All of what you post above could be true, but probably isn't. Regardless however, the thing that sets science apart from more mundane human endeavors, where personal opinions really do matter, is that in matters scientific it only takes one bright person to upset the entire apple cart.
Nir Shaviv...
Shaviv started taking courses at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa at age 13. He graduated with a BA in physics in 1990, and finished as best in class. His prizes and awards include:
- 1996 Wolf foundation award for excellence as PhD student
- 1996 Lee A. DuBridge scholarship at Caltech
- 2000 Beatrice Tremaine scholarship in Toronto
- 2004 Siegfried Samuel Wolf lecture for nuclear physics
- 2014 IBM Einstein Fellowship, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
The following are excerpted from the Wiki article that GRULSTMRNN gave a link to...
He is best known for his solar and
cosmic-ray hypothesis of
climate change. In 2002, Shaviv hypothesized that passages through the Milky Way's spiral arms appear to have been the cause behind the major ice-ages over the past billion years. In his later work, co-authored by
Jan Veizer, a low upper limit was placed on the climatic effect of CO2.
His best known contribution to the field of astrophysics was to demonstrate that the Eddington luminosity is not a strict limit, namely, that astrophysical objects can be brighter than the Eddington luminosity without blowing themselves apart. This is achieved through the development of a porous atmosphere that allows the radiation to escape while exerting little force on the gas. The theory was correctly used to explain the mass-loss in Eta Carinae's giant eruption, and the evolution of classical nova eruptions.
He has also shown that the Cosmic Ray climate link explains part the faint sun paradox, since the slowly decreasing solar wind will give rise to a cooling effect that compensates the solar irradiance increase. Moreover, long term star formation activity in the Milky Way correlate with long term climate variations.
In a more recent work with Andreas Prokoph and Ján Veizer, it was argued that the reconstructed temperature has a clear 32 million year oscillation that is consistent with the solar system's motion perpendicular to the galactic plane. The oscillation also appears to have a secondary modulation consistent with the radial epicyclic motion of the solar system.
[Shaviv argues that] while sunspot activity declined after 1985, cosmic ray flux reached a minimum in 1992 and contributed to warming during the 1990s. Secondly, Shaviv argues that short term variations in radiative forcing are damped by the oceans, leading to a lag between changes in solar output and the effect on global temperatures. While the 2001 maximum was weaker than the 1990 maximum, increasing solar activity during previous decades was still having a warming effect, not unlike the lag between noon and the hottest hour of the day. Later quantitative modeling showed that indeed there is no discrepancy. The perceived "hiatus" in the early 2000s is a natural consequence of the decreased solar activity.
Shaviv denies the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. He claims that solar activity changes have contributed between half to two thirds of the warming over the 20th century, and that climate sensitivity should be on the low side ΔTx2=1.3±0.4 °C compared with IPCC's range of ΔTx2=1.5 to 4.5 °C per CO2 doubling.
