The Great Global Warming Swindle Page #4

so for example if somebody says:

"Oh, I'm seeing changes

in the North Atlantic,

...this must mean that the

climate system is changing",

it may only mean that

something happened...

...in a remote part of the ocean

decades or hundreds of years ago

whose effects are now beginning

to show up in the North Atlantic.

The current warming

began long...

...before people had cars

or electric lights.

In the past 150 years,

the temperature has risen

just over half a degree celsius.

But most of that rise

occurred before 1940.

Since that time, the

temperature...

has fallen for four decades,

and risen for three.

There's no evidence at all...

...from Earth's long

climate history...

...that CO2 has ever determined

global temperatures.

But if CO2 doesn't drive

Earth's climate, what does?

The common belief that CO2

is driving climate change...

is at odds with much of

the available scientific data.

Data from weather

balloons and satellites,

from icecore surveys and from

the historical temperature records.

But if CO2 isn't driving climate,

what is?

Isn't it bizarre the thing

that it's humans,

you know when we're filling apart car,

turning on our lights,

that we are the ones

controlling climate?

Just look in the sky, look at

that massive thing, the Sun.

Even humans, at

our present 6.5 billion

are minute relative to that.

In the late 1980's, solar physicist

Piers Corbin decided to try...

a radically new way of

forecasting the weather.

Despite the huge resources

of the official Met Office,

Corbin's new technique consistently

produced more accurate results;

He was held in the national press

as the super weatherman.

The secret of his success

was the Sun.

The origin of solar weather technique

of long range forecasting...

came originally from study of sunspots

and the desire to predict those,

...and then I realized there was

actually much more interest in...

...to use the Sun to

predict the weather.

Sunspots, we now know,

are intense magnetic fields...

...which appear at times

of higher solar activity.

But for many hundreds of years,

long before this was

properly understood,

the astronomers around

the world used to count...

...the number of

sunspots in the belief,,,

...that more spots

heralded warmer weather.

In 1893 the British astronomer

Edward Maunder observed...

that during the Little Ice Age

there were barely

any spots visible on the Sun.

A period of solar inactivity

which became known as...

...the Maunder Minimum.

But how reliable are sunspots

as an indicator of the weather?

I decided to test it by gambling

on the weather through William Hill,

against what the Met Office

said was, you know,

a normal expectation.

And I won money month after

month after month after month.

Last winter the Met Office

said it could be...

...or would be an

exceptionally cold winter;

We said:
"no, that is nonsense,

it's gonna be close to normal"

and we specifically said

when it would be cold,

after Christmas and February:

we were right, they were wrong.

In 1991, senior scientists of the

Danish Meteorological Institute

decided to compile a record

of sunspots in the 20th century...

and compare it with the

temperature record.

What they found, was an

incredibly close correlation...

between what the

Sun was doing...

and changes in temperature

on Earth.

Solar activity they found

rose sharply to 1940,

fell back for four decades

until the 1970's...

...and then rose again after that.

When we saw this correlation...

between the temperature and

solar activity or sunspot cyclings,

then the people said to us:

"OK, it can be just a coincidence",

so how can we prove that

it's not just a coincidence?

Well, one obvious thing is

to have a longer timeseries...

...or different timeseries

and we went back in time.

So Professor Friis Christensen

and his colleagues examined...

...four hundreds years

of astronomical records...

to compare sunspot activity...

...against temperature variation.

Once again, they found...

that variations in solar activity...

were intimate linked...

...to temperature

variation on Earth.

It was the Sun, it seemed,

not CO2, or anything else,

that was driving changes

in the climate.

In a way, it's not surprising:

the Sun affects us directly...

...of course when it

sends down its heat.

But we now know...

the Sun also affects

indirectly through clouds.

Clouds have a powerful cooling effect,

but how are they formed?

In the early 20th century

scientists discovered that...

the Earth was constantly

being bombarded...

...by subatomic particles.

These particles, which

they called cosmic rays,

originated (it was believed)

from exploding supernovae,

far beyond our Solar System.

When the particles coming down

meet water vapour rising

up from the sea,

they form water droplets

and make clouds.

But when the Sun

is more active...

and the solar wind is strong,

fewer particles get through

and fewer clouds are formed.

Just how powerful

this effect was,

became clear only recently,

when an astrophysicist,

Professor Nir Shaviv...

...decided to compare

his own record...

of cloud-forming

cosmic rays...

with the temperature record

created by a geologist,

Professor Jan Veizer...

...going back six hundred

million years.

What they found was that

when cosmic rays went up,

...the temperature went down;

when cosmic rays went down,

the temperature went up.

Clouds and the Earth's climate

were wery closely linked.

To see how close,

you just flip the lines.

We just compared the graph,

just put them one upon the other

and it was just amazing

and Jan Veizer looked at me and said you know,

We have very explosive data here.

I've never seen such a

vastly different records...

coming together

so beautifully...

to show really what's happening

over that long period of time.

The climate was controlled

by the clouds.

The clouds were controlled

by cosmic rays,

and the cosmic rays were

controlled by the Sun.

It all came down to the Sun.

If you had X-ray eyes

what appears as a nice

friendly yellow ball...

...would appear like a raging tiger.

The Sun is an incredibly

violent beast...

..and is raying out great

explosions...

and puffs of gas...

...and endless solar wind...

that's forever rushing

past the Earth.

There, in a certain sense,

inside the atmosphere

of the Sun...

the intensity of its magnetic

field...

more than doubled...

...during the 20th century.

In 2005, astrophysicists

from Harvard University...

published the following graph...

in the official Journal of the

American Geophysical Union:

The blue line represents

temperature change...

in the Arctic over the

past hundred years...

and here is the rising CO2

over the same period.

The two are not

obviously connected.

But now look again at

the temperature record...

and at this red line...

which depicts variations

in solar activity...

over the past century as recorded

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