Sallie Baliunas

3-23-06
Much ado about global warming. Here is an interview that should add more light than heat to the subject (pun intended).
Stars in Her Eyes Astronomer Sallie Baliunas on sunspots, global warming, and the benefits of privately funded science
Interviewed by Virginia Postrel and Steven Postrel
When she became an astronomer, Sallie Baliunas never thought she'd be posing for magazine photos. But her life as a scientist hasn't been a matter of pure research. In her quest to study the stars, she has found herself drawn into the world of entrepreneurship and public policy.
An astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, Baliunas is also the deputy director of the Mount Wilson Institute in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Pasadena, California. She spends about a week a month on the West Coast, using Mount Wilson's historic 100-inch telescope to study "sun-like stars." Baliunas came to the observatory as a graduate student in 1977. On her very first night, a lightning bolt struck a tree outside the dining room. "All the windows in the building were shattered from the shock wave of the tree disintegrating," she recalls. "This was an omen whose meaning was not clear until years later."
In between observing and management, Baliunas can also be found testifying before congressional committees and giving papers at conferences on global climate change--a subject she was drawn to by her research on the sun's fluctuating magnetic field. She is a leading greenhouse skeptic. How, she wondered, could climate models be so specific when we hardly understand the sun or its effect on the earth? Baliunas talked about this and other questions with REASON Editor Virginia Postrel and her husband, Steven Postrel, an economist who teaches business strategy at U.C.-Irvine, under the Mount Wilson dome in late June.