For the last couple of months I’ve been getting up at zero-dark-thirty, putting on my bedroom slippers and war surplus greatcoat over my pajama and sloshing through the dew on the grass in my back yard till I’m clear of the tree line and can see the crest of the mountains to the north. I’ve been looking for the Aurora Borealis and seeing clouds. They say one morning you could see the airglow as far south as Dallas Texas, but you couldn’t see it from my cloud-shrouded digs.

We’re supposed to be approaching the bottom of the solar cycle but someone evidently forgot to tell the Sun. The geomagnetic storms are trashing satellite communications and so far I’ve missed several torrid scenes on the Playboy Channel. Somewhere out there in Van Allen Land the sun is shining.

A couple of Scandinavian physicists have figured out that solar flares from a more active sun are responsible for Ice Ages, and the lack of flares is responsible for Global Warming and the collapse of the Freon industry.

Seems that the magnetic packages of protons sent our way by a flare fill up the Van Allen belt, thus enhancing the earth’s exospheric magnetic field. Since cosmic rays are mostly charged particles traveling at warp speeds, their trajectories are warped by this magnetic field and fewer of them enter the stratosphere. The cosmic rays, like charged particles in a cloud-chamber, cause clouds to form in the stratosphere and upper troposphere. Now the plot thickens: the thicker cloud layers increase the earth’s albedo; more sunlight is reflected back out into space; and voila! — the temperature at the ground, which is usually heated by sunshine, decreases.

Just what proof do these dudes have to support this wild idea? It seems that microscopic cuttlefish or some such creatures wax and wane with the temperature of the ocean and get stuck in the mud at the bottom of the sea. So the temperature is recorded in core samples from the ocean floor. Ice in Greenland includes air bubbles which contain CO2 with C14 atoms. C14 in the air is created in the stratosphere when (you’ve got it) cosmic rays rip open nitrogen atoms creating C14. So cosmic ray intensities are recorded in ice core samples from Greenland.

Now for the pizza remnants. The cycles of earth surface temperature and cosmic ray intensity match exactly for the several tens-of-thousands-of-years for which data are available. Oh no! Could Rush Limbaugh have been right all along about global warming?