by Rod D. Martin
January 31, 2007

The whole global warming debate comes down to one thing, and it’s not whether global warming is real: the question is whether people are causing it.

Why is that the question?  Because if global warming either isn’t happening or isn’t caused by people (i.e., it’s a natural phenomenon), there’s nothing we can do about it.  But if it’s real and if people are causing it, there might be a whole lot we can do.

And what the global warming crowd wants to do is simple:  socialize everything.

It’s no accident that, after stepping down as the mass-murdering dictator of the Evil Empire, Mikhail Gorbachev’s first “job” was as head of an environomental group.  The eco gang is a bunch of watermelons:  green on the outside and red all the way through.  This doesn’t mean they’re never right, just as Communists were sometimes right about this or that as well.  It just means that all their solutions boil down to taking from you and giving to the state.

So it’s a very big deal whether global warming is human-caused.  All the debates about whether temperatures are rising or falling mean nothing if man isn’t doing it.

And increasingly, lots of scientists think we aren’t.

Read this flash from Drudge:

Two New Books Confirm Global Warming is Natural; Not Caused By Human Activity
Tue Jan 30 2007 10:02:32 ET

Two powerful new books say today’s global warming is due not to human activity but primarily to a long, moderate solar-linked cycle. Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years, by physicist Fred Singer and economist Dennis Avery was released just before Christmas. The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change, by Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark and former BBC science writer Nigel Calder (Icon Books), is due out in March.

Singer and Avery note that most of the earth’s recent warming occurred before 1940, and thus before much human-emitted CO2. Moreover, physical evidence shows 600 moderate warmings in the earth’s last million years. The evidence ranges from ancient Nile flood records, Chinese court documents and Roman wine grapes to modern spectral analysis of polar ice cores, deep seabed sediments, and layered cave stalagmites.

Unstoppable Global Warming shows the earth’s temperatures following variations in solar intensity through centuries of sunspot records, and finds cycles of sun-linked isotopes in ice and tree rings. The book cites the work of Svensmark, who says cosmic rays vary the earth’s temperatures by creating more or fewer of the low, wet clouds that cool the earth. It notes that global climate models can’t accurately register cloud effects.

The Chilling Stars relates how Svensmark’s team mimicked the chemistry of earth’s atmosphere, by putting realistic mixtures of atmospheric gases into a large reaction chamber, with ultraviolet light as a stand-in for the sun. When they turned on the UV, microscopic droplet’cloud seeds started floating through the chamber.

“We were amazed by the speed and efficiency with which the electrons [generated by cosmic rays] do their work of creating the building blocks for the cloud condensation nuclei,” says Svensmark.

The Chilling Stars documents how cosmic rays amplify small changes in the sun’s irradiance fourfold, creating 1-2 degree C cycles in earth’s temperatures: Cosmic rays continually slam into the earth’s atmosphere from outer space, creating ion clusters that become seeds for small droplets of water and sulfuric acid. The droplets then form the low, wet clouds that reflect solar energy back into space. When the sun is more active, it shields the earth from some of the rays, clouds wane, and the planet warms.

Unstoppable Global Warming documents the reality of a moderate, natural, 1500-year climate cycle on the earth. The Chilling Stars explains the why and how.

Powerful stuff.  Very consistent with the research recently reported by Russian scientists who are convinced that any current warming is caused by the sunspot cycle, and will reverse toward global cooling in the middle of the next decade (as we all had the “joy” of experiencing in the late 1970s, when the hippie crowd was warning us of the coming Ice Age and the need for socialism to prevent it).

But more than that, it’s a lot of very legitimate questions raised by very legitimate scientists who deserve a hearing.  And they’re not getting one:  in fact, the latest is that The Weather Channel wants to fire anyone who disagrees with the official orthodoxy on the subject!  Tolerant?  Devoted to the scientific method?  Or just garden-variety communism?

The left wants to railroad the world into statist “solutions” because it couldn’t accomplish the same ends through its beloved proletarian revolution; and it wants to censor anyone who stands in its way.  They have gone so far in this last regard that many scientists who believe in global warming now fear they’ve oversold their case.  Their motives are clear, and there’s no way of getting around that.

Does this mean there’s no global warming?  Who knows?  But there’s precious little proof man has any ability to have caused it, and nothing like the supposed unanimity among climate scientists the left claims.

So maybe what we need to do is demand a moratorium on Kyoto-like laws until 2020.  That will give the sunspot cycle time to play out, and technology time to catch up:  if we need to do something, we’ll be far better able; and if we don’t, then we’ll out the eco-nuts once and for all.