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Cosmic Rays and Global Warming
Overly Critical Guy writes "The former editor of New Scientist has written an article in the TimesOnline suggesting that cosmic rays may affect global climate. The author criticizes the UN's recent global warming report, noting several underreported trends it doesn't account for, such as increasing sea-ice in the Southern Ocean. He describes an experiment by Henrik Svensmark showing a relation between atmospheric cloudiness and atomic particles coming in from exploded stars. In the basement of the Danish National Space Center in 2005, Svensmark's team showed that electrons from cosmic rays caused cloud condensation. Svensmark's scenario apparently predicts several unexplained temperature trends from the warmer trend of the 20th century to the temporary drop in the 1970s, attributed to changes in the sun's magnetic field affecting the amount of cosmic rays entering the atmosphere."
infact it doesn't even look like you read past the past line of the submitters description, since it clearly starts he in conjunction of a TEAM of scientists have shown that cosmic radiation creates cloud cover. so he is qualified to be commenting, and he is not a lone nut.
co2 alone is not sufficent to raise the greenhouse effect by any appreciable amount. this is a fact global warming nuts tend not to like have outed but it's true if you only stop taking spoon feedings.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Interestingly enough, his theory does even more! It predicts the
substantial positive change to his bank balance due to a payment from
an oil cartel discussed here last week.
I didn't quote a "small very vocal band of extremists". The IPCC is a very conservative scientific panel. That's "conservative" in the scientific sense of not making unsubstantiated claims, not in the American political sense like the nutjobs you linked to.
Exactly. You are calling those that did NOT ignore the "good" news from the report extremists... actually, you called them nutjobs.
As to the IPCC report you're talking about... it hasn't been released yet. What you've read is the "Summary for Policymakers"... in other words, the cliff-notes for politicians. I think the world will survive long enough for the actual report to come out. Even then, I don't know how much stock I'm going to put into a bunch of UN hired scientists. I put them just below Exxon employees on the credibility scale. At least Exxon did not watch half a million children die from starvation, tainted water and disease due to UN corruption. (UNICEF'S numbers, Oil for food program is the corruption in case you couldn't figure it out. Don't even get me started on Darfur, Rwanda or even Bosnia!)
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Cosmic rays? BullSHIT!
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Really? How interesting. Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Troll.
The Slashdot crew must not be aware that what these studies propose is that *charged particles* can affect cloud formation! Ghasp! Had they known this, then they surely wouldn't have allowed this one to get through ...
That would suggest a link between charged particles moving through outer space and weather here on Earth. That would actually lend support to the general ideas proposed by Electric Universe theorists that weather has electrical components. Yikes!
EU theorists argue that the energies inherent to the cosmic rays are in some cases so large that they could not be accounted for even with the result of the annihilation of matter and antimatter. In order to accelerate particles to this extent, it's necessary to subject the charged particles to some sort of sustained electric field. In the EU view, all stars have their own electric fields with their own "solar winds" accelerating away from them as a result of these fields. Cosmic rays that hit the Earth are in fact nothing more than the solar winds of foreign stars that are larger than our own Sun. The energies imparted to those charged particles are enough to overtake our own solar wind such that they reach the Earth. In their view, it's conceivable that cosmic rays can potentially act as a mechanism for distributing energy across the universe in the absence of filamentary plasmas.
It's very interesting to observe in real time how astrophysicists are going to deal with this heretical view and these heretical experimental results. Traditional astrophysicists suddenly find themselves in the difficult position of having to apply their space models, which they've created by imagining what the universe *should* be like and which consistently fail to explain their own telescope observations in a rational way, to a real-world problem that has real consequences for all of us. The traditional views of astrophysicists that the Earth is largely an isolated body whose weather is unaffected by the plasma phenomenon that surrounds it has now been challenged by a peer reviewed study that alleges that charged particles from foreign stars can affect weather here on Earth. What about the other planets? Might cosmic rays be affecting *their* weather too? And what about all of those experiments where people are inducing rain by pumping ions into the atmosphere? Shouldn't we be taking a closer look at those now too?
My guess is that these new findings will be completely ignored or possibly slandered as if there's no tomorrow. To accept that cloud formation and global warming might have electrical components is going to be just far too much for the mainstream. But it should make for an entertaining show.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.