Cosmic Rays and the Climate

Technocrat

Cosmic Rays and the Climate

Jim2

Sun Feb 11 13:54:55 -0800 2007

Environment.

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A paper published this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society Journal A by Dr. Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Center and his colleagues puts forth the claim that cosmic rays are influencing the climate possibly more than CO2. The theory is that (1) cosmic rays help ionize the outer atmosphere, (2) ions attract water molecules leading to the nucleation of small water clusters, and (3) the water clusters cause clouds to form. He says that fewer than normal cosmic rays result in fewer than normal clouds and hence less reflection of sunlight from the Earth and thus more global warming.

The quantity of cosmic rays reaching the Earth is in turn controlled by magnetic activity of the sun. This may explain the previously noted but not fully understood correlation between sunspots and Earth's climate. Links to (free) copies of Svensmark's earlier papers can be found at http://www.dsri.dk/~hsv/. The latest paper is here($).

Cosmic Rays and the Climate

Simon

Sun Feb 11 16:25:34 -0800 2007
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But the flaw is the correlation between the cosmic ray flux and cloud cover is slightly negative, so this would suggest that the cosmic rays are masking global warming, and things are worse than we thought.

http://folk.uio.no/jegill/papers/2002GL015646.pdf

Why does technocrat insist on covering every crackpot theory that says global warming isn't happening, no matter how week the evidence, how old the story - etc etc.

Is Bruce after that $10,000 from the oil companies ;)

Better than crackpot

Beryllium Sphere(r)

Sun Feb 11 22:30:47 -0800 2007
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The folks at Realclimate are unconvinced but interested: Realclimate on galactic cosmic ray climate effects.
The open questions are huge and include questions like what the real effect is in real atmosphere as opposed to laboratory or theoretical atmospheres. Until we have some numbers about how closely the troposphere resembles a cloud chamber and how much effect the changes have, this idea can't get promoted above "hmm, interesting".

Cosmic Rays and the Climate

Jim2

Sun Feb 11 23:13:38 -0800 2007
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For studies that use statistical methods, it is not unusual for them to reach different conclusions. However, that is not the case here. While the paper that Simon referenced (J. E. Kristjansson, A. Staple, and J. Kristiansen, 2002) did use data that left the correlation weaker and less significant, the correlation between cosmic rays and low-cloud (IR-low) cover, using annual mean data, was still quite large (0.456) and quite positive. This is why, in their conclusions, Kristjansson et. al. still state that the "two series are rather well correlated" as expected from Svensmark's theory.

Cosmic Rays and the Climate

maethorechannen

Mon Feb 12 03:49:37 -0800 2007
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Why does technocrat insist on covering every crackpot theory that says global warming isn't happening, no matter how week the evidence, how old the story - etc etc.

A few points:

a) The claim isn't that global warming isn't happening, it's that there's a potential cause other than anthropogenic green house gases. I doubt that they're even mutually exclusive - we could be in a state of "natural" warming (cosmic rays, solar cycles, etc) with all that extra CO2 and methane getting pumped into the air is making things worse.

b) "Crackpot theory" seems somewhat unjust - the paper is in a peer reviewed journal, by fully fledged scientists.

Cosmic Rays and the Climate

phred14

Mon Feb 12 08:23:16 -0800 2007
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It's unfortunately human nature. We're just emerging from 6 years of apparent suppression of the possibility of human causation of global warming by Big Oil. That period has been marked by any number of trumped-up "Isn't related to burning fossil fuels, so go away and let us keep making profits," studies. So by this point, any study that counters human-caused global warming will naturally be greeted skeptically, given previous "interference."

Cosmic Rays and the Climate

Simon

Mon Feb 12 13:13:58 -0800 2007
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"Crackpot theory" seems somewhat unjust

I wasn't necessarily referring to just this story.

But this story is OLD science, and the papers were cited multiple times by scientists querying everything from the data upwards.

So it seems crackpot to report it, without linking to the original citations, and commenting that the evidence was flatly contradicted by subsequent studies.

So in this case I'll settle for theory in desperately in need of some evidence.

If there is some new novel science being published, by all means let's run a story, but this just looks like old stuff pushed out by various interested parties in response to the latest IGPCC report.

Cosmic Rays and the Climate

maethorechannen

Tue Feb 13 02:22:00 -0800 2007
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But this story is OLD science,

But it's a NEW paper:

Mr Svensmark last week published the first experimental evidence from five years' research on the influence that cosmic rays have on cloud production in the Proceedings of the Royal Society Journal A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.

without linking to the original citations,

The story links to a newspaper article, and newspaper articles rarely (if ever) give citations. However, the original paper's DOI is DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2006.1773 and you can see the publisher's page about it here:
http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/link.asp?id=3163g817166673g7

Cosmic Rays and the Climate

Vincent guerrini

Mon Feb 26 15:58:28 -0800 2007
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We shall see if the results from the CERN CLOUD experiment confirm these findings

Cosmic Rays and the Climate

AB3A

Tue Feb 13 15:44:38 -0800 2007
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Interesting. I wonder, since the earth's magnetic field is overdue for a flip, whether that could cause some warming.

We already know that aircraft contrails are a major cooling factor. Maybe we could start some global cooling by finding an artificial method for exciting the earth's magnetic feild...