This just in from Chicken Little: It’s a cloud, not the sky, that’s about to fall. So button up your overcoat. Earth is about to cool off.
“It’s global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world,” says Timothy Patterson, director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center at Carleton University in Canada. He sets out in Toronto’s National Post a fascinating and wholly credible argument, backing up what many of his scientific colleagues regard as nothing less than blasphemy.
This goes against the received theology of the Worldwide Church of Science, of course, and Mr. Patterson is not likely to be invited to the tea parties of the archbishops presiding over the global-warming debate, which the archbishops insist is over. Only this week a group of six American scientists declared the Earth in “imminent peril” and scolded a United Nations panel on climate change for “grossly underestimating” how much the sea will rise over the next century.
In fact, to hear them tell it may already be too late to learn to swim. Greenpeace, the environmental advocacy group eager to paint the town green, released a study by a German academic that predicts global warming will create 200 million “climate refugees” by the end of this century’s third decade. (When everybody drowns, women, minorities and the poor will suffer most.) The bad news is good news for Al Gore, who has another book in the works and his documentary movie, no longer playing at the Bijou, will no doubt soon go into DVD.
The globe is warming a little — nobody is arguing that it’s not — and it’s certainly getting noisier. It’s difficult for a dissenter in the congregation to make himself heard over Chicken Little. Good ol’ Al, who presides for now over the archbishops of the Worldwide Church of Science, insists that the debate is over. The prelates of the Roman church never argued with more certainty over the doctrine of papal infallibility. Al brooks no back talk.
What the global-warming fanatics won’t cede is the fact that the Earth’s climate has never been stable. “The only constant,” argues Prof. Patterson, “is change; it changes continually and at times quite rapidly. Many times in the past temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally temperatures were colder.” As recently as six thousand years ago it was on average just under 2 degrees warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago … temperatures rose as much as 4 degrees in a decade — 100 times faster than the past century’s warming that has so upset environmentalists.
Prof. Patterson bases his skepticism that man is causing the globe to “run a fever” (as the greenies put it) on his study of storms on the sun, which play havoc with Earth’s climate: “Hundreds of studies, using [data from studies of] tree rings in Russia’s Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show exactly the same thing: The sun appears to drive climate change.”
But how it does that is crucial. The measured variations of incoming solar energy are not sufficient to explain the rising temperatures observed by evangelist and dissenter alike. “There has to be an amplifier of some sort for the sun to be a primary driver of climate change.” The amplifier is a protective solar wind, entering Earth’s atmosphere from deep space, enhancing cloud formation which has a cooling effect on the globe. When the sun’s “energy output” is greater, Earth warms slightly from direct solar heating, and the stronger solar winds generated during these “high sun” periods block the cosmic rays from deep space. Cloud cover decreases and Earth warms even more. That’s what we’re seeing (and feeling) now.
When the sun’s tantrum subsides, more cosmic rays get through, the cloud cover thickens and the globe cools. Prof. Patterson — and a considerable number of his eminent fellows — conclude that it’s the sun’s “output” that has caused the most recent climate change. “Solar scientists,” he says, “predict that by 2020 the sun will be starting into its weakest solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth.”
This is not fashionable to say. But maybe we should keep in place the machines that leave such a big “carbon footprint.” Al can keep his barn-burner of a house and the rest of us can haul the SUVs out of storage. We’ll need them to keep the Earth warm.
Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.
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