Paul Mulshine says it well:
This guy nails it.
The movement to use a theoretical threat from atmospheric CO2 to control other humans is a religion, not a science.
He says the issue is the role of CO2 versus cosmic rays in cloud formation, and “it can be resolved only by physicists, not the crowd I like to call ‘climate scientologists’.” He cites an article about Henrik Svensmark by Robert Tracinski.
Svensmark, says Tracinski, “has already broken the claim of the man-made global warming “consensus” to be the only scientific explanation of the climate.”
He says:
Ignoring the past is precisely what [the alarmists] have done. The scientific advocates of man-made global warming tend to busy themselves with artificial computer models of the climate. Yet they have little interest in the past climate, and while they presume the ability to project the future climate over a scale of centuries, they have not spent much time showing how their theory—that carbon dioxide is the main driver of global temperatures—would explain the millions and billions of years of the Earth’s history.
Henrik Svensmark has driven straight through this gap in their theory.
Svensmark’s theory of climate change, you may recall, began by targeting a glaring gap in the global warming theory: the inability to account for cloud-formation and its effect on climate. Svensmark formulated the theory that cosmic rays—fast-moving charged particles from outer space—hit the atmosphere and create nucleation sites for the condensation of water vapor, encouraging cloud formation. Thus, an influx of cosmic rays would create more clouds, which bounce more sunlight back to space and cool the Earth, while fewer cosmic rays create fewer clouds, letting more sunlight in to warm the Earth.
More cosmic rays = cooler.
Fewer cosmic rays = warmer.
A key element of this theory, the effect of cosmic rays in creating aerosols in the atmosphere, was recently demonstrated in an experiment at the CERN particle accelerator.
Up to now, Svensmark’s theory has focused on the role of the sun in regulating the influx of cosmic rays. When the sun is more active, its magnetic field is stronger and blocks more cosmic rays, warming the Earth. When the sun is weaker, it blocks fewer cosmic rays and the Earth cools. But now Svensmark has a new study out looking at the other side of the equation, the number of cosmic rays coming from outside the solar system, and using this factor to explain a vast portion of the Earth’s past climate variation.
Supernovas create a massive flux of cosmic rays. You can see why. What would be better at ejecting fast-moving charged particles out into space than the violent explosion of a star? So the more supernovae there are and the closer they are to Earth, the larger the number of cosmic rays that will rake our atmosphere.
Here’s where a little knowledge of astronomy comes in handy. Just as the planets revolve around the sun, so our solar system as a whole is revolving around the center of our galaxy. Over long periods of time, tens of thousands and millions of years, we move in and out of different neighborhoods in the galaxy, bringing us closer and farther to areas with supernova activity. So over geological time, the Earth is exposed to widely varying levels of cosmic radiation.
Tracinski cautions there’s a long way to go and Svensmark’s theory still has to be pulled apart by others.
But his theory has already gone much farther than anything put forward by the proponents of carbon-dioxide-driven global warming, both in terms of demonstrating its physical basis and in terms of accounting for vast swaths of geological and biological history.
Worth reading in full.
Visits: 53
Nailed all right.
By using a questionable statistical model, Mann made it look like global temperatures had been basically flat over the past two millennia, only moving in the last two decades of the 20th century. Talk about a climate change denier!
Cue Idiot #1, your line:-
“But Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate says there’s no linear trend in cosmic rays”
Come in #1 – you know you want to.