OK. I guess this is old news, not only because everyone knows that Senator Inhofe (R-OK) is desperately trying to shake the overwhelming consensus that human-caused climate change is real, but also because this press release came out nearly three weeks ago. I'm not a climatologist, but it's pretty clear that Marc Morano1 misunderstands a February 27 report from the Danish National Space Center.
The press release announcing the report describes an article entitled “Cosmoclimatology: A new theory of climate change,” It's key observation is that “[cosmic ray intensities] explain repeated alternations between cold and warm periods during the past 12,000 years. Whenever the Sun was feeble and cosmic-ray intensities were high, cold conditions ensued, most recently in the Little Ace Age that climaxed 300 years ago.”
Morano wants to use this observation to suggest that humans had nothing to do with warming in the last half century. Unfortunately for them, they can't. The observations in this report say nothing about increases in global average temperature since 1950. More importantly, analyses of volcanic, solar, and human influences demonstrate that emissison of greenhouse gases has been the dominant cause of global warming in the last half century (link).
Inhofe and Morano seem to know they're losing the case on it's merits. They've now been reduced to whining that Al Gore doesn't play fair (link).
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1Marc Morano is a member of the minority staff for the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee. He writes for the Inhofe EPW Press Blog.
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