Stunning Announcement: Global Warming Caused by the Sun! (Imagine the following news report, NYT December 15, 2015)

After a ten year study of satellite data, the U.S. National Scientific Council announced that the increase in average temperatures over the past half century is the result of increasing intensity of cosmic rays from the sun. The satellite study shows that increasing CO2 concentrations actually held down temperatures by increasing cloud cover. A peer review of this study by the authoritative Academy of the Academy of National Sciences confirmed the authenticity of these findings. Trading on the Chicago carbon cap-and-trade board was halted as the price of carbon futures fell by 99 percent.

This stunning news evoked angry responses from a spokesperson of the Allied Council for Climate Defense. Spokesman E. Everit Leverit questioned the timing of the release of the study’s results: “We at the Allied Council were not given adequate time to find a new threat to mankind’s existence. We are extremely upset by the release of these results at such an inopportune time.” Off the record, Leverith disclosed that the Allied Council would switch its attention to the proliferation of microwaves in the atmosphere, which pose an existential threat and require urgent international governmental action.

Universities and research labs throughout the country face a loss of more than $10 billion in climate research funding from the federal government and from charitable foundations. A spokesperson (who asked for anonymity) stated: “Mankind is not out of the woods yet; there must be hundreds of other existential threats out there. Just give us the money and we’ll find them.”

A spokesperson of the JcPierpont Charitable Trust declared that they were tipped off by insiders to the study. Given their charter of saving mankind, they are exploring new frontiers of existential dangers that we have not yet heard of. Dangers from meteors or threats from extra-terrestrials do not fall under their charter because they are not caused by humans.

It should the noted that climate scientists themselves are not affected by the results of this study. They are still needed to study the effects of the sun and finding clues to how long this warming is going to last. Most endangered are policy and legal specialists, whose task it had been to translate global warming into public policy and new taxes.