Research published in the Institute of Physics' Environmental Research Letters shows how a team from Lancaster and Durham Universities sought a means to prove the correlation between the ionizing cosmic rays and the production of low cloud cover.
Previous research had shown a possible correlation, using the results of the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project, and this had been used to propose that global warming was due to cosmic rays.
The new research shows that change in cloud cover over the Earth does not correlate to changes in cosmic ray intensity. Neither does it show increases and decreases during the sporadic bursts and decreases in the cosmic ray intensity which occur regularly.
One such very large burst caused the magnetic storm which blacked out the power in Quebec in 1989.
Professors Sloan from Lancaster University and Wolfendale from Durham University write, "No evidence could be found of changes in the low cloud cover from known changes in the cosmic ray ionization rate."
New research has dealt a blow to the skeptics who argue that climate change is all due to cosmic rays rather than to man-made greenhouse gases. The new evidence shows no reliable connection between the cosmic ray intensity and cloud cover.
It also disputes suggestions that global warming is due to a decrease in cosmic rays over the last hundred years that would cause a decrease in the production of low clouds allowing more heat from the sun to warm the Earth and cause global warming.
Comments
It's interesting to see there's a partial effect.
It would be intellectually dishonest to not concede a partial effect. That's in defiance of physics.
Likewise
New research has dealt a blow to the skeptics who argue that climate change is all due to cosmic rays rather than to man-made greenhouse gases.
is something of a straw man. I can find maybe 5 people who are dumb enough to argue that global warming is all due to cosmic rays but they don't know what they are talking about. In my lifetime alone the population has doubled and so has the emissions from them and to feed them so there will be warming due to that.
Hank Campbell | 04/09/08 | 22:12 PM
Well, that's what I thought as well, they were propping up a straw man. The thought that cosmic rays could even play a 25 percent role in cloud formation might explain a great deal.
With the prospect of the sun's avg activity slumping in mid-century (yes, this is being seriously discussed by a great man solar scientists -- not just Russians) the role of cosmic rays in cloud formation may well be seen to be more important.
With that I'm anticipating that the IPCC gig is up. They are defending Kyoto as hard as they can but the targets are unattainable and the Arctic isn't melting due to air temperatures going up by 0.7 c, it's melting due to soot deposition!
And Al Gore's bet the farm on this one. Heh.
Lee Rodgers | 04/10/08 | 08:18 AM
It's interesting to see there's a partial effect.
"...Over the course of one of the Sun's natural 11-year cycles, there was a weak correlation between cosmic ray intensity and cloud cover - but cosmic ray variability could at the very most explain only a quarter of the changes in cloudiness."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7327393.stm