The current fashion of associating climate change with carbon dioxide in a cause/effect relationship received an early boost by one of its first proponents, James Hanson of NASA. But Mr. Hanson, a prime mover for human-induced CO2 as a cause of global warming, reversed himself in 2001. He has now largely abandoned the CO2/global warming theory and advocates fighting pollution instead. Indeed, increases in CO2 are known to follow, rather than precede increases in global temperature. Also, water vapour occupies some 95% of the so-called Greenhouse Gases and is notoriously hard to accommodate in the enviromentalists' favoured computer simulations. The theory that an increase in carbon dioxide causes global warming rests on a very dubious foundation. Consequently, so does the Kyoto Protocol. 

It pays to return to some well established principles of global climate change which seem to have been either forgotten or not recognised by the present day practitioners of computer climatology. The politicians, of course, may never have known them in the first place.

Our sun is a very restless star. Its flow of solar radiation (heat) is irregular and one would only have to observe its corona and look at the eleven year sunspot cycle to be convinced of that. In addition, our planet's distance and angle of exposure to the sun are variable, namely:

1. by the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, which changes from elliptical to more circular in a cycle of approximately 100,000 years;
2. by  the precession of the equinox, the so-called “wobble”, in which the earth behaves like a spinning top with a cycle of 19,000 to 23,000 years;
3. by the variations in the tilt of the earth’s spin axis with respect to the orbital plane, which occurs on an approximate 41,000 year cycle.

As all these influences have their own periodicity, there will be times when they coincide for maximum effect and times when they cancel each other out.

The first segments of a solar radiation theory based on the varying proximity of the earth to the sun started to take shape in the middle of the 19th century. Workers such as Adhémar ("Révolutions de la Mer"), Leverrier ("Recherches astronomiques"), and, in particular, Croll ("Climate and Time in their geological relations" and "Discussions on Climate and Cosmology") started to identify the various pieces of the puzzle. They found remarkable correlation between their cycles and the Pleistocene glacial periods in the Alps (resp. Günz, Mindel, Riss and Würm). 

When Croll died in 1890, Milutin Milankovitch was eleven years old. To Milankovitch, bringing together the cycles of orbital eccentricity, axis tilt and wobble was primarily a mathematical problem. His main work came out in 1930 as Vol I, part A of the "Handbuch der Klimatologie" under the title "Astronomische Theorie der Klimaschwankungen" (Schwankungen = oscillations) . It was the result of a determined effort to which he devoted a portion of every day for 30 years. How would he have loved to-day's computers!

The composite curve he published in 1930 covers the incoming solar radiation intensity for different latitudes over the past 600,000 years, which covers all of the Pleistocene glacial periods in alpine Europe. The correspondence of minima and maxima of radiation to the four glacial stages of the Alps (and the nine substages in which they are usually broken down) is remarkable. He was accepted and praised by the astrophysical and climatological community of the day.

The theory suffered a setback at the introduction of radio-carbon dating, which seemed to show dates of glacial action incompatible with those of Milankovitch. It initially won the day, but made the error of assuming that solar output of carbon-12 was constant. However, work on changes in foraminifera from deep sea cores provided data which showed a high degree of correlation with the Milankovitch curve. Radio-carbon dating was adjusted and the credibility of the Milankovitch curve was reinstated.

As recently as 1989, at a conference on Climate Change at the National Museum of Canada, the astronomical theory of variations in solar radiation was mentioned in most of the papers presented and elicited no challenge from anyone.

Climate oscillations are, of course, common in our planet's history, even in the general warming trend since the last glaciation, some 20,000 years ago. In historic times our civilisation experienced the Medieval Warm Period around 1100 AD, the Little Ice Age around 1600 AD, and we even had a cooling panic in the 1970's when scary scenarios about a new ice age were suggested by some scientists and politicians. In this context, the present gradual average warming of 0.5 0 Celsius per 100 years is nothing out of the ordinary. To-day's scary scenarios (floods, droughts, el Niño, etc) are bnased more on the exaggerated and misleading statements by special interest groups and Environment Canada than on an actual increase of occurrences. As to the "Brown Cloud" emanating from Asia: particulate and chemical pollution is indeed man-made and is a different phenomenon altogether. It is very much worth combatting. But CO2 plays a decidedly minor role and is not a pollutant.

A major problem in to-day's climate research is that it is carried out by environmentalists and climatologists who concentrate on data gathered on the climate of about the last hundred years. Milankovitch and his co-workers and predecessors Köppen, Wegener (he of the Continental Drift theory, anno 1929), Leverrier, Croll and others were "Natur-philosophen" in the classic European sense of the word and were familiar with concepts of space and time as astronomers and geologists are. They were the General Practitioners of the natural sciences, before the Specialists were around. They were able to integrate the various disciplines that had bearing on the interconnected processes, from geology and astronomy to oceanography and paleoclimatology. Granted, this was an easier task to accomplish in the 19th century than it is to-day with our overload of data, both relevant and not. In contrast, to-day's climatologists depend on their simulated computer models (GCM's), which are only as good as the assumptions made in the input variables. They look at the problem through the wrong end of their field glasses.

Environment Canada took an early stand on the CO2 issue, before a proper scientific discussion had taken place. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with the help of the earlier mentioned James Hanson, made exhaustive studies, but, according to many frustrated participants, the conclusions and recommendations drawn up by its UN overseers were biased and twisted beyond their recognition.

More recently, Environment Canada and its Minister have refused to discuss the technical information on whichKyoto is based, even in country-wide "consultations". These consultations were by invitation only and closed to critics of Kyoto. Anyone who still managed to raise a scientific question was told : "The science has been decided". 

As climatologist Dr Timothy Ball has said, this country is in great danger of embarking on an unspecified multi-billion dollar political solution to a non-existent problem without scientific justification.