Cosmic Rays and Global Warming 548
Overly Critical Guy writes "The former editor of New Scientist has written an article in the TimesOnline suggesting that cosmic rays may affect global climate. The author criticizes the UN's recent global warming report, noting several underreported trends it doesn't account for, such as increasing sea-ice in the Southern Ocean. He describes an experiment by Henrik Svensmark showing a relation between atmospheric cloudiness and atomic particles coming in from exploded stars. In the basement of the Danish National Space Center in 2005, Svensmark's team showed that electrons from cosmic rays caused cloud condensation. Svensmark's scenario apparently predicts several unexplained temperature trends from the warmer trend of the 20th century to the temporary drop in the 1970s, attributed to changes in the sun's magnetic field affecting the amount of cosmic rays entering the atmosphere."
Re:cult of global warming (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed! The fact that men like Galileo exist is proof that every lone nutter with a theory is utterly correct!
Re:cult of global warming (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Incorrect. (Score:2, Insightful)
Here we go again.... (Score:4, Insightful)
All those crazy "climate change has nothing to do with carbon levels" crackpots are going to have a field day. And all the "Yes it bloody well does!!" crackpots are going to get all defensive and who's going to win in the end? The trolls. That's who. The trolls.
In all this I'm reminded of a mock argument I heard on the radio between a geologist and a biologist about the source of oxygen in out atmosphere. Both "experts" were convinced that it was largely due to some effect described in their field of study and dismissed the other.
What I'm trying to say is that there is solid evidence that carbon in the atmosphere can trap heat. If we now discover that cosmic rays are warming the planet, that doesn't exclude the effect of carbon as an insulator from the equation. Now if both theories are true we have a serious problem. Cosmic radiation is warming the planet at a higher rate and carbon is preventing it from cooling.
What do we do about it?
1. Reduce carbon emissions.
2. reduce Earth's exposure to cosmic rays
If reducing cosmic rays can be done along the lines of Mr. Burns blocking out the sun with his big dish, I'm all for it, as long as I'm the one who owns the dish. Otherwise, with sincere apologies all the "I'm gonna fcsking well drive my big Ford SUV 2 blocks to buy my cheese in a can" crackpots, but it has to be option 1.
My own bias (Score:5, Insightful)
When I read something that says global warming is wrong, I want to say yes! Brilliant! When something confirms it, I can't help but think 'alarmist fear-mongering can't-think-for-themeselves idiots.' But at the same time I know those thoughts are ridiculous, and that I don't really have the understanding of all the parameters to make an intelligent decision.
I guess that's what happens when you politicize a scientific topic. Or maybe I'm just an optimist.
Re:Incorrect. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me break it down for you.
Calder offers local cooling as an example of how anthropogenic climate change scientists are wrong.
However, anthropogenic climate change scientists predict local cooling in their models.
Therefore, one of Calder's 'proofs' that anthropogenic climate change scientists are incorrect is faulty.
Please note that I am not commenting on Cosmic Ray/Cloud formation experiment, until it is indepentantly reproduced (CERN is currently doing this [web.cern.ch]).
Re:USE=brain (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:USE=brain (Score:3, Insightful)
-Albert Einstein
We only have one earth (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My own bias (Score:3, Insightful)
That's why we really need to get this whole issue out of politicking and into the hands of experts. General population - politicians and /. readers included - simply does not have enough understanding of the subject for any purposeful rationalising on it.
You're a nerd. Go detail-oriented. (Score:4, Insightful)
Only some of the following statements are true or even supported by evidence:
1. The average temperature of the Earth is going up.
2. It is likely to continue doing so.
3. The largest cause is CO2.
4. The rise in CO2 levels is human-caused.
5. The results will be catastropic.
6. The result will be a mass extinction event.
7. The result will wipe out the human race.
8. This is proof that our economic system is evil.
9. We must destroy or replace the foundation of our economic system.
10. The planet is in jeopardy.
11. The Kyoto accord should be ratified.
It's logically consistent to snort with contempt at 8 and 10 while accepting 1-4 pending further data.
What frosts me (sorry) is that the policy implications don't have to be this politicized. We need a malaria vaccine anyway, regardless of whether the mosquito habitat moves north. We benefit a zillion ways from replacing coal burning by almost anything else. Fuel efficient vehicles are great just in terms of national security alone. Bangladesh is in trouble no matter what we do about future CO2 emissions and we need to make decisions about that (seawall? Resettle? (WHERE?!)).
>I don't really have the understanding of all the parameters to make an intelligent decision.
No one person does, but judicious application of "How do you know?" will cut through a lot of garbage and allow intelligent decision though not certainty.
Re:Pretty much unknown how big an effect ths has (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a graph showing the effect they think various potential influences had, listed along with our scientific understanding of them. Solar influence was at the far right of the scale of our scientific understanding (at the lowest level), and was listed as having a comparatively small heating effect. Greenhouse gases were listed to the far left, and had a comparatively very high heating effect.
You can read this as "we're not sure what effect solar radiation has, but we're damn sure greenhouse gases have a large heating effect".
If they haven't taken it into account to the same degree as other influences it's because they don't fully understand it and don't have much to report, not because there's some conspiracy.
Just because we don't understand dark matter doesn't mean we don't know the direction a ball will fall in when we release it; solar radiation may or may not be having a impact, but what we do know is that the Earth is warming and humans are having a huge warming influence.
Does the editor of New Scientist might have a clue what he's talking about? Have you read New Scientist recently? Every time I see a copy in a waiting room I learn that there may be black holes everywhere, or how some scientist has come up with a theory of everything, or how the entire field of physics has just been turned on its head.
Most of the time it's just sensationalist rubbish to get sales. "A 1000 year old problem solved?" "Is N-theory the successor to M-theory?" "Are there millions of galaxies within every atom?" "Has time travel been achieved?". Then, in the list of extras "Are you more like Einstein or Newton? Take our test", etc, etc.
With all the recent reports of oil companies paying people to discredit the IPCC should we trust the editor of a magazine? Or a report compiled based on the cumulative efforts of thousands of climatologists?
Pedantry (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a superb correlation, the curves track each other amazingly.
By itself that doesn't prove anything. Given only the correlation, you couldn't rule out that temperature increases cause increased CO2 levels. Which is plausible, since organic decay releases CO2 and goes faster when it's warmer (if you doubt that, unplug your refrigerator and see what happens).
Given only the correlation, you couldn't rule out that some other factor causes both warming and CO2 increases.
The reason to think it's causal is that there's a well-demonstrated mechanism and that the details match up.
>Florida may be the first state in the union to give fish the right to vote.
Hey, we already know all about Florida elections.
Red herrings (Score:2, Insightful)
BULLSHIT! Peer-review is an integral part of science, without it everything deteriorates into "he said - she said" politics.
Also the red herrings in TFA have been around for years and have been debunked ad-nauseam.
For all those wondering about attribution please look at the latest IPCC SPM, it has a diagram that has been peer-reviewed and agreed apon by ALL the national science bodies on the planet. It includes such things a volcanos, solar variation, ect, most impotantly it also includes error bars. The reason this guy has picked on clouds as other so called "skeptics" have done before him is because NOBODY has a good model of cloud formation.
"The short conclusion is, we have NO CLUE how the climate really works..."
The alternative conclusion is that you were deliberately aiming for the +Funny mod that you recieved.
What's missing in the discussion is science... (Score:5, Insightful)
What is missing from this forum so far, and from the linked essay, is any link to the actual scientific paper in question. If we are to judge how significant this paper is, and what it means, shouldn't we be taking a look at it?
The whole drama of hidden agendas, who profits from what, the desires of individuals to get attention and upset people of one political stripe or another, are in the end irrelevant to the questions of "Is human activity affecting the climate" and "What, if anything, do we need to be doing to protect our existence". The drama affects what we end up ACTUALLY doing, so may be very significant to the outcome of the next few hundred years of human history. But our individual responsibilities are to understand the science as best we can, even if we are not climatologists.
Richard Feynmann used to bemoan the fact that reporters asking him about his work constantly tried to "dumb it down" so the average reader could understand it. His point was that, first of all, all the important stuff got lost in this process, and second, even if the "average" person couldn't follow it, there are huge numbers of scientists, engineers, and others who would be able to grasp the main points if they were actually presented.
Given the nature of this forum (we're nerds, right?) I'd love to see the actual science... if only Mr. Calder, or any of the other writers on this subject would deign to show us the actual papers, rather than giving us their predigested interpretations.
Re:cult of global warming (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:FSM link (Score:3, Insightful)
Just think how tired a meme Christianity is, then, and you're beginning to get at least one of the points of the whole FSM thing.
Re:Calling Bullshit on this. (Score:2, Insightful)
"Sometimes even papers in highly respected journals fall into the same trap. Friis-Christensen and Lassen (Science, 1991) was a notorious paper that purported to link solar-cycle length (i.e. the time between sucessive sunspot maxima or minima) to surface temperatures that is still quoted widely." [realclimate.org]
"Notorious" paper?! Why do the realclimate bloggers engage in this name-calling?
Science is supposed to investigate the unknown in ambitious ways. Sometimes it turns out that your findings are wrong or misleading. But that should be expected to happen now and then. It's all part of our gradual increase in understanding. Of course you try to be as correct and complete as is practical, but if we only report findings that we think we understand very well, then our experiments will take ages to complete, and we'll have very little to report anyway.
Better to be a little daring. And if something is wrong, it will surely be corrected sooner or later. That's part of the reason to have a scientific community anyway.
Furthermore, they should welcome attempts to challenge or refine climate models. In physics, we spend a lot of time testing relativity, quantum mechanics, cosmological models, etc. to see if we can get them to fail. Nobody says "Oh, you can't trust him! He's a dark energy denier!"
It is important to fight fraud, but this is best done by trying to reproduce results, not by casting aspersions on someone's character or motivations.
Here we go again (Score:4, Insightful)
Flat out, that's not what the science tells us. What science tells us is that climate is a complicated system with many inputs and feedbacks that we only crudely understand. Even so, we understand enough to know one significant input right now is anthropogenic CO2 emissions. How significant? That is the multi-trillion dollar question.
See, the question is not yes/no. Our choices are not "We're destroying all life! Dismantle capitalism before it's too late!" vs "we're doing nothing! Burn more coal!" What we're really looking at here is a serious study of how much we're influencing the climate we depend on (climate scientists agree enough to be worried). Following from that, we seriously need to look at the risks and how best to manage them without tanking our economy.
We have many choices and a lot will depend on the relative significance of our contributions to climate change. We NEED studies like this, not as a tool to discredit global warming, but as a way to refine our understanding to better understand what WE'RE doing, so we can more effectively do the cost/benefit analysis of various scenarios. Unfortunately, reasonable voices are being drowned out by trolls in the warring camps.
Are You a Climate Scientist? (Score:5, Insightful)
In any scientific discipline, and particularly complex ones like climate science, it is easy to select evidence (even honestly) to make almost anything appear to be the right explanation. The reason the scientific process works is because it doesn't just let each theory get up and give a stump speech but demands to know how it can answer tough questions and fit consistently with our other knowledge. The question is not, 'would cosmic rays make for a good hypothesis on the basis of our inexpert knowledge,' but 'given the vast body of knowledge scientists have is it plausible that cosmic rays explain climate variation.'
Thankfully, climate scientists have not only already addressed this question but even written lay explanations [realclimate.org] about it. You can find plenty of other discussions about cosmic rays over on realclimate.org [realclimate.org] and they point out that there is considerable reason to discredit the cosmic ray explanation for global warming.
What disgusts me about this whole buisness is that whenever something like this comes up a bunch of people who can't be bothered to actually read the journal articles but think they are entitled to second guess the people who have pipe up and complain about how global warming is just a dogma. Like any topic you have a choice. You can either choose to learn enough about the subject to intelligently weigh the evidence, which in this case would mean keeping up with the actual scientific papers not just media summaries, or you can count on experts to analyze that evidence for you and reach your conclusion on the authority of those experts.
Look it's simple really. Either you can read the scientific papers yourself and argue with the other experts about the evidence or you can argue about which experts are more credible. If you are debating the matter here you are doing the later. So do you really expect anyone to believe that the handful of climate change deniers are more credible than all experts who find the evidence for global warming compelling? If the positions were reversed and it was the deniers who were claiming it was global warming would you believe?
The worst part of all this is that these very idiots who claim that climate science is just some dogma pose a real threat to important dissent in the climate science community. While we may be sure of the vague outlines of human caused climate change there are many issues that still require vigorous scientific debate but if this debate is jumped on by skeptics as proof that global warming is a fraud then responsible scientists will be more reluctant to publicly express such disagreements.
Re:cult of global warming (Score:5, Insightful)
So sure is it logically possible this guy is right and the rest of the scientific establishment wrong? Sure, though there are some quite compelling [realclimate.org] reasons not to think cosmic rays explain climate change. It's also logically possible that Xenu really did bring 50 billion aliens to earth on DC-10s and kill them with hydrogen bombs. Do you think we should plan for the future based on mainstream science or the threat from the thetans?
The question is how likely is this guy to be right. Now if you happen to be a climate scientists you should evaluate that based only on the merits of the idea, i.e., the evidence for it. If you don't read climate science papers and keep up with the subject it is just idiotic for you to evaluate the merits of his theory. Instead you have to compare the credibility of the vast vast majority of the scientific establishment and a few dissenters. There isn't much of a contest here.
Let's put the issue a little bit more concretely. Suppose some guy comes up to you with a proposal to mine gold based on a new process for leaching it from rocks other companies are ignoring. He wants you to invest money in his company but when you consult experts in chemistry, mining and geology they all tell you he is a complete quack and his idea is completely bogus. Would you invest?
Re:Galileo Galilei (Score:1, Insightful)
What is so dangerous about religion is that even today, many states reserve a place for it in their laws and politics.
Religion should be only for the private life of citizens who can use it to their own advantage. Any referral to religion in laws, legal procedures, day-to-day politics etc is insane and should be banned.
Funny (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny, you just described dogmatic believers in communism/socialism/liberalism/conservatism/liber
I know, I know, don't feed the trolls...
Re:Funny (Score:2, Insightful)
When it is "written in the bible" is is taken to be true, disregarding the fact that the bible is just an old book like any old book. When an old scientific book mentions that the earth is the center of the universe, a new article may just prove that this is false and we be done with it. But with religious books this is different, because many followers of a religion (not only the very fanatic ones) take everything written in their book of religion as the truth even when evidence is put up against it.
Re:cult of global warming (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a thought: if someone presents a seemingly valid hypothesis and you aren't expert enough to assert if it is false or not, you either attempt to gain more knowledge or you reserve judgment. I know the appeal to authority thing is always in vogue, but that is not the rational reaction. Science is always wrecking accepted viewpoints. Very often those "few dissenters" prove the established majority wrong. You shouldn't dismiss arguments solely on the basis of current popularity. Climate change is still very much a science undergoing constant changes and revisions. It is very possible that many of our current theories are false. I'm not saying he's right or anything, but that is horrible, horrible argument you're making.
You always, always, evaluate the merits of the theory. If you can't and are incapable of making that judgement, then you shouldn't.
Re:Red herrings (Score:4, Insightful)
Consensus is the process of finding a bunch of people who will attest to the same thing, while peer review is a process of criticism for an unproven idea.
Re:cult of global warming (Score:5, Insightful)
No, Galileo is proof that a lone nutter with enough theories can fluke it occasionally. After all, most of Galileo's crank theories have been quietly forgotten, and what Galileo got into trouble with the authorities for wasn't so much for resurrecting the (then) long discredited heliocentric theory, but rather for suggesting that anybody who disagreed (up to and including the Pope) was a simpleton.
So what we really need to learn from Galileo is that just because a theory is espoused by a lone nutter doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong.
Re:Funny (Score:2, Insightful)
I think what you are describing is the definition of politics! The scientific method is demonstratably the best tool known to man for weeding dogma and politics out of any predictive theory. As for who's name is remebered, often that's just politics.
Re:cult of global warming (Score:5, Insightful)
From the blog:
Re:cult of global warming (Score:1, Insightful)
1.) The world appears to be getting warmer with many computer models showing an increase in global temperature.
2.) Tying a trend to warmer temperatures based on older data from the early 1900's is suspect at best. Good, reliable, accurate scientific equipment that measures the temperature wasn't readily available until recently (late 1900's).
3.) Apparently, the Earth magnetic field has decreased by 10% in the last 150 years (source: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/earth_magne
4.) Jupitor is experiencing the same climate change that Earth is. (source: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060504_red_
5.) Mars is experiencing the same climate change that Earth is. (source: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem
How can you explain the recent same climate changes on different planets? I doubt it's all those cars being driven there.
6.) The United Nations found that there is more Methane produced from livestock, which raises global temperature greater than CO2 by a factor of approx. 20, than any human caused CO2 combined (source: http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000448/
Is it possible that the warmer temperatures that Earth is experiencing are caused by cyclical natural phenomena? What about glaciers in Greenland that have been shrinking for 100 years (source: http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/08/21/06082119
One last thing. Lets say we all buy into the fact that we're causing the climate change through CO2. Regardless of what actions we (America) take, China will still produce more CO2 than anyone because they want to get rich. There's no stopping it folks.
Credentials (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, you are slightly better off getting your science information from an author with doctorate in medicine [wikipedia.org] than politian with a bachelor of arts degree [wikipedia.org] (though in fairness, he did invent the internet).
Re:Here we go again (Score:5, Insightful)
Attacking the idea that multinational corporations should be given the legal status of human beings, but not the responsibilities of human beings, does not constitute an attack on capitalism. Many people are faulting the left for a position it doesn't generally have (with a few outright communist examples) because, let's face it, the message "we oppose them because they want shareholders to be held responsible for what they profit from" isn't going to sell as well as "they hate capitalism!" This is about as cogent a criticism as saying that Republican Senators who want to debate the Iraq war are trying to help the terrorists. It's an attempt to front-load the argument with the assumption that the criticis of corporate unaccountability actually want to attack capitalism itself.
Re:cult of global warming (Score:2, Insightful)
I subscribe to the "Most Galileos are clowns" theory, which hypothesizes that for every present-day Galileo in the world who truly does have a revolutionary idea suppressed by the status quo, there are thousands of clowns who *think* they are like Galileo but wouldn't know the real scientific process if it dropped like a cannon ball on top of their head from the height of the Tower of Pisa.
I call a related assertion the "Galinthropic Principle". It is founded on the idea that *every* so-called modern Galileo can't actually be one, because a universe probably can't exist in which every whacked-out idea proposed by all of them is simultaneously correct.
Re:Incorrect. (Score:3, Insightful)
2. Mann's study (the one whose data analysis has been contested) is not the only reconstruction which leads to a hockey stick curve. In fact, reconstructions do, to one extent or another, and many of them use quite different methods of analysis.
3. Paleoproxies are indeed correlated with temperature, and there is a large literature on this subject.
4. You don't need a "hockey stick" reconstruction at all to see that there has been global warming; you can look at the instrumental record.
Re:Pedantry (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pedantry (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:cult of global warming (Score:3, Insightful)
You make a good point that correlation != causation, which is a point drilled into just about every student of climatology at some point (at least this was true for me). However, in this case the belief of global warming has far less to do with statistics than with predictive modeling. To first order, the appealing logic behind global warming goes something like this:
Fact 1: CO2 is a good absorber of IR radiation
Fact 2: We have been increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere
Fact 3: Historical records compiled from ice cores, tree rings, and coral samples from all over the world indicate a correlation between CO2 and temperature
Deductive hypothesis: To first order, increasing CO2 will increase temperature
Caveat: Climate is complicated and non-linear with lots of feedbacks, best to create some computer models to study it
Now fast forward many years and several iterations of climate models and research into feedbacks and sensitivity and still our simulations predict that average global temperature is increasing. However, this isn't really the most notable result of the models. The alarming result is that in most of the models weather patterns themselves become increasingly erratic with changes to precipitation distribution and extreme swings in local weather.
Climate science is a good deal more complicated than "I observe X and Y to be correlated, therefore if I increase X I also increase Y." Every good scientist is aware of this logical fallacy, but we're also aware it makes a good starting point for investigation, with the catch that you need to be careful to thoroughly test for causality.Real trend? (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? Any evidence to back that up? I can cite counter-examples. Lindzen, for example, has no problems getting funding (his most recent article cites 3 sources - NSF, DOE, and NASA), whereas scientists who are more cautionary are having trouble (see recent /. article). Without evidence, it's your claim that's FUD, not sober reports such as the recent IPCC.
I'm glad that you're in favor of reducing our impact on the climate regardless of your personal belief on the strengths of anthropogenic global warming, but I do recommend that you read some climatology journals and try to get first hand information. I suggest that perhaps your current source of information is quite filtered and biased.
Are you aware of biased or sensationalist coverage in the scientific community? The press has problems with accuracy, of course, but I'm not aware of any problems in the scientific community itself. (No more than with other fields, that is. No community is perfect.)