Someone in the "mainstream" media finally gets it right.

CBS Radio News: The Osgood File
"Humans May Not Be the Cause of Global Warming"
Wednesday, May 6, 1998
(full transcript, aired every hour)

Charles Osgood reporting: "THE OSGOOD FILE, sponsored in part by CNA.

"I'm Charles Osgood. To hear many of the people in the environmental movement talk about air pollution, water pollution, the hole in the atmosphere's ozone layer, the greenhouse effect and global warming, you get the impression that you're supposed to feel guilty just being a human being, especially a fossil fuel-burning, greenhouse gas-emitting, high-consuming resource-depleting American human being. So if you happen to be a human being and an American consumer to boot, you may be interested in what some Danish scientists are now saying about global warming. They say humans may not have much to do with it at all. Maybe it's the sun that's to blame.

"The story after this for CNA."

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OSGOOD: "Now then, last week in New York, the European Union signed the Kyoto treaty on climate change, bringing the total number of signatories to 34. Last December, the world's industrial nations agreed at a conference in Kyoto, Japan, to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases by an average of 5.2 percent from 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012. This came after a report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which concluded that the burning of fossil fuels was behind an increase in global temperature since the late 19th century, even though the lead writer of the climate change report, Ben Santer, went out of his way to point out that the science leading to that conclusion was, in fact, inconclusive.

"Well, now Knud Lassen and Eigil-Friis Christensen, scientists at the Danish Meteorological Institute, have published a theory suggesting that the rise in the Earth's temperature owes everything to long-term changes in the output of the sun and has nothing to do with greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels and, therefore, nothing to do with Homosapiens, long the environmentalists' favorite whipping boy.

"Their study showed that climate is influenced not so much by man as by cosmic and solar rays impacting on the Earth's magnetic field. Cosmic rays vary with the solar cycle, interact with the solar wind which has a direct impact on cloud formation and, therefore, on the climate. They say cloud cover varies between 65 percent and 68 percent and has direct influence on the amount of the sun's heat that's absorbed or reflected back into space and this could explain why Greenland was warm enough to attract Viking settlement more than 1,000 years ago and how southern England could support a red wine industry during Roman times when humans weren't burning fossil fuel at all.

"Of course, this flies in the face of the environmentalists' political agenda. They're saying something is rotten in Denmark, that the extent that the Danes' theory lets us humans, especially us Americans, off the hook, they're against it. The last thing they want to do is to take us off the hook.

Copyright (c) 1998 CBS, Inc. All rights reserved.