Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
would cause cooling. They say that the geological record of cosmic ray
bombardment during the past 550 million years shows excellent agree-
ment with climate fl uctuations, trumping carbon dioxide.
Other scientists have noted a dramatic acceleration of the drift of
magnetic poles of the earth since 1990, which affects global climate.
They have also noted a decrease in magnetic intensity by as much as 10
percent in some regions, which allows increased cosmic radiation to
impact the earth.
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Other changes in the magnetosphere have increased
the amount of cosmic radiation in polar areas, leading to heating of polar
caps.
It may be that both anthropogenic and astronomical factors are
involved in the climatic changes the world is experiencing, but no one
knows how to determine the relative importance of each. Overlapping
infl uences may be diffi cult to tease apart.
The view that human activities are not the major or only cause of
climate change is not represented in the series of reports published by
the IPCC, the latest one in 2007. In a 2003 poll conducted by German
environmental researchers, two-thirds of more than 530 climate scien-
tists from twenty-seven countries surveyed did not believe that “the
current state of scientifi c knowledge is developed well enough to allow
for a reasonable assessment of the effects of greenhouse gases.”
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About
half of those polled stated that the science of climate change was not
suffi ciently settled to pass the issue over to policymakers.
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The contro-
versy remains unresolved.
