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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."
While it is possible that he is wrong, it wouldn't be the first time one guy turned out to be right over the establishment, anyone remember a man a long time ago called Galileo Galilei.
Before you people start screaming, "what do they expect us to do about cosmic rays??//?/?" Think. This isn't about "debunking" global warming, nor is it about fearmongering about it. It's about building more accurate climate models.
Move along.
http://outcampaign.org/
I have had some classes on this theory at university.
This being a somewhat new theory everything is still quite uncertain how much effect this has on the heating of the earth.
I think the estimates we saw in class a year ago was that this could explain from 10% to maybe 30% of the heating that has happened in the last 30 years.
We don't have measurements of the amount of cosmic radiation from more than something like 30 years so it is hard to go further back to check this theory.
We have CO2 measurements from somewhat longer, but not that much longer, but we have trapped air in the ice cores which give us information almost 100K years back which gives the evidence of CO2 and methane quite strong support.
Cosmic radiation does is not "trapped" anywhere in the geologic layers to my knowledge.
I am no saying Svensmarks theory is wrong, it most likely has an effect, but how big this effect is is very hard to say by now.
Anyhow I think the critique of the UN-report is justified, if this theory is not part of the report. Not taking this theory into account and then saying there is a 90% certainty that humans have caused global warming is not scientific.
unlikely since this is a 5 year long research project recently completed. even less likely since it's nothing to do with oil.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
He's pointing out another possible contributing factor. There are lots of them including volcanic activity. The one thing none of it adequately accounts for is the spike in CO2. No one is disputing the CO2 spike is manmade. All the other factors are within normal levels and would not account for an unpresidented spike in CO2. If he was working for corporate america he'd claim Spotted Owls were causing the CO2 and cutting down the forests would reduce the number of the little CO2 machines. No reputible sources are disputing global warming and that humans are the cause. The only issues are how bad it'll be and if it can be stopped. If you notice our flipflopping President quitely acknowledged global warming and that we are the cause. Amazing the press gave him a pass on this since he went from saying global warming wasn't proven to accepted science overnight with zero fanfare. If CO2 levels are any indication we are in for a rough ride. I hate to break it to the flat earthers but there is a well established correlation between CO2 levels and temperature. If CO2 levels are even close Florida may be the first state in the union to give fish the right to vote.
... until the experiment has been independently reproduced and there is some more data on whether and how much cosmic radiation affects our climate. So far, there is one paper on this topic (July 2002 issue of Journal of Geophysical Research-Space Physics), and not much else. The experiment is interesting, but rather tenuous in its conclusions. We have a potential mechanism, along with some ways on testing the validity of its predictions. But it's far too early to make this anymore than it is - an idea that needs further exploring.
3 1080631.htm
Besides, can we link to something more than someone's blog? Here's a link that has a lot more substance and not so much speculation: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/07/0207
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
From TFA:
The only trouble with Svensmark's idea -- apart from its being politically incorrect -- was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.
Why didn't the oil cartel fund his experiment if they were so interested in it? Or did you just choose to assume, without actually reading the article?
This the same Calder often quoted derogatorily on certain websites with anti environmentalist leanings?p hy/BG1143.cfm
several quote an article "In the Grip of a New Ice Age?" in the National Wildlife Federation's journal, International Wildlife attributed to a "Nigel Calder" in 70's
the line they like to quote is: "the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind."
eg http://www.ncpa.org/ba/ba337/ba337.html
http://www.mises.org/story/2119
http://www.heritage.org/Research/PoliticalPhiloso
True. You remove the sun, and we turn into pluto. Now quantify that effect. Exactly how much does a change in the output of the sun affect the temperature on the earth? Note: correlation != causation.
Just flat out wrong. Find the research papers (not a blog) that demonstrate this. I hope that you'll learn in the process not to equate someone's opinion with science.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Oh, hell, I'll bite. Venus was always slightly too close to the sun for it's atmospheric water to condense. As a result, no oceans. Without aqueous chemistry, carbon dioxide couldn't turn into carbonates and stayed in the atmosphere. With no water and no life to create an ozone layer, and all it's water stuck in the upper atmosphere, high-energy radiation dissocated the water into hydrogen and oxygen. As the hydrogen went into space, sulfur-containing compounds got oxidized and reacted with the remaining water to make sulfuric acid.
And to make this worthwhile, consider: Earth's ecosystem handles the increasing luminance of the Sun by reducing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere to reduce the warming effect. In 1 billion years, the concentration will hit zero and then earth fries. Cheers!
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005 /07/the-lure-of-solar-forcing/
4 /12/recent-warming-but-no-trend-in-galactic-cosmic -rays/
6 /10/how-not-to-attribute-climate-change/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/200
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/200
The notion that professional climate scientists have ignored solar forcing in estimating climate sensitivity is 100% false, and by now repeating it is slander.
By no means whatsoever have actual climatologists "forgotten" about the Sun since the earliest days of global warming studies in the 1960's and further. Of course popularizations ignore all the complexities but that's what they do.
The fact remains that by the best known observations and theory there is no way to explain the current observations WITHOUT major to dominant human greenhouse gas forcing.
There is no trend in solar activity observed or predicted which either explains recent past observations or will in any way nullify the clear and significant effect from greenhouse gas forcing. That depends on very predictable laws of physics, not statistical correlations.
And if the Sun does happen to be in an upswing in output, then that will just make the climate change we are causing that much worse. Since the upper extremes of events and risks are the greatest danger, any uncertainty in solar forcing adds to the variance in future forecasts, and not the mean. This means that doing something about the thing we can do something about is ever more urgent.
Just to nitpick, but Galileo Galilei wasn't the first nor the only one to describe heliocentrism - Nicolas Copernic was the forethinker of that system, and Galileo Galilei main discoveries (Saturn's rings, Jupiter's satellites, physics of the pendulum etc.) weren't in the line at his trial. Actually, most of the learned scholars of the time knew for a fact that heliocentrism gave far more accurate mathematicals results to build sailing tables.
Galileo Galilei faced troubles because he wrote that helliocentrism was the physical TRUTH. He would have escaped any trial (and was offered a plea bargain as a matter of fact) had he accepted to write that heliocentrism was a mere hypothesis. But he refused and the rest is history. As to know why he was so stubborn, we now know there was a mix of self-pride, and insurance he received from high profile individuals among the Catholic Church that the Pope was considering adopting a progressive doctrine. That turned out to be deceptive. Basically, he was caught in the middle of a political fight, and sided with the wrong persons.
"....it makes it worth at least looking at his claim"
It has been looked at, and will definitely be "looked at" again iff someone were to come up with a new idea.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
---- No reputible sources are disputing global warming and that humans are the cause.
Uh, think again.
There's a fairly solid consensus that global mean temperatures have gone up about 1.5C in the last hundred and fifty years. There's good proof that humans are putting a significant amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. There's still a lot of room for discussion of how much effect anthropogenic CO2 has on the global mean temperature, though.
Most scientists say, "at least some," but it's hard to pin anyone down to specific numbers. First and foremost, we don't understand the atmosphere well enough to say we know what acounts for natural variation. We know very little about the cloud system, for instance, which has a significant effect on planetary temperature.
If you want to make scientific statements about anthropogenic global warming, you need to be able to answer the following questions:
All measurements have some error, and you can't make meaningful statements about numbers smaller than that error. For most scientific work, an error margin of 5% is considered acceptable. I don't happen to know the error for converting 500-year-old tree ring data to global mean temperature, for instance, but I'd be surprised to find it less than 5%. The same is true for extrapolating global CO2 levels from a microliter of prehistoric gas trapped in an ice core sample.
By the same token, all real data populations have some amount of variation. It might be very small, or it might be very large. Statistically, about 2/3 of a sample falls within one standard deviation (aka: sigma) of the average. That means a variation of less than one sigma is 2/3 likely to be perfectly natural, and only 1/3 likely to be caused by external factors.
And finally we have coefficient of correlation. A CoC of .95 means that when factor A goes up, factor B also goes up 95% of the time. Again, it's scientifically invalid to claim correlations greater than your CoC.
So.. the scientifically valid way to discuss anthropogenic global warming is to say it's X% certain that anthropogenic CO2 accounts for Y degrees of variation in global mean temperature, plus or minus Z degrees of error.
And let's face it, when you carve out a 5% error for basic measurement, figure a standard deviation of between .4C and .75C in the historical temperature data, then factor in a CoC of .8 or so (which is generous for real-world science), there isn't much room left for sweeping pronouncements. If you want to be 95% certain that Y degrees of variation are due to human-produced CO2, you have to set Y somewhere around .1C.
The "we are headed towards an ice age" meme was due to the belief in cyclic weather, basically that the global temperature could be predicted by a Fourier series. You can always fit any measured data to a Fourier series, but here at least some of the coefficients had astronomical explanations.
Global warming was also a concern 30 years ago, as the mechanisms were well known. There were actually people warning about global warming a 100 years ago. However, only recently computers have become fast enough, and measurements accurate enough, that you can actually quantify the risk.
Interestingly enough, cyclic weather has until recently[1] been used to dismiss global warming, claiming that it was not man made but predicted by the coefficients in the Fourier series. Which does apparently conflict with the series predicting an ice age, but not really, as the series consist of overlapping cycles, and you can be on the way up on one of the short cycles, and on the way down one of the longer.
[1] You still see references to it by laypeople on the net, but it is no longer used that way by scientists.
... your precious economy? Easy, stop eating cows. Kill all the ones you have now and eat them, but don't make new ones. The farmland you can reclaim will yield ten times as much food and whatever you have left over that doesn't need to be used for growing food can be used for growing for instance industrial hemp, which can then be used as fuel for heating houses. Oil can be extracted from the plants which mixed with gasoline (20/80 in normal cars without any modifications) can run cars, reducing your addiction to foreign oil (or domestic, if you live in a country whose oil production still surpasses demand).
Nyhetsankaret.com -- det bÃsta av Sveriges Nyhetssido
RealClimate discussed these results back in October ...
Here's a nice "Cosmic Rays and Climate Change for Dummies" article that has pretty pictures and graphs. At least give it a read before dismissing this. I found it compelling.
http://www.sciencebits.com/ice-ages
more on the climate debate: http://www.sciencebits.com/ClimateDebate/
Shaviv's personal site: http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/
Read the table. Look at the net flux of natural CO2 sources and sinks. Look at the manmade flux for comparision. Look here.
There are some people out there who dispute the human impact on atmospheric CO2 trends, but this particular issue is a smoking gun. The data fits, and there is no plausible alternative hypothesis that explains the very striking trend in CO2 emissions (highest in 400k years, by a lot). If you want to pick apart global warming, spend your time on the climate sensitivity bit, not on the CO2 concentration part.
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
The Ural Sea dried up because the rivers that fed it were siphoned off to irrigate crop production in Soviet Georgia. From the sixties on up there wasn't any water going into the sea. While this was man made, it wasn't because of global warming.
(1) As I said the first time you posted this exact same diatribe - which media are we not hearing this from?
(2) We have proxies. Those proxies can be checked against more recent data to help determine margins of error. No, proxies are not perfect, but they do allow us to gather remarkable information back 800,000 years.
(3) Yes, the Earth's magnetic field is decreasing. And, no, you're not a genius for "figuring out" that it might be related to climate change. There are lots of electrical engineers who no doubt know far more about climate science than you. If you disagree, you should publish a journal article in a peer-reviewed journal. Don't give me any conspiracy theory on that, either.
(4) Jupitor [sic] is not experiencing the "same" climate change as Earth. Jupiter takes a lot longer to go around the sun than Earth, so it's natural variations are also longer. According to your link, "We're sorry, but there is no SPACE.com Web page that matches your entry." If you're going to keep posting stuff that has been debunked, as least refresh your link list.
(5) Mars is also not experiencing the "same" climate change on Earth. Read the one link you posted (for this bullet) that actually works. It's experiencing climate change - which it should when it goes from summer to fall to winter to spring (which takes about a year and a half of Earth time). Of course, if Mars is experiencing the exact same climate change, then that kind of shoots down #3, right?
(6) And who is responsible for these livestock? Methane is an important factor. However, C13/C12 ratios (as well as simple math) determine that the vast majority of increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is due to fossil fuels. Luckily, methane has a much shorter "life span" in the atmosphere than CO2. Even so, why would it reduce our need to take action otherwise? Also, you realize that this "point" contradicts #4 and 5, right?
(7) Just like last time you posted this drivel and had it debunked, you stopped numbering at this point. Why can't you actually create new arguments?
(8) Just because slow climate change in the past was natural does not mean that the fast climate change now is natural. Just because cancer kills you, it doesn't mean that a bullet won't kill you as well. Do you understand your logical fallacy about bringing up past climate change? The basic science is:
(a) We've increased the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere from the range of about 180-280 ppmv (over the last 800,000 years, where 180 ppmv = ice age) to over 380 ppmv.
(b) CO2 absorbs infrared radiation.
(c) Absorbing infrared radiation leads to an increased thermal equilibrium point.
No fancy computer simulations are required to understand this basic science. As for cosmic rays, sounds like a BOFH excuse to me.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
One of the co-authors of that study is a friend of mine. He's bemused by how the press has gotten the data's implications entirely wrong. An average increase in global temperatures results - according to all models - in some local average decreases. The overall patterns change.
Consider the question some must be asking, "Why is there record snow in Mexico, New York now if our winters are warming?" It's because the Great Lakes are warmer than usual because of the unusually warm December and January, so there's more evaporation now that cold winds are finally blowing across, and that becomes snow. Global warming means as a planetary average it snows less (because it's more often rain instead). But locally it may be that Mexico, New York is in for a string of nasty winters.
It's similar effects we're seeing in Antarctica, where local regions have more snow buildup, or more cold, even though on the large scale major ice shelves are breaking off for the first time in tens of thousands of years.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Incidentally, the "hockey stick" was not shown to be rubbish; McIntyre & McKitrick's work itself has plenty of flaws. You can read Mann's rebuttal, or Tim Lambert's independent analysis. And even if Mann's work was flawed, there are other reconstructions, performed by completely different methods, which also show a "hockey stick" shape. (In fact, all of them have a noticeable upswing in recent times, they just differ on when that upswing starts: 1800 vs. 1900.) I don't know why everyone singles out Mann's work in this respect. The other problem is that it doesn't explain the other cold and warm periods in the last 2000 years. How is that a problem? CO2 is not the only driver of climate change. Solar variations, for instance, have played a greater role in the past. I'm not saying that Global Warming isn't happening, but I'm not convinced that CO2 is the sole and main cause. CO2 definitely is not the sole cause. It is, however, the main cause of the warming in the 20th century, particularly in the last 40 years. See, for instance, Fig. SPM-2 in the IPCC AR4 SPM (PDF). At different points in history, different factors have been the primary drivers of climate change. Right now, it happens to be CO2, largely due to anthropogenic emissions since the Industrial Revolution.
Your questions are talking points from global warming deniers and they have long since been answered. Like the "debate" about evolution, and questions such as the evolution of flagella or the eye, they distract attention from real science and waste people's time answering ignoramuses who refuse to do a little research on their own. Since I've got some free time though, I'll bite.
1) Why is East Antarctica cooling?
The mean surface temperature of the entire globe can be increasing even if local areas are decreasing in temperature. You're confusing the average with the entire distribution.
2) Why has air temperature apparently stabilized?
What?
3) What caused the Medieval Warm Period?
Who knows exactly why, but as with Eastern Antarctica there is no evidence that the Medieval Warm Period extended to regions outside of the Northeastern Atlantic and Europe. In general though any changes in climate are the result of a variety of influences: solar irradiation, ocean circulation, changes in greenhouse gas concentrations, etc. Furthermore, for periods of a decade or two, large scale volcanic eruptions can affect climate over reasonably large areas of the globe.
4) What caused the mini Ice Age of the 1700s?
Same answer as 3, there are a variety of factors to consider.
5) Why in the historical record do temperatures rise before CO2 rises?
Because there are a variety of factors involved in a complex feedback loop, and it is not always the case that temperature changes precede greenhouse gas concentration changes. What is not in dispute though, is that current greenhouse gas levels have not been seen in half a million years and during that period the Earth's average temperature was 2-5 degrees Celsius greater than it is now. Admittedly, that's a correlation, not a proof of causation, but is reason for concern. Furthermore it's not in dispute that the majority of the observed increase in greenhouse gas levels is due to human activity, from agriculture to fossil fuel based energy production.
Solar forcing, cloud formation, ocean and atmosphere interactions, and biosphere influences on global climate are all important areas of study. In general, over time as one question after another has been raised about the causes of climate change each of these has been offered as a reason not to worry, and ultimately after careful analysis found to be lacking in explanatory power. The oceans can't absorb all the CO2 (and we wouldn't want that because all the delicious fish would die and we'd be left with an ocean full of jellyfish), plant's can't absorb all the excess either (and switch to respiration in a CO2 rich environment further increasing the problem), careful analysis of solar irradiation data has largely ruled out sunspots as the major driver in current observed climate change and given the speculative nature of the research presented here (the experiment was performed under idealized conditions and the magnitude of the contribution of cloud seeding via cosmic ray flux in the actual atmosphere as opposed to a test tube is still an open question) it is too soon to decide that anthropogenic greenhouse gas formation is not problematic. In fact there are a host of reasons, such as the improving agreement between observed phenomena such as; decreasing glaciation, thawing of the permafrost, and shifts in such climatic phenomena as the monsoon, and predictions based on extrapolations of increased greenhouse gas levels to believe that greenhouse gas concentration changes are the primary driver of current observed climate change. Not the only driving force in the climate system, just the most important one right now.
Also, things like the Medieval Warming, Little Ice Age and so on are largely the result of concentrating on the European climate record and become less significant when the sparser Asian climate record is also considered. The lack of good records of the climate of the tropics mid
"I think he meant serious, peer reviewed investigation"
Have a look again, RC is attacking a PRESS RELEASE similar to the PRESS RELEASE that is TFA. If this guy (or anyone else) publishes a paper on cosmic rays and climate I am sure it will be treated with more respect.
"In case the writers didn't know - environmentalists are also widely regarded..."
Perhaps RC contributors are also evil boogey-men "environmentalists" in their spare time, but they are climatoligists first and foremost. The guy who started the blog is the hockey stick guy and has been a lead authour in the IPCC reports, many of the contribitors also have a long list of current peer-reviewed publications under their belt, there is a bio for all of them on the site and (unlike psuedo-skeptical sites there is a prominent list of "other opinions. OTOH: The guy in TFA is a journalist who's claim to fame is that he was once the editor of New Scientst.
Having said that I doubt it will slow you from dogmatically defending a psuedo-skeptical press release in the face of overwhelming contra-evidence.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.