I recall a smart Eastern European scientist pointing this out for years — that cosmic rays an related solar radiation are key drivers of cloud formation.
Poor guy was * figuratively* jumping up and down shouting trying to get the clowns at IPCC to seriously consider his work.
Can you say vindication?
Various folks have been trying to point out the connection between cosmic rays, cloud formation, and global temperature for years.
There’s a reason why the device used to detect cosmic rays is called a “cloud chamber”.
Of course, I haven’t checked with Al Gore yet, so maybe we’re all missing something.
(By the way, a (probably *the*) major factor in determing the flux of cosmic rays impinging on the earth is solar activity, which modifies the magnetosphere that partially screens the earth from those cosmic rays)
Who is that scientist?
Credit where credit is due, it was a Swedish guy named
Svensmark in his self created “cloud chamber”
His idea was that when solar activity is low (few sun spots), our sun’s magnetic field doesn’t protect the earth as much and this resulted in more cosmic rays reaching earth’s atmosphere which made more clouds.
This paper in Nature bolsters that case that it is the sun’s activity that explains global warming much more than CO2.
It was a Danish scientist, Henrik Svensmark, who posited the role of cosmic rays in cloud formation and the role of changes in solar magnetism in changing the amount of cosmic radiation hitting the earth’s atmosphere as the causal mechanism linking the sunspot cycle to global temperature. In fact, the phenomenon CERN just confirmed is called “the Svensmark effect”.
I think you may be confusing him with a Hungarian scientist, Ferenc M. Miskolczi, who also dealt a significant blow to the AGW alarmism by recalculation the solution to the differential equations governing the greenhouse effect with realistic boundary conditions (instead of the simplifying assumption of a “semi-infinite” atmosphere used since about the 1920’s and used in all models that “support” the AGW theory). His solutions agreed with observation on both Earth and Mars without any fudging, and (here’s what’s deadly to climate alarmism, albeit not to the possibility of human causation of global warming) predict that run-away greenhouse warming is impossible: the greenhouse effect is self-limiting, even without other negative feedback mechanisms.