Could it possibly be that the mainstream school of thought surrounding climate change has it all wrong? While the media continues its love-fest with the alarmist non-scientists like Al Gore, climatologists and other atmospheric scientists continue research that may turn the conventional wisdom on its head. The author offers a great opening abstract of his research:

The mud at the bottom of B.C. fjords reveals that solar output drives climate change - and that we should prepare now for dangerous global cooling

Earlier this year, I examined the connections between solar variability and climate change in great detail (On Solar Variability and Global Warming). Further research into the sunspot activity and terrestrial climate change is revealing some astounding correlations, as published recently by the Financial Times: Read the Sunspots. Written by R. Timothy Patterson, the chief researcher of the project, the article starts out by summarizing the well-known and universally-accepted variability of the Earth's climate nicely:

Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now [ed. margin note: How did those stranded polar bears survive then?]. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thou-sand-year-long "Younger Dryas" cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade -- 100 times faster than the past century's 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists.

And then it tackles the solar variability issue. By measuring sediment, diatom and fish-scale records well-preserved in mud, the authors were able to track yet another climate proxy (be sure to read the full article text to understand the detailed analysis of the data that was completed). Via computerized analysis of the fossil record, scientists have been able to identify periods of warmer, abundant growth:

Specifically, we find a very strong and consistent 11-year cycle throughout the whole record in the sediments and diatom remains. This correlates closely to the well-known 11-year "Schwabe" sunspot cycle, during which the output of the sun varies by about 0.1%. Sunspots, violent storms on the surface of the sun, have the effect of increasing solar output, so, by counting the spots visible on the surface of our star, we have an indirect measure of its varying brightness. Such records have been kept for many centuries and match very well with the changes in marine productivity we are observing.

But one question constantly remained - the same core evidence that many doubters of the theory that climate change is driven by solar variability had claimed: the solar variability is not great enough to be the primary driver of terrestrial climate change:

...Even though the sun is brighter now than at any time in the past 8,000 years, the increase in direct solar input is not calculated to be sufficient to cause the past century's modest warming on its own. There had to be an amplifier of some sort for the sun to be a primary driver of climate change.

Indeed, there must be another piece - some stronger force at work that could be responsible for terrestrial climate change. The correlation between solar variability and climate change has long-since been established, it is the causation that has been saught after in the current research - and it is exactly what they may have found (emphasis mine):

In a series of groundbreaking scientific papers starting in 2002, Veizer, Shaviv, Carslaw, and most recently Svensmark et al., have collectively demonstrated that as the output of the sun varies, and with it, our star's protective solar wind, varying amounts of galactic cosmic rays from deep space are able to enter our solar system and penetrate the Earth's atmosphere. These cosmic rays enhance cloud formation which, overall, has a cooling effect on the planet. When the sun's energy output is greater, not only does the Earth warm slightly due to direct solar heating, but the stronger solar wind generated during these "high sun" periods blocks many of the cosmic rays from entering our atmosphere. Cloud cover decreases and the Earth warms still more.

The opposite occurs when the sun is less bright. More cosmic rays are able to get through to Earth's atmosphere, more clouds form, and the planet cools more than would otherwise be the case due to direct solar effects alone. This is precisely what happened from the middle of the 17th century into the early 18th century, when the solar energy input to our atmosphere, as indicated by the number of sunspots, was at a minimum and the planet was stuck in the Little Ice Age. These new findings suggest that changes in the output of the sun caused the most recent climate change. By comparison, CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales.

As a footnote, a message to those who belief Global Warming is a no longer up for debate (emphasis mine):

In some fields the science is indeed "settled." For example, plate tectonics, once highly controversial, is now so well-established that we rarely see papers on the subject at all. But the science of global climate change is still in its infancy, with many thousands of papers published every year. In a 2003 poll conducted by German environmental researchers Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, two-thirds of more than 530 climate scientists from 27 countries surveyed did not believe that "the current state of scientific knowledge is developed well enough to allow for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases." About half of those polled stated that the science of climate change was not sufficiently settled to pass the issue over to policymakers at all.

An impressive research project indeed...we can only wait and see if it gets the time of day from the global-warming-alarmist-obsessed mainstream media.
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Jake Gontesky routinely posts columns exploring the mainstream media
coverage of the global warming debate and other topics in the world of
atmospheric science. As a meteorologist, his viewpoints are frequently
explored from a scientific standpoint rather than a purely political
one. Read more at Notes in the Margin.