The now widely accepted paradigm identifies greenhouse gases as the source of global warming, a significant share of which is anthropogenic, stemming from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels and intensive agricultural production. The hope is that humanity can limit this biosphere-threatening process by regulating these activities. This article argues that processes on the Sun have partly or entirely caused global warming in the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years. Global warming is likely a consequence of streams of positively charged, high-energy particles emitted by the Sun, mainly during the “rise” phase of solar activity, when phenomena on the Sun’s surface are associated with a growing magnetic field. Part of this high-energy radiation reaches the Earth. It penetrates deep into the Earth’s atmosphere, increasing the concentration of ions that serve as condensation nuclei around which water vapor forms droplets. Condensation nuclei increase cloudiness in the lower atmosphere. The upper surfaces of clouds and fog partly reflect solar electromagnetic radiation, returning energy to space, which leads to a decrease in surface temperature and, hence, in the temperature of the ground air heated by the surface. When solar activity decreases, as observed over the last 100 years, the reverse process occurs: the high-energy fluxes of corpuscular radiation decrease, the ionization of the Earth’s atmosphere decreases, cloudiness decreases, and more solar electromagnetic radiation reaches the Earth’s surface, increasing the temperature. An additional argument for the presence of high-energy radiation that penetrates deep into the Earth’s atmosphere and even reaches the Earth’s surface is the high, statistically significant correlation between the fluxes of such radiation recorded by the GOES series satellites in geostationary orbit (36,000 km above the Earth’s surface) and human mortality from the deadliest diseases. The bad news is that if the described mechanism is the leading cause of global warming, there is not much humanity can do to protect itself and the biosphere. Humanity’s efforts (the International Energy Agency estimates global clean energy investment at USD 2 trillion for 2024) should be redirected to increasing the planet’s reflectance of solar electromagnetic radiation.
Keywords: Global warming, Climate change, Solar cycle, Ionizing radiation, Satellite data.
Citation:Is Global Warming the Result of Earth’s Clouds Having Lower Albedo Due to Declining Solar Activity Over the Past Few Decades?. Adv Earth & Env Sci; 7(1):1-20. DOI : https://doi.org/10.47485/2766-2624.1091