“The idea that our climate is in a crisis – I do not think that is actually the case,” Dr. Henrik Svensmark argues. “People should actually get tired of all the predictions that are wrong. That there will be no ice in the Arctic, Greenland is melting, the islands in the Pacific shall be subdued and so on. It’s not really happening,” he says.
Svensmark points out that we are talking about global warming while the temperature has gone up by a degree or so. “If we look at geological time scales, the climate changes are much much more severe. You have periods where you have glaciations, ice, almost down to the equator. Even most of the Earth is covered by ice,” he says.
And these kinds of changes have had nothing to do with human activities or greenhouse gases, but are a natural phenomenon, according to Svensmark. His research has largely focused on trying to understand what causes climate change and in the podcast he explains how the variations in solar activity, particularly cosmic rays, influence Earth's climate by affecting cloud formation and influencing biodiversity on Earth.
Svensmark is currently a Senior Researcher in the Astrophysics and Atmospheric Physics Division at the Danish National Space Institute (DTU Space) in Copenhagen. He has previously directed the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish Space Research Institute (DSRI). He has published almost 80 peer reviewed research papers which have been cited almost 5,000 times.
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