The possibility that rays coming from the sun might have a determining effect on the earth’s climate should provoke interest, not dread, but in some circles the very idea is politically discomfiting:

In April 1990, Al Gore published an open letter in the New York Times “To Skeptics on Global Warming” in which he compared them to medieval flat-Earthers. He soon became vice president and his conviction that climate change was dominated by man-made emissions went mainstream. Western governments embarked on a new era of anti-emission regulation and poured billions into research that might justify it. As far as the average Western politician was concerned, the debate was over.

But a few physicists weren’t worrying about Al Gore in the 1990s. They were theorizing about another possible factor in climate change: charged subatomic particles from outer space, or “cosmic rays,” whose atmospheric levels appear to rise and fall with the weakness or strength of solar winds that deflect them from the earth. These shifts might significantly impact the type and quantity of clouds covering the earth, providing a clue to one of the least-understood but most important questions about climate. Heavenly bodies might be driving long-term weather trends. — Anne Jolis

The results of a long-delayed experiment at CERN in Switzerland seem to have confirmed the influence that “other possible factor in climate change: charged subatomic particles” might have on earth’s climate. While far from being the “final nail in the coffin” of global warming alarmism (as some have prematurely asserted), the experiment does cast long shadows on any theories of human-caused climate disruption (AGW—Anthropogenic Global Warming).

Indeed, the two senior scientists (Jasper Kirkby and Henrik Svensmark) responsible for the experiment are both characterized as “hold[ing] that human activity is contributing to climate change. All they question is its importance relative to other, natural factors.”

Both scientists have been warned not to sensationalize their results:

In July, CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer told Die Welt that he was asking his researchers to make the forthcoming cloud-chamber results “clear, however, not to interpret them. This would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate-change debate.”

True science, however, never bows to politics — even the act of avoiding politics, as recommended by Herr Heuer, can itself be political under certain circumstances.

Svensmark isn’t by training a climate scientist:

“I had this field [subatomic particles and how they relate to climate change] more or less to myself for years — that would never have happened in other areas of science, such as particle physics. But this has been something that most climate scientists would not be associated with. I remember another researcher saying to me years ago that the only thing he could say about cosmic rays and climate was it that it was a really bad career move.

“. . . . Before 1995 I was doing things related to quantum fluctuations. Nobody was interested, it was just me sitting in my office. It was really an eye-opener, that baptism into climate science.”

The experiment was delayed for quite some time:

It took six years for CERN to greenlight and fund the experiment. Mr. Kirkby cites financial pressures for the delay and says that “it wasn’t political.”

Mr. Svensmark declines entirely to guess why CERN took so long, noting only that “more generally in the climate community that is so sensitive, sometimes science goes into the background.”

Interesting: A multi-billion-dollar scientific establishment could have delayed an experiment, not necessarily because of scheduling or lack of funding, but because “the climate community is … so sensitive.”

You can read the rest of Anne Jolis’s WSJ article — “The Other Climate Theory” — here.