ABSTRACT
MACKEY, R., 2007. Rhodes Fairbridge and the idea that the solar system regulates the Earth’s climate. Journal of Coastal Research, SI 50 (Proceedings of the 9th International Coastal Symposium), 955 – 968. Gold Coast, Australia, ISSN 0749.0208
Rhodes Fairbridge died on 8th November, 2006. He was one of Australia’s most accomplished scientists and has a special connection with Australia. In July, 1912 his father Kingsley established Fairbridge Village near Perth. It contains a chapel of elegant simplicity designed by one of the world’s most famous architects of the time, Sir Herbert Baker, as a labour of love to commemorate Kingsley. Rhodes is one of the few scientists to research the sun/climate relationship in terms of the totality of the sun’s impact on the earth (i.e. gravity, the electromagnetic force and output and their interaction). When the totality of the sun’s impact is considered, having regard to the relevant research published over the last two decades, the influence of solar variability on the earth’s climate is very strongly non-linear and stochastic. Rhodes also researched the idea that the planets might have a role in producing the sun’s variable activity....
THE SUN’S IMPACT ON CLIMATE
The impact of the sun on the earth’s climate has been an active area of scientific inquiry ever since Sir William Herschel presented a series of papers on the subject to the Royal Society in London in 1801. He saw a relationship between solar activity and the series of wheat prices in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations that was published 25 years earlier in 1776.x
During the 1960s and ‘70s there were several major international scientific conferences devoted to the thesis that the sun has a major role in the regulation of the earth’s climate((FAIRBRIDGE, 1961b); (BANDEEN and MARAN, 1974),xi (MCCORMAC and SELIGA, 1979)).