WHEN IS AL GORE GOING TO ATTACK THE SUN?:

Sorry, But With Global Warming It's The Sun, Stupid (Larry Bell, 9/20/11, Forbes)

Man-made global warming crisis crusaders are now facing a new threat. Their anti-fossil carbon-based premise for alarmism is being challenged by new scientific evidence of important solar influences upon climate that can't readily be blamed on us. Not that there wasn't lots of good evidence of this before. Actually, there has been, and it has been routinely denigrated and ignored.

Only this time, the high-profile international source will be impossible for the entrenched scientific establishment to casually dismiss. No, not after experiments at the world's leading physics laboratory, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland recently revealed an inverse correlation between periodic changes in sunspot activity levels, and quantities of cosmic rays entering Earth's atmosphere that trigger surface-cooling cloud formations. [...]

Astronomer Royal, William Herschel, noticed a correlation between sunspots and the price of wheat in England two centuries ago. Some scientists have also observed that sunspots all but disappeared for 70 years during the frigid "Little Ice Age" around the 17th and 18th centuries. Yet the notion didn't begin to receive any real attention, albeit mostly negative, until 1995. That was when Danish physicist, Henrik Svensmark, decided to explore the matter after coming across a 1991 paper by fellow Danes Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen that charted solar variations and global surface temperatures since 1860. Svensmark then teamed up with Friis-Christensen to review solar activity, cloud cover and cosmic ray levels recorded using satellite data available since 1979. The connections seemed clear.

Responses to their findings by prominent members of the climate science community were unwelcoming. When presented at a 1996 conference in Birmingham, England, Svensmark recalls that "everything went completely crazy...It turned out that it was very, very sensitive to say these things already at that time." Upon returning to Copenhagen he was greeted by a statement quoting Bert Bolin who was then chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): "I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naïve and irresponsible."

Follow @brothersjudd