Just a short note this week to advise you of a new development in the field of atmospheric physics that, apart from an op-ed piece in the Financial Post by global warming maven Lawrence Solomon, probably won’t make it into the mainstream media at all.
Two years ago, I wrote the following in a draft paper (apologies for the lengthy citation, but as the climate change debate devolves upon actual science as opposed to opinion and invective, some explanation is required):
Apart
from the obvious impact on climate of increased or decreased solar activity
(i.e. more, or less, solar energy striking the Earth) the difficulty with the
thesis that solar activity drives atmospheric temperatures was that no one had
ever demonstrated experimentally a mechanism whereby this might be
accomplished. That changed with the
publication in 2006 of the results of a series of experiments at the Danish
National Space Centre by physicist Henrik Svensmark and his team. Noting that colder climatic periods tended to
correspond with low sunspot numbers (an indicator of solar activity, and the
key observational metric employed in measuring solar activity cycles) Svensmark
suggested that the Sun might exert an influence over terrestrial temperatures
through the influence of solar activity on the intensity of galactic cosmic
rays (GCR) striking the Earth.
Figure 10 - Comparison of tropospheric
temperature with cosmic radiation flux
Geological
evidence of periods of higher and lower cosmic ray bombardment – for example,
the presence or absence of the Beryllium-10 isotope in rocks picked up by
icebergs and deposited on the ocean floor (sometimes as far south as Africa) –
suggested prima facie that periods of intense cosmic radiation corresponded
with periods of intense cold.
Svensmark
proposed that heavy cosmic rays – muons – are a key factor in the nucleation of
low clouds because they are more likely to penetrate further into the
atmosphere. During periods of intense
solar activity, the solar wind pushes these particles away from Earth,
inhibiting low cloud formation, leading to lower terrestrial albedo
(reflectivity) and, therefore, greater warming.
During periods of low solar activity, however, the solar wind is less
intense, meaning that more cosmic rays impact the atmosphere, leading to higher
rates of low cloud formation, resulting in a higher albedo (greater
reflectivity), and therefore a cooler planet.
Svensmark
and his team tested this idea in 2005 and obtained experimental results
corroborating their hypothesis. Their
work has since been buttressed by proposals offered by other elements of the
space sciences, including – but not limited to – a significant correlation
between prehistoric cooling periods and the passage of the Solar System through
the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy. According to a theory posited by Nir
Shaviv, an astrophysicist at the Racah Institute of Physics in Jerusalem, the
four major coolings that occurred during the half-billion-year span of animal
life on Earth can be explained by the passage of the Solar System through the
galactic spiral arms on its quarter-billion-year gavotte around the galaxy’s
core. The cycle of passage through the
spiral arms – which occurs roughly every 142 million years – may be augmented
by the Solar system’s oscillation above and below the galactic plane, which
further alters the exposure of the Earth to varying intensities of cosmic
radiation.
Europe’s Centre d’Etudes pour la Recherche
Nucleaire (CERN) is presently engaged in a much larger scale validation of
Svensmark’s thesis called CLOUD09, testing a physical mechanism - proposed by Jasper Kirkby of the Center -
whereby GCR may influence cloud nucleation, and providing archaeological data
(in the form of radioisotopes) supporting this extension of the Svensmark
thesis. Kirkby, citing Eichler et al.,
notes a 30-year time lag between GCR activity and temperature response, which
corresponds to oceanic cycles, e.g. the Pacific and Atlantic oscillations
(indicating a probable role for oceanic heat retention and release in
influencing climate). It is also
interesting that both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age are
visible in the Siberian temperature record from Eichler’s work, and are clearly
correlated with the presence or absence of measured isotope ratios.
The mechanism postulated by Kirkby of course
has yet to be demonstrated conclusively; one of the chief goals of the CLOUD09
experiment is to determine whether the proposed nucleation pathway actually
works. However, by positing a causal
mechanism and designing an experiment to test it, the GCR theorists - unlike
the proponents of the AGW thesis - are following an empirical approach to
obtaining corroboration of their hypothesis.
Well, that empirical approach has paid
off. Last week, without fanfare (indeed,
with the opposite of fanfare; prior to publishing the results of the
CLOUD experiments, CERN’s management ordered CERN staff “to present the results
clearly but not interpret them”), CERN published a brief statement outlining
the results of the experiments, which have been underway for more than a
decade. The results were published in a
truncated fashion in Nature magazine (see here: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110824/full/news.2011.504.html)
using very tentative language, as might be expected from an actual scientist
concerned about overreaching - but the fact that they were published at all is
something of a victory. And, more to the
point, the results constitute actual empirical evidence for a link between
cosmic radiation and climate.
How convincing is the correlation? Just take a look at the CERN graph that Nature declined to publish:
From
Solomon:
The
graph above does not appear in the print edition of Nature, but it does make
showing at the back of the online supplementary material. The graph shows how
cosmic rays promote the formation of clusters of molecules that can then grow
and seed clouds in the real atmosphere.
At
03.45 am in a CLOUD experiment in Geneva, ultraviolet light began to create
molecules in the cloud chamber, which approximates the air in the atmosphere.
Jn above shows the neutral phase of the experiment, during which the CLOUD
experiment electrically removed ions and molecular clusters. At 4.33 am, the
CLOUD experiment stopped the electrical removal and allowed natural glalactic
cosmic rays (Jgcr) to enter the chamber through the roof of the Geneva
building, leading to a faster rate of cluster buildup.
Then,
at 4.58 am, CLOUD also beamed charged
pion particles (Jch) from an accelerator (these are equivalent to cosmic rays),
the rate of cluster production took off, convincingly demonstrating the effect
of cosmic rays on cluster growth.
In
the graph above, the different colours show the different diameters of the
clusters in nanometres. The blue clusters, which are smallest, grew fastest;
the black ones, which are the largest, took the most time.
The graph makes it blatantly obvious that
charged pions, equivalent to GCRs, are the most potent nucleating factor in
cloud formation. Why is this
important? Well, that’s simple. The IPCC completely rejects any significant
role for the Sun in radiative forcing (RF) of climate, arguing that “natural
forcings”, i.e. solar and volcanic effects, “are both very small compared to
the differences in radiative forcing estimated to have resulted from human
activities” (AR 4, WG1, Chapter 2, 137), and insisting that “increases in RF
are clearly dominated by CO2.” (AR 4, WG1, Chapter 2, 208). The global circulation models (“climate
models”) used to make the (failed) predictions of increased temperatures in
response to increased CO2 concentrations (there is no statistically significant
correlation between atmospheric CO2 and average global temperature over any
time frame, recent or historical) cannot and do not model clouds - a crucial
flaw, as clouds affect terrestrial albedo, and a mere 2% variance in cloud
cover could explain all of the temperature change experienced over the past
century. Kirkby and his colleagues,
however, have found that GCR nucleation may account for “almost half” of cloud
formation, indicating that “natural forcings” may indeed be the determining
factor in climate change; and that they are in any case far more important a
player in climate physics than atmospheric CO2 (and logically, therefore, more
important than the 3% of atmospheric CO2 that is attributable to human
activities).
There’s some circumstantial evidence for this,
by the way; while CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have increased steadily
over the past decade, solar activity has dropped off markedly, with sunspot
cycle 24 being extremely weak.
Meanwhile, average global temperature has declined over the past
decade. Correlation may not be
causation, but when you’re looking for a causal relationship, you generally
start by looking at phenomena that correlate, like solar activity and
temperature, rather than those which - like carbon dioxide and temperature, for
example - show no statistically significant correlation whatsoever. Come to think of it, maybe the decline in
solar activity over the past decade is the reason why, contrary to the
increasingly shrill babblings of the mavens of conventional wisdom, the Earth
hasn’t been getting warmer, the Arctic won’t be ice-free any time soon, Greenland isn’t melting unusually, sea level rise is
decelerating instead of accelerating, and we’re not all drowning in the gore - no pun intended - of the inevitable climate-change-driven bloodbath.
(For those interested in the non-link
between climate and conflict, another of the favourite hobby-horses of the 'climate disruption' crowd, see http://thegwpf.org/the-climate-record/3274-bruno-tertrais-the-climate-wars-myth.html).
To put it more simply, if - as the CLOUD
experiment suggests - the Kirkby-Svensmark thesis is correct, then all of the
policies aimed at “stopping climate change” by controlling GHG emissions are
useless and grotesquely costly nonsense.
This has not, of course, stopped governments from pursuing them. Yet, anyway.
While it’s nice to see something I tried to
highlight two years ago as being of potential interest to policymakers come to
fruition, it would be nicer to see governments base their policy on actual
empirical science as opposed to the shriekings of rent-seeking partisans. Of course, doing so would risk being subjected
to their invective, which is becoming ever more extreme as support for their
position continues to be eroded by empirical science. Just as “global warming” became “climate
change” and then “global climate disruption” through the magic of
etymorphology, “skeptic” has transmogrified into “denier” - and now, courtesy
former VP Al Gore - into “racist.” [http://dailycaller.com/2011/08/28/gore-global-warming-skeptics-are-this-generations-racists/#ixzz1WQIX3SR0].
That’s sort of a funny position to take, coming
from the side that wants to hold Nuremberg trials for skeptics. But I guess that’s just how Nobel Peace Prize
winners “settle” scientific debates.
Cheers,
//Don//
Notes:
Here’s
Solomon’s piece:
…and
the Kirkby, et al., article in Nature:
…and
the CERN graph that Nature left out of its piece:
