This commentary piece by Canadian columnist Lorne Gunter, which appeared Wednesday June 10 in the Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, and other Southam Canadian newspapers, shows growing interest in the solar radiation theory of climate change--and more grumbling in Canada over the government's signing on to the Kyoto Protocol.

The article mentions the research on clouds and cosmic rays now going on at Harvard, Columbia, and the European Particle Physics Center (CERN). It should be noted, however, that the crucial Danish work on this subject was published by Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen in 1997, with Svensmark properly named first because of his key role in the discovery. Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen published a well-known paper about solar-climate links in 1991, which did not include the cloud/cosmic-rays result.

Quick, which is usually warmer, day or night? And what is typically the warmest part of the day? The warmest time of the year? Finally, which are generally warmer, cloudy or cloudless days? If your answered day, afternoon, summer, and cloudless you may be well on your way to understanding what is causing global warming. You may also already know more about the subject than the phalanx of United Nations and Government of Canada scientists who have lately been frantically warning about greenhouse gases. It doesn't require a genius IQ to figure out it usually gets no hotter than mid-afternoon on a clear summer's day, nor to figure out why. It's the sun. That giant, self-luminous ball of burning gases--which has a mass 332,000 times that of Earth and at its core may be as hot as 20,000,000 degrees Celsius--that makes Earth habitable.

Solar radiation absorbed by plants permits photosynthesis. The energy stored in coal and oil originates in the sun. Air masses move and rain falls because of solar radiation.

So why is it so hard for most government climate scientists to accept that the one-degree warming the Earth has experienced since the mid-19th century has been entirely, or even just mostly, caused by solar activity?

I can't help thinking their motives are political. Government can't control the sun.

Most government climate scientists are suspcious of the free market and generally leery of industry.

You can see their bias in the very fact they believe government-to-government treaties and legislation can actually limit the global rise in termperature.

And you can see it in the only solution their reports ever propose: mandated emission caps, fuel-consumption regulations, alternative energy source quotas, and so on.

All preserve government's place in the economic driver's seat. If global warming can be shown to be anthropogenic--man-made--then a case can be made for increasing government power.

So most government and government-funded climate scientists have done two things:

They have stopped looking seriously for explanations of global warming other than industrial pollution, and they have convinced themselves that warming of even another degree will be catastrophic.

Big business is the cause. The results will be devastating. Government must save us.

Fortunately, a few skeptical scientists remain.

Last month, Jasper Kirkby of the European particle physics centre, CERN, in Geneva explained there is "a striking correlation (between) global cloud cover and the incidence of cosmic rays."

Cosmic rays, as Danish researchers Knud Lassen and Eigil Friis-Christensen had earlier demonstrated, ebb and flow with the solar cycle, intensifying as solar activity rises, weakening as activity lessens.

The rays in turn accelerate the solar wind, which as it strikes Earth, has a direct correlation on cloud formation.

Kirkby then observed that cloud cover since the middle of the last century has been reduced by solar wind by enough to account for all the warming recorded to date.

He also pointed out that the "medieval warm period" about 1,000 years ago, a time when southern England supported a wine industry, the North Atlantic teemed with fish and the Vikings cultivated parts of Greenland, corresponded precisely with the last such solar wind event.

Moreover, we know from scientists at Harvard and Columbia universities, working independently of each other and the Europeans, that 17 of the last 19 global warmings have occurred during periods of increased solar activity.

Some of these pre-industrial (i.e. pre-pollution) warmings were even greater than the one the Earth is now experiencing.

In addtion to giving off more cosmic rays, the sun is also brightening, which may also be contributing to the Earth's warming.

And an emeritus chemistry professor from Oxford recently created a bit of a stir in Britain by calculating convincingly that just the heat given off by all the fossil-fuel burning in the past century (not the pollution, just the heat) was enough to account for all the warming that has occurred.

Still, none of the global warming computer models--the foundations for nearly all the claims that warming is the result of manmade greenhouse gases--account for solar wind, solar brightening, or heat from energy burning.

And none adequately account for (their creators' admission, not my assertion) the interaction between the oceans and the atmosphere, or the addition of a large portion of the very warm South Pacific to the worldwide grid of temperature reporting stations in the past half century.

Believing in anthropogenic global warming at this time would be like insisting evil spirits, not germs, cause disease.