First the 'Good News'. That bastion of politically (in)correct thinking, aka, NASA, has taken a gigantic step shuffled forward a tad! Hitherto it has represented the High Church of the Anthropogenic Global Warming cult with its insistence that global warming was entirely due to man-made production of CO2. Hitherto, they have resolutely turned their backs on that enormous ball of burning plasma in the sky and insisted that it was 'CO2 wot dunnit'. Needless to say, they now find their backs scorched and blistered and have been forced to turn over.
Sorry, too much sarcasm and too many metaphoricals, so let me get to the point. The ever-excellent WAWT reports that NASA has concluded a grand meeting of experts in just about every field concerned with the viciously complicated causes and effects of our global climate and finally they have admitted, cautiously and hedged around with various 'ifs', 'buts' and 'maybes', that there may be something in the theory that tethe solar energy, in all its various forms, may have soemthing to do with earth's climate.
As a result we now have a fascinating and new debate on the pages of WAWT in which the 'usual suspects' in the AGW camp have been totally ignored and instead a ferocious argument has broken out between what I am tempted (and I never resist temptation!) to call the 'Sun Worshippers' and the 'Sun Infidels'. The latter are led by the stiff and unyielding, Dr. Lief Svelsgaard (a major sun-swot), who refuses absolutely to take any step in any direction without solid scientific proof. Then there are his opponents who, so they maintain stoutly, keep offering him proofs which, they say, he keeps ignoring.
It's always a shame when friends fall out but at least those scattered remnants of the AGW cult have been put back where they belong - out on the fringes. That they have been shoved there by NASA, the spritual home of James Hansen and Michael Mann, spells doom for them and their potty ideas - at last. I urge you to read the article and the comments thread, as good an example of controversial science at work as you will see anywhere.
