“The alarmists paid by George Soros seem to be jealous and they ask: “Why the continued interest?” They mean interest in the mechanisms by Svensmark et al.

Well, because it seems to work, it seems to be justified by a flux of new articles, and because of reasons that are written in these articles. Because it may be the most important insight in climatology during the recent decades.

I think that Svensmark and a few others must feel somewhat unpleasantly because they have found something that may be a spectacular discovery in their discipline, and possibly the first discovery of this discipline that could deserve a Nobel prize.

Except that they simply can’t get the deserved credit right now because their discipline has been hijacked by a political movement that prefers ideologically convenient opinions over solid and non-trivial insights that are likely to be true because they are justified by the empirical evidence.

I hope that the situation will change soon.”

I’m not hoping one way or another, really. Instead, I’m hoping that his work advances climate science, and there’s little to no doubt that it will.

If he’s right and GCRs help create cloud cover, then it’s simply GOT to go into climate models. Clouds are arguably the single biggest hole in climate models, and modelers have been working to understand cloud formation and cloud feedbacks for years. So this would be a big correction in the models that would make them much better. It’ll still take time to figure out whether he’s right on the magnitude of the formation, and that’ll probably take even more years after he’s proved cloud formation in principle.

As you mentioned, if he’s right but something else changed recently, then we’ll need to attribute that change, and that’s a good thing because it advances climate science. In addition, if he’s right, then we need to understand how he could be given that there is significant concerns about a long-term trend in GCRs. In other words, either our historical proxies for GCRs are wrong, or he’s wrong, or something a lot more interesting than either Svensmark or his critics currently understand is probably going on.

If he’s wrong, then we have eliminated one more possible cause for climate disruption.

And in all cases, human knowledge of our world moves forward. And I always like more knowledge.

In a strange way, you should be rooting for this guy if your a pollution guy. If, as you say, the data seem to line up for past cycles but not for this one, doesn’t that mean that something about the atmosphere has changed the chemistry recently? So even if he’s right, there still could be AGW impact, right? Or am I missing something? Of course, the flip side of this is, we may have changed the chemistry for the better. Who knows?

Svensmark hypothesized that the cascade of energetic particles that results from a GCR impact on the upper atmosphere would produce small sites of nucleation (IIRC) around which water vapor would condense, thus starting cloud formation. He did a test at CERN that appeared to support that hypothesis, but it was a “proof of concept” test, no a full-fledged “am I right or wrong” test. The results were good enough that he got more money for further testing at CERN, and IIRC he’s running those tests now.

The sun’s magnetic field shields the solar system from GCRs just as the Earth’s field shields us from the solar wind. When the sun’s field is strong, fewer GCRs get through to impact the Earth’s atmosphere, and so fewer clouds are seeded by GCR reactions. When the sun’s field is weak, more GCRs get through and so more clouds are seeded. Svensmark says that this mechanism is the dominant solar influence on the Earth’s climate, even more than changes in spectral energy output (irradiance).

Most of the climate scientists whom I’ve read have acknowledged a few things about this argument. First, they don’t expect it to dominate anthropogenic CO2, but can’t rule it out entirely. Second, doing more research on this is absolutely worth the time and energy spent on the research, because cloud formation and feedbacks (along with aerosol effects) are some of the things that they don’t have a good enough handle on yet.

The problem is that several other science teams have looked at the same data Svensmark used to formulate his hypothesis and have found a couple of problems. The main problem is that the data shows correlation for earlier solar cycles, but little to no correlation in later cycles. In addition, the correlation in the earlier cycles was relatively low, suggesting that GCRs could have an effect, but that effect wasn’t particularly strong and had been overshadowed recently by other forces (aka AGW).

However, the sun DOES impact the Earth’s magnetic field. The field really does get pushed around with changes in solar activity, assuming that activity occurs on the correct side of the sun (i.e. not all solar activity impacts the earth. It’s an orbital mechanics thing). It’s kinda like air hitting the wing of an airplane. More flow = tighter pressure gradients. So more solar activity = tighter magnetic gradients = more GCRs getting through.

But hell if I know what that has to do with cloud cover and/or global warming.

Brian, you know damned well that Svensmark is talking about the sun’s magnetic envelope and not irradiance. Nobody has debunked him because his theory is misqoted…the old strawman technique again.

Hail Eris!

As for Svensmark’s claims, I’ve debunked several of them at least twice:

“Svensmark’s various GCR claims” Debunked here and here.

“Medieval Warm Period” Debunked here and here and here.

http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/res_agenda21_00.shtml

Surely you can’t have failed to notice what has been going on with the Wall Street/Washington Fandango? Trillions now…..did you get to vote on that either?

A good place to start your research on what is happening is the very academic http://www.globalresearch.ca/

Also get with the times and drop the CO2 BS
While the Sun sleeps
Henrik Svensmark, Professor, Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen

“In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. No climate model has predicted a cooling of the Earth – quite the contrary. And this means that the projections of future climate are unreliable,” writes Henrik Svensmark.
Excerpt:
“Ever since we put forward our theory in 1996, it has been subjected to very sharp criticism, which is normal in science.

First it was said that a link between clouds and solar activity could not be correct, because no physical mechanism was known. But in 2006, after many years of work, we completed experiments at DTU Space that demonstrated the existence of a physical mechanism. The cosmic rays help to form aerosols, which are the seeds for cloud formation.

Then came the criticism that the mechanism we found in the laboratory could not work in the real atmosphere, and therefore had no practical significance. We have just rejected that criticism emphatically.

It turns out that the Sun itself performs what might be called natural experiments. Giant solar eruptions can cause the cosmic ray intensity on earth to dive suddenly over a few days. In the days following an eruption, cloud cover can fall by about 4 per cent. And the amount of liquid water in cloud droplets is reduced by almost 7 per cent. Here is a very large effect – indeed so great that in popular terms the Earth’s clouds originate in space.

So we have watched the Sun’s magnetic activity with increasing concern, since it began to wane in the mid-1990s.

That the Sun might now fall asleep in a deep minimum was suggested by solar scientists at a meeting in Kiruna in Sweden two years ago. So when Nigel Calder and I updated our book The Chilling Stars, we wrote a little provocatively that “we are advising our friends to enjoy global warming while it lasts.”

In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. Mojib Latif from the University of Kiel argued at the recent UN World Climate Conference in Geneva that the cooling may continue through the next 10 to 20 years. His explanation was a natural change in the North Atlantic circulation, not in solar activity. But no matter how you interpret them, natural variations in climate are making a comeback.”

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/10/svensmark-global-warming-stopped-and-a-cooling-is-beginning-enjoy-global-warming-while-it-lasts/#more-10739

“Global warming” is a genocidal conspiracy. Because trying to slow the pace of man-made greenhouse gas emissions is … ummm, unnatural? While letting them continue exploding is perfectly in line with the natural order of things. Or something.

Wow. Up until now it was about some twisted version of “science.” Now it’s about the Trilateral Commission or the Illuminati.

Sorry I accused you of being a sock puppet, Judy. I work in the corporate world and when they hire an astroturfer they tend to steer clear of truthers and the patently deranged. Clearly you are not a sock puppet.

Keep up the good work. The truth is out there.

Brian you blather..you do not debunk.

“Global Warming” is, and always
was, a policy for genocidal reduction
of the world’s population. The preposterous
claim that human-produced
carbon dioxide will broil the Earth, melt
the ice caps, and destroy human life,
came out of a 1975 conference in
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina,
organized by the influential anthropologist
Margaret Mead, president of the
American Association for the
Advancement of Science
(AAAS), in 1974.

http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/gw-hoax-born.pdf
Club of Rome

(Committee of 300 subversive body)

This group was organized in 1968 by the Morgenthau Group for the purpose of accelerating the plans to have the New World Order in place by the year 2000. The Club of Rome developed a plan to divide the world into ten regions or kingdoms.

In 1976, the United States Association of the Club of Rome (USACOR) was formed for the purpose of shutting down the U.S. economy gradually. The Technetronic Era Henry Kissinger was then, and still is, an important agent in the service of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, a member of the Club of Rome and the Council on Foreign Relations.
http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/clubofrome.htm

If you think you will be exempted from this because you are good little kiddies and support the scam, you have a rude awakening coming.
“The common enemy of humanity is man.
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up
with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming,
water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through
changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome.
The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
- Club of Rome

Plimmer is probably right about having enough CO2 to drop ocean pH below 7.0. But as I mentioned above, that’s not what’s necessary.

As for what the climate models did or did not forecast, I debunked that not less than three times just in the comments from my last Carbo, never mind all the times before that.

I’ll build on Slammy’s question, though – what’s the motive? If it’s a government conspiracy, why would nearly every government on the planet voluntarily decide that they want to risk destroying their own economies (a claim that your fellow deniers make) in order to turn around something that doesn’t exist?

Finally, it’s easy enough to verify who I am, Judy. Google my name – there’s only two people on the top page of results, and I’m not the British recluse who bought the AC Cobra line. If you dig a few pages back, you’ll discover that I’ve been on-line since 1991 or 92. It would have been a lot of work to create a bogus identity to solve a problem that was only barely coming into focus when I first started doing stuff on line.

See, Judy, science is a process. It’s never “over.” You’d know this if you’d ever taken a science class.

I don’t expect this to diminish your zealotry in the least, but it’s important for people to notice when purveyors of faux science accidentally demonstrate that they don’t know the first thing about which they’re talking.