The Galileo of Global Warming

By Robert Tracinski

I have written before about how the left loves to invoke the example of Galileo in order to present themselves as the great defenders of science against all of those knuckle-dragging religious bigots who don’t believe in global warming. But these same people don’t understand science very well themselves (remember amateur neurologist Janeane Garofalo lecturing us about the “limbic brain”?), so they end up using Galileo, a man who defied the “consensus” of his day, as a propaganda talking point to enforce the consensus of today.

It occurred to me a while back that there is something worse about this invocation of Galileo, because there is a modern-day equivalent to Galileo, specifically on the issue of global warming—and he’s on the other side. In this more civilized age, he is thankfully not threatened with torture or any kind of persecution. But he is a pioneer of new and important scientific truths who is being ignored and vilified because his discoveries run counter to the quasi-religious dogma of our day.

That man is the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark, who seems to have discovered the most important factor that actually regulates Earth’s climate, and who is quietly in the process of proving it.

I linked last year to Svensmark’s latest big breakthrough, but I didn’t get a chance to discuss it much, so I want to give a little more detail now, then show one of the recent consequences of Svensmark’s achievement.

Let me briefly sum up Svensmark’s theory. The temperature of the Earth, he argues, is regulated by the intensity of solar radiation, but not in the obvious way. It is not that the increase is solar radiation heats the Earth directly. (It does, of course, but not to a sufficient degree to explain climate variations.) Rather, an increase in solar radiation extends the Sun’s magnetic field, which shields Earth from cosmic rays (highly energetic, fast-moving charged particles that come from deep space). How does this affect the climate? Here is the crux of Svensmark’s argument. When cosmic rays hit the atmosphere, he argues, their impact on air molecules creates nucleation sites for the condensation of water vapor, leading to an increase in cloud-formation. Since clouds tend to bounce solar radiation back into space, increased cloud cover cools the Earth, while decreased cloud cover makes the Earth warmer.

So if Svensmark is right, lower solar radiation means more cosmic rays, more clouds, and a cooler Earth, while higher solar radiation means fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer Earth.

Those who have followed the global warming controversy over the years may recall that cloud-formation is one of the major gaps in the computerized climate “models” used by the consensus scientists to predict global warming. They have never had a theory to explain how and why clouds form or to account accurately for their effect on the climate. Svensmark has smashed through this glaring gap in their theory.

Like I said, Svensmark hasn’t just put this theory out there. He has been working to prove it. He has done some studies that attempted to track measurements of cosmic ray flux against surface temperature and cloud cover, with some success. But his big breakthrough last year was a long-awaited experiment at Switzerland’s CERN particle accelerator that demonstrated the most controversial part of Svensmark’s theory.

It is widely accepted that the Sun’s magnetic field helps shield Earth from cosmic rays, and it is also widely accepted that increased cloud cover cools the Earth (though expect this to suddenly come into question as Svensmarks’ theory gains ground). What Svensmark needed to demonstrate was that cosmic rays form nucleation sites that seed clouds.

Hence the aptly named CLOUD experiment performed at CERN last year, with the results published last August. The experiment was actually more than a decade in the making, but as Lawrence Solomon explains, it was help back for years by the scientific bureaucracy because of its potentially unwelcome results.

The results are indeed unwelcome, at least for the advocates of the global warming consensus. Anthony Watts explained the experiment at his blog, Watts Up With That? The CLOUD experiment used CERN’s particle accelerator to send a beam of artificially generated charged particles—simulated cosmic rays—into a gas-filled chamber and then measured the formation of aerosols, the kind of compounds that can serve as cloud nucleation sites. It found a direct and very significant relationship.

This is not a total demonstration of Svensmark’s theory. The Nature paper on the CLOUD experiment notes that “the fraction of these freshly nucleated particles that grow to sufficient sizes to seed cloud droplets, as well as the role of organic vapors in the nucleation and growth processes, remain open questions experimentally.” But last year’s result is a clear demonstration of a crucial step in Svensmark’s theory. It’s certainly a lot farther than the warmthers have ever gotten in demonstrating the physical basis for their theory.

(“Warmther,” by the way, is a coin termed—if I recall correctly—by occasional TIA Daily contributor Tom Minchin. It’s intended to put advocates of the global warming hysteria in the same category as the “truthers” and the “birthers.”)

What impact did the CLOUD experiment have? Well, the global warming establishment set out to make sure it would have no impact. Like I said, this is a more civilized age, so Svensmark and his colleagues will not be subject to an Inquisition. They will just be ignored, for as long as the entrenched establishment can manage to do so.

This campaign began immediately. James Delingpole’s overview of the reaction to CLOUD quotes the statement given to the press by Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Director General of CERN.

I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them. That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.

I don’t know what I find more amusing about this quote: the fact that he is directing scientists not to draw conclusions from data, or the fact that he then proceeds to assert his own interpretation of the data, that “cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.” Well, no, if Svensmark’s theory is right, it is not “only one of many,” it is the central factor, far more important than human emissions of carbon dioxide. But thanks for telling us all ahead of time what we’re supposed to think.

Heuer’s statement is an example of an old warmther practice of releasing scientific results to the media only on the condition that upper-level science bureaucrats, the ones who want to increase or preserve the funding they get from government, provide the politically appropriate “spin” to the press. In this case, the appropriate spin is, “move along, nothing to see here.”

Read the rest here.

Sean Lengell

A top official with the National Rifle Association said Friday that President Obama will move to “destroy” gun rights and “erase” the Second Amendment if he is re-elected in November.

While delivering one of the liveliest and best-received speeches at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said the president’s low-key approach to gun rights during his first term was “a “conspiracy to ensure re-election by lulling gun owners to sleep.”

“All that first term, lip service to gun owners is just part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term,” he said.

“We see the president’s strategy crystal clear: Get re-elected and, with no more elections to worry about, get busy dismantling and destroying our firearms’ freedom, erase the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights and excise it from the U.S. Constitution.”

Mr. LaPierre said the president’s two Supreme Court appointees — Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan— are “two of the most rabid anti-gun justices in history.” He also accused Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of being a foe of gun rights.

And with the possibility of two or more Supreme Court justice positions opening during the next four years, the NRA official warned that gun ownership would be in jeopardy if Mr. Obama stays in office.

“If we get one more like those three, the Second Amendment is finished,” he said. “It’ll be the end of our freedom forever.”

Read the rest here.

Joe Weisenthal

For the first time since the Great Recession, the economy is showing some signs of being on a “sustainable” recovery path. And the timing is pretty great for Obama, if the momentum can continue through the year — a big if.

But it’s hard to argue with the fact that through the first couple years of the administration, job creation was achingly slow, even as GDP bounded back nicely from the ’08-’09 depths.

A new article from Noam Scheiber at TNR — adapted from a forthcoming book of his — sheds new light on the fumbling, dysfunctional economic team that Obama had in place during the first two years. It’s a depressing read.

Probably the saddest part is how quickly the administration pivoted to deficits, rather than stimulus.

The article tells how in the summer of 2009, after the first stimulus, Larry Summers and Peter Orszag still had wildly different views on stimulus and deficits. Orszag reportedly wanted deficit cuts; Summers recognized that the economy needed new stimulus.

In the end…

Seated in the Roosevelt Room in early December 2009, the president wondered why both sets of ideas were so timid. Orszag grumbled that it was, in fact, disappointing to offer so little on the deficit front. Summers interjected that the economy was in dire need of more stimulus. Each side then labeled the other’s proposals political nonstarters, and the president lost his patience. “You know what, this is the same meeting we’ve been having,” he said, excusing himself. “Talk to me when you’ve thought this through.” The bickering soon grew so loud that Orszag’s deputy, Rob Nabors, lunged to shut the door.

With no agreement forthcoming, it was Orszag who filled the vacuum throughout the fall. He urged the president to freeze domestic spending in his next budget and favored setting up a commission of Washington elders to recommend trillions in savings over a decade. Summers believed such ideas were gimmicks unworthy of a president. To colleagues he complained that “what’s really important in life is not to believe your own bullshit.” The president sided with Orszag.

Again, the key here is that this was 2009, with the economy barely out of technical recession.

Read the rest here.

Sheesh, would somebody tell the politicians that all that needs to be done to save the economy is spend more of everyone else’s money? Gosh, who knew it could be so simple?

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Debt-ridden and hidebound, Europe may be on the verge of a painful breakup. America is still reeling from the 2008 financial crisis. Even China and India — the new engines of global growth — seem to be sputtering these days. Worse yet, the usual wonkish prescriptions don’t seem to be working anymore. So we asked 13 of the smartest people we know to give us their one out-of-the-box idea for fixing the global economy. Here’s what they recommend.

Read the rest here.

By Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier on February 9, 2012

The NFL is done for the year, but it is not pure fantasy to suggest that it may be done for good in the not-too-distant future. How might such a doomsday scenario play out and what would be the economic and social consequences?

By now we’re all familiar with the growing phenomenon of head injuries and cognitive problems among football players, even at the high school level. In 2009, Malcolm Gladwell asked whether football might someday come to an end, a concern seconded recently by Jonah Lehrer.

Before you say that football is far too big to ever disappear, consider the history: If you look at the stocks in the Fortune 500 from 1983, for example, 40 percent of those companies no longer exist. The original version of Napster no longer exists, largely because of lawsuits. No matter how well a business matches economic conditions at one point in time, it’s not a lock to be a leader in the future, and that is true for the NFL too. Sports are not immune to these pressures. In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction.

The most plausible route to the death of football starts with liability suits.¹ Precollegiate football is already sustaining 90,000 or more concussions each year. If ex-players start winning judgments, insurance companies might cease to insure colleges and high schools against football-related lawsuits. Coaches, team physicians, and referees would become increasingly nervous about their financial exposure in our litigious society. If you are coaching a high school football team, or refereeing a game as a volunteer, it is sobering to think that you could be hit with a $2 million lawsuit at any point in time. A lot of people will see it as easier to just stay away. More and more modern parents will keep their kids out of playing football, and there tends to be a “contagion effect” with such decisions; once some parents have second thoughts, many others follow suit. We have seen such domino effects with the risks of smoking or driving without seatbelts, two unsafe practices that were common in the 1960s but are much rarer today. The end result is that the NFL’s feeder system would dry up and advertisers and networks would shy away from associating with the league, owing to adverse publicity and some chance of being named as co-defendants in future lawsuits.

It may not matter that the losses from these lawsuits are much smaller than the total revenue from the sport as a whole. As our broader health care sector indicates (try buying private insurance when you have a history of cancer treatment), insurers don’t like to go where they know they will take a beating. That means just about everyone could be exposed to fear of legal action.

Read the rest here.

* Top U.S. corporate tax rate is 35 percent

* Obama seen calling for lower rate, in line with peers

* Opening salvo in corporate tax revamp (Adds administration official, Bernstein comments)

By Kim Dixon

WASHINGTON, Feb 10 (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama will call for cutting the top 35 percent corporate tax rate as early as this month, according to two sources close to the administration.

The president is likely to propose a rate closer to an average of that seen in peer nations, the sources said.

This would jibe with remarks made last year by U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who suggested the United States should be moving to a rate more in line with its major trading partners in the high 20-percent range.

Obama outlined tax measures – including closing tax loopholes for companies that move facilities and jobs overseas – in his State of the Union speech in January, and will lay out principles for revamping corporate taxes by the end of February, a senior administration official said.

“We will talk more before the end of the month on what corporate tax reform would look like,” the official said on Friday, confirming that it would include a call for “lower rates.”

Facing a potentially tough presidential re-election challenge this November, Obama will propose cutting the rate following the release of his 2013 budget plan on Monday, Feb. 13, according to the sources, who were not authorized to speak on the record.

Read the rest here.

(Reuters) – Some California farmers plan to stop selling their walnuts to Diamond Foods Inc in the wake of an accounting scandal over grower payments that has claimed the jobs of the snack company’s chief executive and chief financial officer.

Six small walnut growers told Reuters they would stop supplying Diamond when their contracts expire because they say the company has been underpaying farmers. Three of those growers said they hoped to break their contracts early.

Diamond declined to comment on its relationship with growers. The company this week said it had to restate earnings for 2010 and 2011 after its audit committee found that it had improperly accounted for payments to walnut growers.

The walnut growers Reuters spoke to said they know of more than a dozen other growers who also want to terminate their relationships with Diamond. While that is still a fraction of the roughly 1,000 growers who supply Diamond, if there is an Exodus, it could hurt the company’s ability to fulfill orders or force it to pay more in an increasingly competitive market.

Read the rest here.

By Jason Zweig

Past returns are no guarantee of future success. Just like smokers ignoring the Surgeon General’s warning on the side of cigarette packs, investors overlook the most obvious caution about the stock market at their peril.

Even after Friday’s stumble over renewed fears about Europe, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has gained 7% so far this year, and the Russell 2000 small-stock index is up 11%.

Why is it so hard for investors to regard such short-term hot streaks with the cold eye they deserve?

Decision Research, a nonprofit think tank in Eugene, Ore., has conducted a nationwide online survey of investors seven times since 2008. These surveys have shown that investors’ forecasts of future returns go up after the market has risen and down after it has fallen.

William Burns, an analyst at Decision Research, says investors’ forecasts of the market’s return over the coming year were heavily swayed by how stocks performed in the previous month.

They might not have had a choice. The investing mind comes with built-in machinery that sizes up the future based on a surprisingly short sample of the past. Neuroscientists say the human brain probably evolved this response in a simple environment in which the cues to basic payoffs like food and shelter changed slowly and rarely, making the latest signals most valuable—nothing like what today’s investors face with electronic markets in a constant state of flux.

Experiments led by neuroscientist Paul Glimcher of New York University found that cells deep in the brain calculate a sort of moving average of past events, giving the greatest weight to the most recent outcomes.

When the latest rewards turn out to be better than the long-term pattern, these neurons fire unusually quickly, spreading a burst of dopamine—the neurotransmitter that triggers the pursuit of reward—throughout the brain.

Thus, after a decade of mostly dismal stock returns, even a month or two of outperformance might prompt you into an impulsive plunge back toward stocks.

Some investors seem to have learned how to resist this tendency, and you should, too.

Read the rest here.

Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia? A biologist’s science- fiction hunch is gaining credence and shaping the emerging science of mind- controlling parasites.

Read the rest here.

FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP) — Former Red Sox pitcher Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd says he probably pitched under the influence of cocaine “at every ballpark” during his 10-year career.

“There wasn’t one ballpark that I probably didn’t stay up all night, until 4 or 5 in the morning, and the same thing is in your system,” Boyd said in an interview with Jon Miller of WBZ radio in Boston. “It ain’t like you had time to go and do it while you were in the game, which I have (done) that.”

Boyd was 78-77 with a 4.04 ERA in his career. In eight seasons with the Red Sox, from 1982-89, he was 60-56. In his last two seasons, he was 18-21 with Montreal and Texas.

“Some of the best games that I’ve ever, ever pitched in the major leagues, I stayed up all night. I’d say two-thirds of them,” he said Wednesday at JetBlue Park, where Boston holds spring training, “and if I had went to bed, I would have won 150 ballgames in the time span that I played and … I felt like my career was cut short for a lot of reasons.”

One of them, he said, was “bigotry.”

Boyd said he “wasn’t doing anything that hundreds of ballplayers weren’t doing at the time, because that’s how I learned it and I just caught the deep end of it. And the reason, too, also, that I caught the deep end of it (is) I’m black and the bottom line was that the game carries a lot of bigotry and that was just an easy way for them to do it.”

He said that “If I wasn’t outspoken and so-called `a proud, proud black man’ maybe I would have got empathy and sympathy like other ballplayers got that I didn’t get; like a Darryl Strawberry or Dwight Gooden, Steve Howe. I can name 50 people that got third and fourth chances all because they weren’t outspoken black individuals.”

Demand has never been greater for an exchange-traded note that appreciates when U.S. stock volatility rises, pushed up by speculators after equities posted their best start to a year since 1991.

The market value of the VelocityShares Daily 2x VIX Short- Term ETN, which aims to produce twice the daily return of the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index, more than tripled this year to a record $514 million. Issued shares rose more than sixfold to 33.8 million between Dec. 30 and Feb. 7.

Stocks have gained in 2012 following better-than-estimated jobs data, driving down measures of equity volatility. Now, after the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rallied 7.5 percent, investors are buying the ETN in case the advance fizzles and price swings surge, said Glenmede Trust Co.’s Sean Heron. The VelocityShares security rose 135 percent in August after S&P cut the U.S. government’s credit rating, roiling markets.

“It’s a convenient way to own volatility,” Heron, who manages options strategies at Philadelphia-based Glenmede, said yesterday in a phone interview. His firm oversees $20 billion. “People want to own the VIX, people want to be long volatility and protect their assets.”

Increasing use of exchange-traded VIX products has driven volume and open interest for its futures to new highs. The futures have an open interest of about 190,000 and reached a record 248,976 in June. That’s up from an average of 179,253 last year and 91,481 in 2010, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Read the rest here.

Warren Buffett’s stake in Bank of America Corp. increased in value by $154 million after President Obama and the U.S. Justice Department announced a $25 billion foreclosure abuse settlement with the five largest U.S. banks Thursday, records show.

Buffett invested $5 billion in Bank of America (BofA) on Aug. 25, 2011. As part of his investment deal, Buffett gained warrants that allow him to buy 700 million shares of Bank of America stock at a strike price of $7.14 a share. However, on Dec. 19, 2011, it was reported that Buffett was $1.5 billion underwater on his stock warrants, with shares of BofA stock trading at $4.94. But on Thursday, after President Obama personally announced the details of the settlement, BofA stock closed at $8.13 a share. The stock opened Friday morning at $8.31 and reached as high as $8.35 a share.

If Buffett had exercised his warrants Friday morning, he would have made $847 million. $154 million of that profit would have been related to the foreclosure deal.

This is not the first time Buffett has profited from Obama administration policies. In November 2011, it was reported that President Obama’s two-year postponement of the deadline to determine the future of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would force North Dakota oil producers to rely more heavily on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. holding company purchased the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad Corp. in a total package worth $44 billion in 2009.

Buffett has personally contributed $5,000 to Obama this election cycle, while Berkshire Hathaway has contributed $30,800 to the Democratic National Committee.

This summer, Obama will accept the Democratic Party’s 2012 presidential nomination with a speech at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C.

Source

Investors should have 100 percent of investments in equities because of valuations and higher returns than bonds, said Laurence D. Fink, chief executive officer of BlackRock Inc. (BLK), the world’s largest money manager.

Investors who seek the safety of treasury bonds will have minimal returns and will not be able to meet their needs with the U.S. Federal Reserve expected to keep interest rates low, said Fink, who in 1988 co-founded the New York-based manager with $3.5 trillion of assets. By contrast, equities are trading at the lowest valuations in 20 or 30 years.

“I don’t have a view that the world is going to fall apart, so you need to take on more risk,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Hong Kong today. “You need to overcome all this noise. When you look at dividend returns on equities versus bond yields, to me it’s a pretty easy decision to be heavily in equities.”

Read the rest here.

The saga continues as Spiegel Online publishes an English translation from the prominent Social Democrat and former German Environment Minister and CEO of the  renewable energy group RWE Innogy.

Excerpts from the interview are published below.

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Will reduced solar activity counteract global warming in the coming decades? That is what outgoing German electric utility executive Fritz Vahrenholt claims in a new book. In an interview with SPIEGEL, he argues that the official United Nations forecasts on the severity of climate change are overstated and supported by weak science.

SPIEGEL: You are an electric utility executive by profession. What prompted you to get involved in climatology?

Vahrenholt: In my experience as an energy expert, I learned that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is more of a political than a scientific body. As a rapporteur on renewable energy, I witnessed how thin the factual basis is for predictions that are made at the IPCC. In one case, a Greenpeace activist’s absurd claim that 80 percent of the world’s energy supply could soon be coming from renewable sources was assumed without scrutiny. This prompted me to examine the IPCC report more carefully.

SPIEGEL: And what was your conclusion?

Vahrenholt: The long version of the IPCC report does mention natural causes of climate change, like the sun and oscillating ocean currents. But they no longer appear in the summary for politicians. They were simply edited out. To this day, many decision-makers don’t know that new studies have seriously questioned the dominance of CO2. CO2 alone will never cause a warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. Only with the help of supposed amplification effects, especially water vapor, do the computers arrive at a drastic temperature increase. I say that global warming will remain below two degrees by the end of the century. This is an eminently political message, but it’s also good news.

SPIEGEL: You make concrete statements on how much human activity contributes to climatic events and how much of a role natural factors play. Why don’t you publish your prognoses in a professional journal?

Vahrenholt: Because I don’t engage in my own climate research. Besides, I don’t have a supercomputer in my basement. For the most part, my co-author, geologist Sebastian Lüning, and I merely summarize what scientists have published in professional journals — just as the IPCC does. The book is also a platform for scientists who apply good arguments in diverging from the views of the IPCC. The established climate models have failed across the board because they cannot cogently explain the absence of warming.

SPIEGEL: You claim that the standstill has to do with the sun. What makes you so sure?

Vahrenholt: In terms of the climate, we have seen a cyclical up and down for the last 7,000 years, long before man began emitting CO2 into the atmosphere. There has been a warming phase every 1,000 years, including the Roman, the Medieval and the current warm periods. All of these warm periods consistently coincided with strong solar activity. In addition to this large fluctuation in activity, there is also a 210-year and an 87-year natural cycle of the sun. Ignoring these would be a serious mistake …

SPIEGEL: … but solar researchers are still in disagreement over whether the cycles you mention actually exist. What do you think this means for the future?

Vahrenholt: In the second half of the 20th century, the sun was more active than it had been in more than 2,000 years. This “large solar maximum,” as astronomers call it, has contributed at least as much to global warming as the greenhouse gas CO2. But the sun has been getting weaker since 2005, and it will continue to do so in the next few decades. Consequently, we can only expect cooling from the sun for now.

SPIEGEL:It is undisputed that fluctuations in solar activity can influence the climate. Most experts assume that an unusually long solar minimum, evidenced by the very small number of sunspots at the time, led to the “Little Ice Age” that began in 1645. There were many severe winters at the time, with rivers freezing over. However, astrophysicists still don’t know the extent to which solar fluctuations actually affect temperatures.

Vahrenholt: Many scientists assume that the temperature changes by more than 1 degree Celsius for the 1,000-year cycle and by up to 0.7 degrees Celsius for the smaller cycles. Climatologists should be putting a far greater effort into finding ways to more accurately determine the effects of the sun on climate. For the IPCC and the politicians it influences, CO2 is practically the only factor. The importance of the sun for the climate is systematically underestimated, and the importance of CO2 is systematically overestimated. As a result, all climate predictions are based on the wrong underlying facts.

SPIEGEL: But you are doing exactly what you criticize climatologists of doing: Using a thin body of data, you make exact predictions. In your book, you estimate the sun’s influence on the climate down to the last 0.1 degrees. No one can do that.

Part 2: ‘Dozens of Solar Researchers Agree with Me’

Vahrenholt: I don’t claim that I know precisely whether the sun is responsible for a 40, 50 or 60 percent share of global warming. But it’s nonsense for the IPCC to claim that the sun has nothing to do with it.

SPIEGEL: On balance, you predict a global cooling of 0.2 to 0.3 degrees Celsius by 2035. Why such a risky prediction?

Vahrenholt: If you want to revitalize the deadlocked debate, you have to have the courage to name a number. And we derive this number from scientific studies on climate history to date.

SPIEGEL: So your contention that we are wrong about global warming is merely a provocation?

Vahrenholt: No. I mean it very seriously, and I know that dozens of solar researchers agree with me. I am perfectly aware of the defamation I will have to listen to in the near future. The climate debate also has some of the trappings of an inquisition. I’m curious to see which truth ministry will now initiate proceedings against me. Perhaps it’ll be the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, which is headed by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, an adviser to the chancellor.

SPIEGEL: You claim that the standstill in global warming since 2000 has been caused in large part by a simultaneous decline in solar activity. But, in fact, the sun behaved relatively normally until the middle of the century, only becoming noticeably quieter after that. How does this fit together?

Vahrenholt: There are two effects: the declining solar activity, as well as the fluctuations in ocean currents, such as the 60-year Pacific oscillation, which was in a positive warm phase from 1977 to 2000 and, since 2000, has led to cooling as a result of its decline. Their contribution to the change in temperature has also been wrongly attributed to CO2. Most of all, however, the last sunspot cycle was weaker than the one before it. This is why the sun’s magnetic field has continued to weaken since 2000. As a result, this magnetic field doesn’t shield us against cosmic radiation quite as well, which in turn leads to stronger cloud formation and, therefore, cooling. What else has to happen before the IPCC at least mentions these relationships in its reports?

SPIEGEL: What you neglect to mention is that it hasn’t been proven yet that cosmic radiation, which is shielded by the sun at varying degrees of effectiveness, truly leads to more cooling clouds on Earth. So far, it is only a hypothesis.

Vahrenholt: It’s more than that. The Cloud Experiment, headed by physicist Jasper Kirkby, has been underway at the CERN particle research center near Geneva since 2006. The initial results of tests conducted in a chamber in which the earth’s atmosphere was simulated showed that cosmic particles do indeed lead to the formation of aerosol particles for clouds.

SPIEGEL: But the aerosols demonstrated in the Cloud Experiment are much too small. They would have to grow before they could actually serve as condensation germs for clouds. Whether this happens in nature is still an open question. You present this as a fact.

Vahrenholt: You will find many correlations between cloud cover and cosmic radiation in the book. I’d like to know why the IPCC doesn’t thoroughly examine this mechanism. My guess is that the answer to this question would jeopardize the entire foundation of the IPCC predictions.

SPIEGEL: Nevertheless, you should be more careful with prognoses on future solar activity. In 2009, US scientists predicted that there would be no sunspots for years. In fact, they returned in 2010. The truth is that we are experiencing rather normal solar activity at the moment.

Vahrenholt: The solar cycle is everything but normal. NASA scientists predict that this cycle will indeed be the weakest of the last 80 years. Not only did it start two years too late, but it’s also very weak. And, besides, you can’t just count sunspots. Cosmic particles continue to rain down on us because the sun’s magnetic field is hardly shielding us.

SPIEGEL: It’s true that there will be a large solar minimum sometime in the next 500 years. But no one knows exactly when. The probability that this will occur in the next 40 years is less than 10 percent. But, in your book, you predict: “It is clear that the sun will be responsible for colder periods in the first half of this century.” Do you know more than all astrophysicists combined?

Vahrenholt: The probability of a large solar minimum, as it occurred during the Little Ice Age, is indeed less than 10 percent. But we are at the beginning of a lighter decline in solar activity of the kind we see every 87 and every 210 years. I’ve spoken with many solar physicists who expect this to happen.

SPIEGEL: We know many other solar scientists who question this. Another maximum is just as statistically likely as a minimum. Predicting what the sun will do in the coming decades borders on fortune-telling.

Vahrenholt: I know only one German solar scientist who has expressed such doubt. Various American and British solar research groups believe that weak solar cycles are ahead. I take this seriously and expect only cooling from the sun until 2050.

SPIEGEL: And what will you do if temperatures continue to rise, after all?

Vahrenholt: Then I’ll give SPIEGEL an interview in 2020 and publicly admit that I’ve made a mistake. But I’m convinced that it won’t be necessary.

SPIEGEL: Do you seriously believe that all 2,000 scientists involved in the IPCC are deluded or staying true to the official line?

Vahrenholt: It’s not like that. However, I am critical of the role played by the handful of lead authors who take on the final editing of the report. They claim that they are using 18,000 publications evaluated by their peers. But 5,000 of them are so-called gray literature, which are not peer-reviewed sources. These mistakes come out in the end, just like the absurd claim that there will no longer be any glaciers in the Himalayas in 30 years. Such exaggerations don’t surprise me. Of the 34 supposedly independent members who write the synthesis report for politicians, almost a third are associated with environmental organizations like Greenpeace or the WWF. Strange, isn’t it?

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After five years of legislative struggling, 23 stopgap measures and a two-week shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration, Congress finally has passed a bill aimed at prodding the nation’s aviation system into a new high-tech era in which satellites are central to air traffic control and piloted planes share the skies with unmanned drones.

The bill, which passed the Senate 75-20 Monday, speeds the nation’s switch from radar to an air traffic control system based on GPS technology. It also requires the FAA to open U.S. skies to drone flights within four years.

Final approval of the measure was marked by an unusual degree of bipartisan support despite labor opposition to a deal cut between the Democratic-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House on rules governing union organizing elections at airlines and railroads. The House had passed the bill last week, and it now goes to President Barack Obama for his signature.

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