle" (Geoscience Canada 2005;32:13-30) show that the variability in the Earth’s temperature over the past 500 million years correlates well with the intensity of cosmic rays hitting the planet when it passes in and out of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. They found that at one point atmospheric CO2 levels were 18 times higher than they are today, and they were 10 times higher when the planet was an "icehouse" during the Ordovician glacial period (450 million years ago).
Read the full article at http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/march2007/160307Solar.htm
