Listen to today's Commentary

Introduction:

Another day and more tons of greenhouse gases are dumped into the atmosphere. More global warming you say. But hold on a minute...are we right about that? Lorne Gunter is a columnist for the Edmonton Journal. On Commentary he says there's new scientific evidence on the issue.

Lorne Gunter:

Remember the vaunted scientific consensus on global warming? That it's a "fact" the slight warming the Earth has experienced in the past century is the fault of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses? If we didn't ratify the Kyoto accord and cork our factories, cars and cows, global warming will devastate life on the planet in the next century. Remember THAT vaunted consensus?

Well, if it ever existed, it's gone now.

On July 1st, the esteemed Geological Society of America published an earth-shattering - or make that a Kyoto-shattering - study by Canadian scientist Jan Veizer of the University of Ottawa and Nir Shaviv, an astrophysicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Veizer and Shaviv discovered that nearly three-quarters of the variability in our climate can be attributed to the interplay between solar radiation and cosmic rays.

The cloudy tentacles of our Milky Way galaxy generate new stars in surprising numbers. Yet many of these stars are unstable and supernova very quickly. As they die in violent explosions, they spew out billions of highly charged cosmic rays. When these rays reach earth they change our climate by encouraging cloud formation and lowering our planetary temperature.

Incoming radiation from our sun can have a profound impact in the opposite direction. According to Veizer, Shaviv over the past five hundred million years solar radiation, not greenhouse gases has driven global temperature. In other words, it's the S-U-N, not S-U-Vs that cause global warming.

This should surprise no one. Why shouldn't earth warm when solar activity is at its peak? Or temperatures fluctuate when the the planet is being bombarded with cosmic rays from exploding stars?

Veizer's and Shaviv's explanation is far more plausible than the so-called consensus view. Supposedly, carbon dioxide, which makes up a tiny fraction of one percent of the atmosphere, is somehow going to build up to such an extent that it triggers a catastrophic - yet unknown reaction in the climate that will raise global temperatures beyond safe levels.

Veizer's and Shaviv's work has profound implications on federal climate change policy, too. If human activity is not the cause of global warming then all our prevention policies are useless. Capping and regulating industry and drivers, and spending billions of tax dollars subsidizing solar panels on everyone's roofs will be futile. The warming is happening naturally and it won't be devastating, anyway.

If Veizer and Shaviv are right then Ottawa's obsession with stopping global warming is no less ridiculous than the ancient English king, Canute, placing his throne in the surf and commanding the tide to stop.

For Commentary, I'm Lorne Gunter in Edmonton.