Posted on 02/10/2007 6:38:21 PM PST by blam
Cosmic rays blamed for global warming
By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 1:08am GMT 11/02/2007
Man-made climate change may be happening at a far slower rate than has been claimed, according to controversial new research.
Scientists say that cosmic rays from outer space play a far greater role in changing the Earth's climate than global warming experts previously thought.
In a book, to be published this week, they claim that fluctuations in the number of cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere directly alter the amount of cloud covering the planet.
High levels of cloud cover blankets the Earth and reflects radiated heat from the Sun back out into space, causing the planet to cool.
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.
This, he says, is responsible for much of the global warming we are experiencing.
He claims carbon dioxide emissions due to human activity are having a smaller impact on climate change than scientists think. If he is correct, it could mean that mankind has more time to reduce our effect on the climate.
The controversial theory comes one week after 2,500 scientists who make up the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change published their fourth report stating that human carbon dioxide emissions would cause temperature rises of up to 4.5 C by the end of the century.
Mr Svensmark claims that the calculations used to make this prediction largely overlooked the effect of cosmic rays on cloud cover and the temperature rise due to human activity may be much smaller.
He said: "It was long thought that clouds were caused by climate change, but now we see that climate change is driven by clouds.
"This has not been taken into account in the models used to work out the effect carbon dioxide has had.
"We may see CO2 is responsible for much less warming than we thought and if this is the case the predictions of warming due to human activity will need to be adjusted."
Mr Svensmark last week published the first experimental evidence from five years' research on the influence that cosmic rays have on cloud production in the Proceedings of the Royal Society Journal A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. This week he will also publish a fuller account of his work in a book entitled The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change.
A team of more than 60 scientists from around the world are preparing to conduct a large-scale experiment using a particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland, to replicate the effect of cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere.
They hope this will prove whether this deep space radiation is responsible for changing cloud cover. If so, it could force climate scientists to re-evaluate their ideas about how global warming occurs.
Mr Svensmark's results show that the rays produce electrically charged particles when they hit the atmosphere. He said: "These particles attract water molecules from the air and cause them to clump together until they condense into clouds."
Mr Svensmark claims that the number of cosmic rays hitting the Earth changes with the magnetic activity around the Sun. During high periods of activity, fewer cosmic rays hit the Earth and so there are less clouds formed, resulting in warming.
Low activity causes more clouds and cools the Earth.
He said: "Evidence from ice cores show this happening long into the past. We have the highest solar activity we have had in at least 1,000 years.
"Humans are having an effect on climate change, but by not including the cosmic ray effect in models it means the results are inaccurate.The size of man's impact may be much smaller and so the man-made change is happening slower than predicted."
Some climate change experts have dismissed the claims as "tenuous".
Giles Harrison, a cloud specialist at Reading University said that he had carried out research on cosmic rays and their effect on clouds, but believed the impact on climate is much smaller than Mr Svensmark claims.
Mr Harrison said: "I have been looking at cloud data going back 50 years over the UK and found there was a small relationship with cosmic rays. It looks like it creates some additional variability in a natural climate system but this is small."
But there is a growing number of scientists who believe that the effect may be genuine.
Among them is Prof Bob Bingham, a clouds expert from the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils in Rutherford.
He said: "It is a relatively new idea, but there is some evidence there for this effect on clouds
Don't forget the grant money
It's only fair that if they can assume that warming is caused by CO2 then we can assume that increases in living standard can be attributed to warming.
That $25 million is REAL safe.
ping 4 referance
That is what they say. Mars is going through global warming and the ice at the poles is melting.
Has to be us because it does not occur naturally according to the scientists.
Go figure huh?
This would be a good time for Bush to start a massive Fusion Power Tech Development Project.
My SUV makes cosmic rays? Who knew?!
But seriously...
It would be interesting to see if any of the known solar cycles, especially those that coincide with the Earth's temperature cycles, also cause variations in solar cosmic ray production. (We know that these cycles involve changes in the EM output of the sun, but what about particles?)
Doggone! Wouldn't you know it? I just transferred all my holdings into carbon credits.
No, they tested the PATCH sewn on after the church fire in the 1500s. Another satanic ploy, doesn't work. The totality of the evidence is perfectly clear, that's the face of the JUDGE that will judge YOU on JUDGEMENT DAY, on the shroud of turin.
Right now, we do. The amount of cosmic rays reaching the atmosphere decreases when the magnetic field of the sun increases. It just so happens that in the last 50-100 years, the magnetic field of the sun has DOUBLED. Soooo--global warming.
Yup---that's pretty much it.
It would be interesting to see if any of the known solar cycles, especially those that coincide with the Earth's temperature cycles, also cause variations in solar cosmic ray production.
Carbon 14 & Beryllium 10 isotopes are generated in the atmosphere through nuclear interaction with cosmic rays in the atmosphere. Both show cycles in concentration in sync with solar cycles.
More directly the geomagnetic field varies with the solar cycle as it is modulated by the sun's magnetic field.
On top of that neutron counts vary with the solar cycle, as does the lower cloud levels.
Cosmic Rays & Climate
http://www.sciencebits.com/CosmicRaysClimate:
Clouds have been observed from space since the beginning of the 1980's. By the mid 1990's, enough cloud data accumulated to provide empirical evidence for a solar/cloud-cover link. Without the satellite data, it hard or probably impossible to get statistically meaningful results because of the large systematic errors plaguing ground based observations. Using the satellite data, Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen has shown that cloud cover varies in sync with the variable cosmic ray flux reaching the Earth. Over the relevant time scale, the largest variations arise from the 11-yr solar cycle, and indeed, this cloud cover seemed to follow the cycle and a half of cosmic ray flux modulation. Later, Henrik Svensmark and his colleague Nigel Marsh, have shown that the correlation is primarily with low altitude cloud cover. This can be seen in fig. 3.
Figure 3: The correlation between cosmic ray flux (orange) as measured in Neutron count monitors in low magnetic latitudes, and the low altitude cloud cover (blue) using ISCCP satellite data set, following Marsh & Svensmark, 2003.
The solar-activity – cosmic-ray-flux – cloud-cover correlation is quite apparent.
More evidence in support of the most important variable of temperature anomaly.
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Cosmic Rays
The chemistry of different layers of the atmosphere (Co2, O2, o3, N, Chloroflourocarbons, etc.)
The Sun
Variations in Earth's Orbit
Variations in the Jet Stream
Variations in the Earth's gravity
The Moon's effect on the tides and deformation of the Earth's crust
How the Core interacts with the mantle and the interaction with the Crust
The chemistry of the world's oceans
The variations of the various ocean currents (Antarctic Circumpolar Current, Atlantic North Equatorial Current, North Atlantic Deep Water etc.)
The natural carbon cycle
Effects of volcanos on the atmosphere
When you add the magnetic pole changes to the Milankovitch Cycles, to the sun's output changing, to the sunspot cycles, and toss in cosmic rays, you get one complicated model. I hope they took all this in.
Maybe they can also explain the warming on Mars, Pluto and Triton, one of Neptunes moons.
I guess climate modeling isn't as simple as it seems, and it will likely be along long time before we have the capability or the understanding to make a real model.
Correlation does not equal causation, one of the first mistakes junior scientists make.
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