Thursday, April 3, 2008

Climate change not caused by cosmic rays, according to new research

How many times must this oft-exploded theory be debunked? I predict that six months from now the denialists will trot out the identical theory, as if the study referred to in this piece from Science Daily had never existed: New research has dealt a blow to the skeptics who argue that climate change is all due to cosmic rays rather than to man-made greenhouse gases. The new evidence shows no reliable connection between the cosmic ray intensity and cloud cover.

Lauded and criticised for offering a possible way out of the dangers of man made climate change, UK TV Channel 4's programme "The Great Global Warming Swindle", broadcast in 2007, suggested that global warming is due to a decrease in cosmic rays over the last hundred years. This would cause a decrease in the production of low clouds allowing more heat from the sun to warm the Earth and cause global warming.

Research published April 3, in the Institute of Physics' Environmental Research Letters shows how a team from Lancaster and Durham Universities sought a means to prove the correlation between the ionizing cosmic rays and the production of low cloud cover.

Previous research had shown a possible hint of such a correlation, using the results of the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project, and this had been used to propose that global warming was all down to cosmic rays. The new research shows that change in cloud cover over the Earth does not correlate to changes in cosmic ray intensity. Neither does it show increases and decreases during the sporadic bursts and decreases in the cosmic ray intensity which occur regularly….

The flux of cosmic ray particles as a function of their energy. The flux for the lowest energies (yellow zone) are mainly attributed to solar cosmic rays, intermediate energies (blue) to galactic cosmic rays, and highest energies (purple) to extragalactic cosmic rays. Not shown here are the months of torture in Guantanamo, as denialists waterboarded the data to force them to say what they wanted. Diagram by Sven Lafebre, Wikimedia Commons.

1 comment:

Will Malven said...

Typical alarmist claptrap.

I hesitate to respond to your drivel at the risk of inflating your feelings of self-importance, but I just can't resist those slow hanging curve balls.

1. Failure to corroborate a claim (the actual finding of the Lancaster-Durham study) is not the same as "debunking" it, nor does it disprove it.

2. Two independent groups of scientists, Drs. N. Marsh and H. Svensmark, and Drs. E Palle Bago and C.J. Butler found such a correlation, only one group failed to find it.

That is a poor basis for making such a blanket denial, at best it is a call for further study.

3. This article, summarizing the findings of an inconclusive study, does not "deal a blow to skeptics who argue that climate change is all due to cosmic rays rather than to man-made greenhouse gases," because that assertion has never been made seriously. What has been asserted is that,

"possibly excluding the most recent decades, much of the warming of the past century can be quantitatively accounted for by the direct and indirect effects of solar activity."

4. The data-fit of the cosmic radiation theory is far, far closer than is that of the CO2 alarmist theory of AGW.

I love the way you alarmists phrase a strawman argument, attribute it to others, attempt to knock it down, and then proclaim yourselves victors. It must be really tough to defeat your own arguments.

These studies, both pro and con, cover such a short time period (solar maximum 22), that neither assertion is particularly compelling...or didn't you read the parent articles?

Using an eleven year window to test a theory which addresses macro-climatic events is laughable and if these "scientist" had been publishing the opposite result and confirming the prior two studies, their paper would have been rejected out-of-hand because of the amount of equivocation and assumptions made.

The number of assumptions, the horrendous "quality" (I hate even to use the word) of their data and the arbitrariness of the smoothing used to fit the data, would be so embarrasing that most honest scientist would hesitate to publish it.

The paper was published only as a result of its confirming the bias of AGW cult members assumptions.

Bad science is worse than no science at all and the Lancaster-Durham study is bad science.