North Star Writers Group

The movement to address global warming has very high-profile proponents. They include former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, whose documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was released earlier this year. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has teamed with British Prime Minister Tony Blair to fight global warming. Billionaire British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson recently pledged financial support for the cause.

Global warming posits that increased levels of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere are linked directly to human activities, in particular to burning fossil fuels for transportation and electric power generation.

Something, however, has always nagged at me about this explanation for the current changes in our climate. After all, the earth has gone through many cycles of warming and then cooling that stretch back millions and millions of years. So what caused climate changes the last time around? Presumably, at that point in our history, we human beings were not emitting billions of pounds of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere.

What if we’re barking up the wrong tree when it comes to climate change? Now that really would be an inconvenient truth. It would also mean a lot of time, effort and treasure expended on measures that, while making our air breathable again, would have not much cumulative impact on climate change.

That’s why a largely unheralded book I read earlier this year so intrigues me. The title is Solar Rain: The Earth Changes Have Begun. The argument of the author, Mitch Battros, runs counter to conventional wisdom about global warming/climate change.

Mr. Battros’s bottom line is this: Greenhouse gases emitted by human activity are not the predominant cause of climate change. They contribute a small amount, but it is insignificant compared to the real source.

The culprit, according to Mr. Battros, is the sun. The star at the center of our solar system is behind the warming and cooling cycles that have marked earth’s history since its beginnings. Not only does the sun cause long-term epochal climate change, but solar activity affects daily weather and even helps trigger events like earthquakes through the effects of solar magnetism on the earth’s magnetic core.

The book is packed with references and data backing up the author’s assertions in detail that is exhaustive enough to satisfy even the pickiest of left-brain skeptics who are also willing to consider other options.

After all, supporters of the greenhouse gases theory of climate change decry any skepticism about it as playing into the hands of the oil and utility industries.

Mr. Battros argues the opposite. He maintains that the polluters themselves are behind the global warming movement because they want to sell a very expensive solution – nuclear power plants. His argument makes too much sense to me to ignore. I covered the energy and utility industries for years as a business reporter and know how much they hated to see nuclear power lose popular/political support in this country thanks to Three Mile Island and then Chernobyl.

My experiences as a journalist also taught me that conventional wisdom is seldom sage and very often entirely inaccurate.

Get the book, read it and decide for yourself.

In his desire to link the scientific and the spiritual, Mr. Battros includes a chapter on ancient Mayan prophecies that coincide with sun cycles, and advice about preparing for devastating weather events and sudden, worldwide disruptive climate shifts. This year, 2006, marked the end of Solar Cycle 23, which witnessed the strongest solar eruptions ever recorded and devastating hurricanes in 2005 and 2004.

Next year, 2007, is the start of the sun Cycle 24, which is predicted to be up to 50 percent stronger than the previous cycle, and will culminate in 2012, a year that should be pivotal, for both the sun and the ancient predictions.

Mr. Battros offers a lot to think about, but what impresses me most, in his book and in his newsletters, is his emphasis on personal truth.

I agree with him. Truth is personal. At the end of his book, Mr. Battros acknowledges that his personal truth has evolved into helping people on Earth prepare for the end of life as we have known it on Earth. Not the end of all life necessarily, but certainly the demise of the post-industrial, consumption-based existence that emerged in the last decades of the 20^th Century.

At this point in our history, we need all the help we can get.

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