Is the world cooling or not – and what is to blame?

The Financial Times supplement this weekend contained profiles of the world’s leading climate experts, including – the magazine promised – the world’s leading sceptic. I quickly leafed through the pages to see who had been picked as the whipping boy, expecting to see a Danish name. No, not that of Bjørn Lomborg, who became (in)famous for his book The Sceptical Environmentalist, but that of Professor Henrik Svensmark. In the end, it was Richard Lindzen.

But it is Svensmark’s research that may prove the greatest challenge to the prevailing consensus on climate dynamics. The Danish scientist, author of The Chilling Stars, become noted because of his research into cosmic rays and their effect on cloud formation. His theories contradict the IPCC’s theory of anthropogenic global warming, which basically blames last century’s rise in average global temperature on human CO2 emissions. Instead, Svensmark hypothesises that clouds created by cosmic rays, which are in part controlled by the activity of the sun, regulate the Earth’s climate.