Did the Danish National Space Center's Henrik Svensmark realize that peer recognition would be the laying of hounds on him?
"I simply thought," Svensmark confessed in an interview with Discover magazine, that causality between the sun and climate "would be very interesting, and I certainly had no idea it would be viewed as so controversial." The physicist hypothesizes that temperatures and weather respond to changes in cloud activity caused by levels at which Sol's irradiation disrupts "energetic particles coming from the interstellar media." Calling the intercalated agency "cosmic rays," Svensmark conducted a recent experiment with air, ionization, ultraviolet lamps and a skylight.
What did he learn? That which parties responsible for declamations of "global warming" — recently criticized by J. Scott Armstrong and Kesten Green, authors of methods in scientific prediction, for substituting consistency for verity — haven't borne in mind. First, results of the experiment corroborated Svensmark's theories, but introduced many more questions that Svensmark intends to study before accosting bodies politic and public. Second, there is still the robust possibility that since, shrugs Svenmark, "we can't predict the sun...we couldn't do anything about it."
And the brain trust at the United Nations spurned Svensmark's work as "extremely naive and irresponsible." Humanists are the unlikely disparagers of Copernican reasoning. Sun, moon, stars — all removed from the account of Earth as a cynosure, Man as a tragic figure. Would that a vis-a-vis meeting with outer space return awe and modesty to scientific discourse. Considering how clarity still eludes us, somebody might impute cosmic marvels to the mephitic contrails of our rocket ships.