TSUNAMI SILVER LINING

The coldest night of my life was spent in the Buddhist temple on top of this mountain: 7,360 foot-high Sri Pada in Ceylon. It’s named for the Sacred Footprint of Buddha, a depression in the rock of the summit around which the temple is built. Pilgrims come to watch the sunset and most have the foresight to bring a blanket. Having climbed up from the torrid jungle in only a t-shirt the afternoon before and lacking such foresight, I froze all the way to dawn.

Ceylon – or the official name of Sri Lanka, if you prefer – is one of the most entrancing lands on our planet. That such a place of gentle beauty should be visited by such horror as we have seen this week is an undiluted tragedy. For the people of Ceylon and their Indian Ocean neighbors who suffered the monumental horror of a tidal wave coming out of nowhere and washing away their lives, there is no silver lining. Life has the capacity to be utterly tragic with nothing to balance or outweigh it.

To argue otherwise would be to demean the suffering of the tsunami’s victims. Yet while there is no silver lining for them, there may be one for us. This numbing event may be humbling enough to teach the egomaniacs of the left that nature is a vastly greater destroyer and alterer of nature than the puny activities of man.

The Left is possessed with a peculiarly pathological form of egomania: We human beings are so immensely powerful and so immensely evil that we can threaten the entire earth! It is this nut-case egomania that fuels the religion of environmentalism.

As the enviros watch the images of death caused by an earthquake’s tsunami and reflect that this single 9.0 earthquake altered the earth’s axis of rotation and shifted the entire island of Sumatra (which is larger than Florida) 200 feet to the west, it just might occur to them to stop blaming humanity as the source of all environmental catastrophe. The best silver lining of all would be for them to start questioning their religion of man-made global warming.

This secular religion has two separate hypotheses. First, that the earth’s climate is getting warmer and overall temperature is increasing. Second, that human activity is responsible for the increase. You can have the first without the second. If – and this is a big and as-yet-unproven if – global warming is real, it by no means follows that we’re the culprits. The far more likely culprit is the sun.

Weather on the sun affects weather on the earth. This is the basic fact that the enviros don’t want to be true – they passionately want to blame humanity. Here’s how it works. Obviously, the heat of the sun – solar radiation – heats up the earth. That the very small recent increase in solar radiation cannot account for the alleged global warming allows the enviros to dismiss the sun as the cause. But the key is not the sun’s heat radiation – it’s the sun’s magnetic activity.

The correlation between sunspots and the earth’s climate has long been observed: the fewer sunspots, the colder our weather; the more sunspots, the warmer. The “Maunder Minimum,” for example, named after astronomer E.W. Maunder, is the period from 1645 to 1715 when there were hardly any sunspots at all (some 50 as opposed to typically 40 or 50,000). This coincided with the coldest part of what was known in Europe as the Little Ice Age with bitterly cold winters and hardly any summers at all.

Here’s the explanation for the correlation. Sunspots are an indication of magnetic activity, magnetic storms on the sun. The stronger these storms, the more they deflect the shower of cosmic rays upon the earth from outer space. Cosmic rays are streams of charged particles (mostly high energy protons) which create “condensation nuclei” when they pass through the water vapor in the earth’s atmosphere (the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere), condensing the water vapor into droplets. It’s the same effect as seen in the scientific apparatus known as a “cloud chamber” invented by C.T.R. Wilson in 1900.

The more cosmic rays, the more high clouds in the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere which reflect sunlight back into space, thus cooling the earth. The fewer cosmic rays, the fewer high altitude clouds, thus warming the earth. For the past 70 years, the sun has been more magnetically active than during the previous 8,000 years (1). If global warming is real now, it is due to the increase in the sun’s magnetic activity deflecting the cosmic rays that would form clouds to cool the earth.

The enviros hate this explanation, because their religion demands that evil humans be responsible for the earth’s woes. This of course blinds them to any real solution to the problem.

To a lot of folks, including me, global warming sounds like a great idea. Who needs freezing cold winters? But if the clamor for a “solution” to global warming proves irresistible, then it involves increasing lower stratospheric cloud formation, not the scam of the Kyoto Treaty. There’s an easy, simple, cost-free way to do this:

Let the world’s airlines use high-sulfur jet fuel while flying at cruise altitude.

All intercontinental jetliners have multiple fuel tanks. During take-off, reaching cruise altitude, descent and landing, they would use tanks with low-sulfur jetfuel. But at cruise altitude, flying in the lower stratosphere at 35,000 or higher, switching to tanks with high-sulfur jetfuel would create denser, wider contrails with sulfate aerosols serving as cloud condensation nuclei, mimicking the effect of cosmic rays. The clouds so created would be long-lasting, and brighter with a high albedo reflecting more sunlight back into space.

Bada bing: thousands of jetliners flying high over the planet every day create a cooler earth, and no more global warming. The sulfate aerosols are high enough in the stratosphere not to precipitate and cause acid rain – and high-sulfur jetfuel is less expensive than low-sulfur. This solution to global warming isn’t just cost-free, it makes money. It’s perfectly designed to drive human-hating enviros into total apoplexy.

Nonetheless, it’s possible that the gigantic Indian Ocean earthquake may shake the religious convictions of the global warmists enough for at least some of them to realize that they must look to the sky, rather than point fingers at people, for global warming’s cause: the sun – and for its solution: the jet planes flying overhead.

(1). “Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years,” S.K. Solanki et al, Nature, October 28, 2004.