gnosis92

July Discover 2007 " Cosmic rays blamed for global warming"

another link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../11/warm11.xml

"Henrik Svensmark, a weather scientist at the Danish National Space Centre who led the team behind the research, believes that the planet is experiencing a natural period of low cloud cover due to fewer cosmic rays entering the atmosphere."

Surely increases in solar activity would be an alternative explanation to the recent trend in temperature.

S2Focus

But a decrease in cloud cover should be accompanied by a decrease in average overnight low temperatures (or at least a smaller increase in overnight lows than daytime highs), which is the opposite of what is actually being observed.

Asha'man

RealClimate has already examined this particular study, and found the connection between cosmic rays and global temperature to be unproven at best. Taking cosmic rays for a spin

Additionally, we've had nonstop monitoring of cosmic rays since the 1940s, and have detected no increase in intensity. That means that cosmic rays alone cannot explain our current rapid temperature rise.

Oddly enough, a perfectly logical explanation is available for this warming, one who's mechanism can be proven to work with simple laboratory experiments: increasing greenhouse gasses produced as the result of human industrial activity.

So, to put it simply, this proposal is almost certainly another oil-industry funded diversion from legitimate science.

gnosis92

He was asked that in Discover magazine and he denied oil funding. Has there been an increase in solar radiation?

The article you linked has a fair and balanced description consistent to Discover magazine's description of the researcher's idea. It does have a physical basis and more research is being conducted, including a team of 60 international scientists and a particle accelerator.

I don't know about the cosmic radiation flucation but he has shown in the test tube that ionizing radiation do indeed nucleate water vapor.

gnosis92

He makes disctinctions between different types of cloud cover, all three of which reflect sunlight, evidentally the lower lying cloud cover is most affected by cosmic rays.

S2Focus

All types of cloud cover -- including lower cloud cover -- are associated with higher overnight lows relative to daytime highs.

gnosis92

I don't deny what you say could be true.

Qam1

Let's see......Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Triton, Pluto and likely Uranus are all heating up the same time the Earth is. No planets or moons are showing signs of cooling.

Which makes more sense

A) All those bodies have Republicans driving SUVs and lighting their homes with incandescent light bulbs.

or

B) The one thing they all have in common, THE SUN is the cause of all the warming seen in the solar system including earth

The answer of course is the sun

.

It's a decrease in intensity that we are looking for.

And yes Cosmic rays have been decreasing throughout the 20th Century (See page 2 for graph)

Alone no, cosmic rays are one factor, the sun has also increased in brightness and has had shorter sunspot cycles with higher average sunspot numbers and has increased the number of solar storms produced.

Combined the instantaneous and cumulative effects of the above (and probably a whole lot more since we learning more about the sun everyday) can explain the heating, again you can see this by the same effect the sun is having on all the other planets

Solar activity correlates much better with temps then CO2 which doesn't correlate at all.

Take the number of solar storms for instance



and solar cycle length



* Most of the temperature rise in the 20th century happened between 1910-1945, just like most of the increase in solar activity and unlike the CO2 levels

* The temperatures slightly cooled between 1945-1976 which corresponds to a slight decrease in solar activity which is opposite of what you would expect if CO2 whose levels were increasing was the culprit

* The temperatures rose from the late 70's to the late 90's then leveled out into the 2000s, again just like solar activity but unlike CO2 levels which continue to rise haven't leveled out

Yeah and Realclimate.org doesn't have any financial, political and religious reasons for pushing AGW

Suuuurrreee


You would expect the same thing if CO2 was the culprit

But 2 things

1) There are 3-4% more cosmic rays at night then during the day . So cloud formation would be greater at night

2) Even without cloud formation the water vapor (The significant greenhouse gas) is still there and a warmer day means there's would be more water vapor in the atmosphere, which effects are twofold, more water vapor will reflect more sunlight back into space limiting the increase in daytime temperatures and at night more water vapor would hold in more heat

S2Focus

The fact that you posted this completely discredited plot is proof that you are getting your "information" from right-wing propaganda web-sites rather than from legitimate scientific sources.

The above plot suffers from some very basic data analysis errors, most notably the failure to deal properly with "edge effects" when one applies a moving-average filter to a finite-length data set.

Please read http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu...onLaut2004.pdf, and pay particular attention to figures 1a-c.

theyeti

I get a real kick out of the quixotic quest to find that "other thing" that's causing global warming, as if it would somehow change the physical properties of CO2 and stop it from absorbing energy. Let's assume for the sake of argument that cosmic rays (or the sun, or whatever) were contributing to global warming. This simply means that without any carbon mitigation, things will be worse than our models predict. This is an even better reason to cut back on emissions.

As it is however, the search for that elusive other thing that's causing global warming is kind of like trying to explain why a gun shot victim isn't feeling well. You might want to start with the obvious before looking for alternatives.

theyeti