On this blog and others, most comments about my previous post “Yet another trick of cosmic rays” have been friendly. Thank you. But some people still want to dismiss all the meticulous experimental, observational and theoretical work of Henrik Svensmark and his colleagues in the Danish National Space Institute by saying there is simply no link between cosmic rays and the climate.
Having written two books on the subject, and still engaged with it, I could in rebuttal flood this post with evidence of many kinds, on time scales from days to millennia or longer. I’ll content myself with just one pair of graphs spanning 50 years. They’re from a 2007 report by Svensmark and the Institute’s director, Eigil Friis-Christensen, and they’re based on a European Space Agency project called ISAC. The carbon dioxide boys and girls would die for a match of cause and effect of this quality.
Cosmic ray intensity is in red and upside down, so that 1991 was a minimum, not a maximum. Fewer cosmic rays mean a warmer world, and the cosmic rays vary with the solar cycle. The blue curve shows the global mean temperature of the mid-troposphere as measured with balloons and collated by the UK Met Office (HadAT2).
In the upper panel the temperatures roughly follow the solar cycle. The match is much better when well-known effects of other natural disturbances (El Niño, North Atlantic Oscillation, big volcanoes) are removed, together with an upward trend of 0.14 deg. C per decade. The trend may be partly due to man-made greenhouse gases, but the magnitude of their contribution is debatable.
From 2000 to 2011 mid-tropospheric temperatures have remained pretty level, like those of the surface, despite the continuing increase in the gases – in “flat” contradiction to the warming predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Meanwhile the Sun is lazy, cosmic ray counts are high and the oceans are cooling.
Reference
Svensmark, H. and Friis-Christensen, E., “Reply to Lockwood and Fröhlich – The persistent role of the Sun in climate forcing”, Danish National Space Center Scientific Report 3/2007.
But since we already know CO2 is the culprit……………..
True, but the correlation goes back a long way and works on any time scale not overwhelmed by signal to noise issues.
In point of fact, several papers have been written taking JUST the natural cycles we know of such as ADO, PDO, sun spots, major volcano eruptions, etc. and plotting them properly against time and world average temperatures. The correlation is so strong that no other mechanism is needed to draw the graph. The addition of the cosmic ray theory just cleans it up even more when added to the other factors. And don’t forget the so-called ‘Iris Effect’ paper that came out not long ago.
[ooops... this was meant for gamecock below, my bad]
“The carbon dioxide boys and girls would die for a match of cause and effect of this quality.”
These findings appear significant, but correlation is still not causation.
Oh lodr! How am I going to break this bad news to the kids?!?!
Al Gore is wrong?!?!
What will the school board do?
Hopefully, the school board will disincorporate and allow actual education to take place under parental guidance. After Al Gore invented the Internet, it seems the only reasonable solution!
At least Al and friends will make billions in carbon credit trading. Imagine if no one could prove global warming was man-made. Maybe they could do trading of solar ray credits instead?