Global warming is real, and at least partially man-made, according to controversial Army scientist Dr. Bruce West. Greenhouse gases have contributed to rising temperatures by as much as 70 percent, he said during a conference call with bloggers, arranged by the military.
For several years, West, the chief scientist of the Army Research Office's mathematical and information science directorate and an adjunct professor at Duke University, has been touting the Sun's effects on climate change -- and warning that the "anthropogenic contribution to global warming" has been "significantly over-estimated" by the the majority of the scientific community.
His conference call began on a similarly iconoclastic note, saying that "our research has suggested an alternative to the apparently universally-accepted cause of global warming. Many contend that the controversy over global warming had been resolved, with the scientific community concurring that humanity has caused the increase in the Earth's average surface temperature... [I] disagree."
"Own our analysis of the the total solar irradiance and the modeling of the Earth's response to change in that irradiance lead us to conclude that the Earth's average surface temperature is directly linked to... the Sun's dynamics," he added.
In some of his scientific papers, however, West acknowledged that human society, by spewing so-called "greenhouse gases" like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, is also having an effect. "Since 1975 global warming has occurred much faster than could be reasonably expected from the sun alone," he wrote in a 2006 study for Geophysical Research Letters.
Later in the conference call, he sounded a similar note. "We know greenhouse gases are also contributing," West said.
Average temperatures have climbed by ".8 degrees Centigrade over the last century, coincident with the growth of industry." Depending on which model of the Earth's environment is used, those gases could account for either 31 or 70 percent of that increase. "Those are the two candidates," West added.
(Burnin': JF)
