The Manic Sun: Weather theories confounded - Nigel Calder LIKE NEW

COSMIC RAYS coming from exploded stars help to make clouds that cool our planet, but when the Sun is in a vigorous mood it blows many cosmic rays away and allows the world to grow warmer. This amazing discovery by Danish scientists smashes the 'greenhouse' theory, which says that the cause of the recent global warming is carbon dioxide and other gases added to the air by human carelessness. Instead the ever-changing Sun, which also varies its output of light, accounts for most or all changes of climate over past centuries and our own. The future climate may well be cooler, not hotter. Here, in plain language, is the story of the battle between the solar theory and the greenhouse theory. Knud Lassen, Eigil Friis-Christensen and Henrik Svensmark, alone in Copenhagen, took on a global regiment of supercomputer operators. After years of disparagement the Danes have, for the time being, won the fight. This is no rarefied argument about oddities in the workings of Nature. It concerns the welfare of all the world's inhabitants, vulnerable to changes in climate bringing heat or cold, flood or drought. Sharp questions arise about the conduct of scientific research and its uneasy relationship with governments. The real hero or villain of this tale is the mighty Sun itself, the nuclear reactor in the sky that gives us light and life. For centuries it perplexed all scientists who tried to understand its weird behaviour, and make sense of the dark sunspots blemishing its surface. A leap forward in understanding has come from a multinational fleet of spacecraft that examine the Sun and its far-flung effects, and monitor the Earth's weather with complete impartiality. 'The story in a nutshell,' the author comments, 'was that clever little robots in space rescued the human species from a blunder magnified by boneheaded supercomputers.' Pristine hardcover

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