The American Spectator

In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me.

With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them…. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”

br> All this was very encouraging news. While I was researching all this, temperatures on the East Coast were in the '60s and '70s and people were sunbathing in January. I still miss winter, but it was encouraging to know that we had been through this once before and the world didn’t fall apart, as generally predicted by alarmists. Greenland may become habitable again, but at least Miami isn’t going to be underwater.

THERE WAS ONLY ONE PROBLEM: What about my book? I was willing to make a concession on global warming in order to try to win liberals over to nuclear energy and now the whole thing had fallen apart.

I spent a very intense two weeks in study. There’s lots of literature on both sides and of course alarmists and skeptics each accuse each other of the most nefarious skullduggery. Environmentalists are now pillorying Exxon of spending $16 million trying to refute global warming. Each side is at the point of trying to outlaw the other’s opinion.

What finally occurred to me is that maybe both are right. It’s possible that the sun forces a 1500-year cycle of warming and cooling and that recent carbon emissions from industrial civilization are exaggerating the pattern. That would suggest there’s nothing too unusual about the recent pattern (everybody agrees it’s getting warmer), but carbon emissions could still be playing a part.

p>I finally found a handful of scientists who support this view. One is Nir Shaviv, a very intelligent Israeli astrophysicist who has written the following on ScienceBits.com : br> /p>

The truth is probably somewhere in between, with natural causes probably being more important over the past century, whereas anthropogenic causes will probably be more dominant over the next century. Following [the] empirical evidence… about 2/3’s (give or take a third or so) of the warming should be attributed to increased solar activity and the remaining to anthropogenic causes.

br> The others are S.K. Solanki of the Max Planck Institute and M. Fligge of the Institute of Astronomy in Zurich, who have done extensive research on solar activity and show that it corresponds very closely with temperature changes. In particular, their data explains the slight decline in temperatures from 1956 to 1970 — a period that carbon-emissions advocates have a great deal of trouble in explaining. p>Solanki and Fligge are generally acknowledged by both sides to be very objective chroniclers of the solar theory. Yet when I read one of their leading papers, I found this: