A friend passed along this very interesting op-ed piece originally published in The Colorado Springs Gazette in December 2007. It's written by Andres Pico, a retired naval flight officer with more than three decades of experience in applying atmospheric and space weather forecasts to land, air, sea and space-based surveillance and communications systems operations.
Here's just a taste:
In science, correlation is not causation. Sunspot records, measuring both the number of sunspots and cycle length, do correlate with climate fluctuations on Earth. Correlation does support the validation of theories and the failure of correlation, as in CO2 and temperature records, does serve to invalidate a hypothesis.
The recent work on cosmic rays triggering cloud formation is just one example of a hypothesis which is still being developed and the theory does potentially explain almost all of the climate shifts being debated.
When looking over longer periods of time, such as several thousand years, the rise in CO2 always lags warming trends by several hundred years rather than leading warming trends as it must if CO2 is the cause of warming rather than rising CO2 actually being the result of warming, which it is.
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