Jeff wrote:
* Dave wrote, On 3/30/2007 4:46 PM:
On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 16:32:41 -0400, Jeff said:

An allegation was made, one that verges on calling everyone who who
supports the theory of Global Warming corrupt. An yet, absolutely no
supporting evidence is given. That's blowing smoke!

No Jeff. Blowing smoke is claiming the issue of whether those
supporting the
theory of GW are corrupt is to be found in a scientific journal.

Why is that, Dave? I don't follow your logic at all. A claim was made,
I only asked if there was supporting evidence that would be acceptable
to most people. How is that blowing smoke? Most people would look at
it the other way, that making such a claim without supporting evidence
is blowing smoke.

Logic was never your long suit, was it Dave?


I think the paper by this physicist has been published in the last few
weeks.


Some scientists reject current global warming theory

February 02, 2007 AD

Astrophysicist Nir Shariv, one of Israel's top young scientists,
describes the logic that led him -- and most everyone else -- to
conclude that SUVs, coal plants and other things man-made cause global
warming.

Step One Scientists for decades have postulated that increases in
carbon dioxide and other gases could lead to a greenhouse effect.

Step Two As if on cue, the temperature rose over the course of the
20th century while greenhouse gases proliferated due to human
activities.

Step Three No other mechanism explains the warming. Without another
candidate, greenhouses gases necessarily became the cause.

+++

Dr. Shariv, a prolific researcher who has made a name for himself
assessing the movements of two-billion-year-old meteorites, no longer
accepts this logic, or subscribes to these views.

He has recanted: "Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is
the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully
digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more
complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or
the stories regurgitated by the media.

"In fact, there is much more than meets the eye."

Dr. Shariv's digging led him to the surprising discovery that there is
no concrete evidence -- only speculation -- that man-made greenhouse
gases cause global warming.

Even research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-- the
United Nations agency that heads the worldwide effort to combat global
warming -- is bereft of anything here inspiring confidence.

In fact, according to the IPCC's own findings, man's role is so
uncertain that there is a strong possibility that we have been
cooling, not warming, the Earth.

Unfortunately, our tools are too crude to reveal what man's effect has
been in the past, let alone predict how much warming or cooling we
might cause in the future.

All we have on which to pin the blame on greenhouse gases, says Dr.
Shaviv, is "incriminating circumstantial evidence," which explains why
climate scientists speak in terms of finding "evidence of
fingerprints."

Circumstantial evidence might be a fine basis on which to justify
reducing greenhouse gases, he adds, "without other 'suspects.' "

However, Dr. Shaviv not only believes there are credible "other
suspects," he believes that at least one provides a superior
explanation for the 20th century's warming.

"Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global
warming," he states, particularly because of the evidence that has
been accumulating over the past decade of the strong relationship that
cosmic- ray flux has on our atmosphere.

So much evidence has by now been amassed, in fact, that "it is
unlikely that this does not exist."

The sun's strong role indicates that greenhouse gases can't have much
of an influence on the climate -- that C02 et al. don't dominate
through some kind of leveraging effect that makes them especially
potent drivers of climate change.

The upshot of the Earth not being unduly sensitive to greenhouse gases
is that neither increases nor cutbacks in future C02 emissions will
matter much in terms of the climate.

Even doubling the amount of CO2 by 2100, for example, "will not
dramatically increase the global temperature," Dr. Shaviv states.

Put another way: "Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2
increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today
instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of
global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant."

The evidence from astrophysicists and cosmologists in laboratories
around the world, on the other hand, could well be significant.

In his study of meteorites, published in the prestigious journal,
Physical Review Letters, Dr. Shaviv found that the meteorites that
Earth collected during its passage through the arms of the Milky Way
sustained up to 10% more cosmic ray damage than others.

That kind of cosmic ray variation, Dr. Shaviv believes, could alter
global temperatures by as much as 15% --sufficient to turn the ice
ages on or off and evidence of the extent to which cosmic forces
influence Earth's climate.

In another study, directly relevant to today's climate controversy,
Dr. Shaviv reconstructed the temperature on Earth over the past 550
million years to find that cosmic ray flux variations explain more
than two-thirds of Earth's temperature variance, making it the most
dominant climate driver over geological time scales.

The study also found that an upper limit can be placed on the relative
role of CO2 as a climate driver, meaning that a large fraction of the
global warming witnessed over the past century could not be due to CO2
-- instead it is attributable to the increased solar activity.

CO2 does play a role in climate, Dr. Shaviv believes, but a secondary
role, one too small to preoccupy policymakers. Yet Dr. Shaviv also
believes fossil fuels should be controlled, not because of their
adverse affects on climate but to curb pollution.

"I am therefore in favour of developing cheap alternatives such as
solar power, wind, and of course fusion reactors (converting Deuterium
into Helium), which we should have in a few decades, but this is an
altogether different issue." His conclusion: "I am quite sure Kyoto is
not the right way to go."