Correlation demonstrated between cosmic rays and temperature of the stratosphere

this is really a fascinating article, and worthy of follow up and more depth. thanks for getting this posted.

That animation was an eye-opener! I take it the red symbolized temperature increases of 40°C?

I don’t see how this has anything to do with Svensmark’s theory….

Heaven forbid, someone should find evidence that the sun affects climate/weather here on earth.

Anthony, if you keep publishing articles about SCIENCE, you are going to ruin your reputation, as flat-earther. Maybe after this is investigated we should call ourselves deep-earthers.

Anthony, there have been a number of interesting press releases in the last few weeks concerning the workings of the Upper Atmosphere. I was only highlighting the two below the other day on another site.
Very interesting indeed. A coherent forcing mechanism seems just around the corner:
Earth Atomsphere “Breathing” due to UV: http://www.colorado.edu/news/r/32abc3f111047d1a5ec153cc27e63d5d.html
Also, Infrared waves due to gaseous molecule radiation from NASAs Langley research:
http://www.livescience.com/space/081216-agu-breathing-atmosphere.html
“The changes in heating that cause the breathing can also impact climate, by triggering the upper atmosphere’s “thermostat,” as study team member Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va., put it. The added UV radiation heats up the atmosphere, in turn causing gaseous molecules to radiate that heat away in the form of infrared radiation.”

Hi,
i’m not sure I really understand how these (very interesting) results corroborate Svensmar’s theory about cloud formation?
REPLY: I didn’t say it corroborated, you did, I said it provides “new hope for Svensmark’s theory” because it shows a measurable connection between cosmic rays and the upper atmosphere, something that has not been demonstrated before. The question is, what drives the change and how is it related to mesons and is the sudden stratospheric warming related to it?- Anthony

Very interesting article – thanks Anthony. So this would basically imply that Sudden Stratospheric Warmings (SSW) should be more frequent during solar minimums (since low solar flux allows an increase in the cosmic radiation recieved at Earth)
It is generally accepted that the Artic Oscillation and/or North Atlantic Oscillation tend to shift negative up to 10 to 20 days following these SSW events – i.e. in meteorological terms SSWs tend to lead to high-latitude “blocking” – patterns which tend to generate intense cold surface high pressure systems near the poles and displace them southwards into the mid-latitudes. i.e. they typically lead to strong cold outbreaks into the mid-latitudes.
This is interesting since we appear to be undergoing a significant SSW as we write…
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/temperature/10mb9065.gif

Anthony – thanks for this – its really useful to have you as a monitor of breaking science. I would love to know how this stratospheric heating ties in with UV heating and the shift of the jetstream studied by Drew Shindell at NASA – he had a paper in 2001 I think that found a correlation with UV heating, southerly shift of the jetstream and the Maunder Minimum – maybe this effect also contributed.

How is this a “renewed hope for Svensmark’s theory of cosmic rays”?
Have they found a correlation between stratospheric temp and weather in lower troposphere?

The explanation of the video featuring sudden stratospheric warming occurring in the southern hemisphere states that ‘This is the only such event recorded in the southern hemisphere (they normally occur in the northern hemisphere).’
Well, that’s pretty interesting. Wonder if that has anything to do with Antarctica’s relative ice stability as compared to the Arctic.

This article from sciencedaily which says that seasons have changed in a way not predicted by the IPCC(therefore AGW), suggests that there have been changes in atmospheric circulation that have changed the seasons. Could the change in the stratosphere cause these changes in atmospheric circulation? then in turn cause the change in global temperature? Just a taught
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090121144053.htm
“Although the cause of this seasonal shift – which has occurred over land, but not the ocean – is unclear, the researchers say the shift appears to be related, in part, to a particular pattern of winds that also has been changing over the same time period. This pattern of atmospheric circulation, known as the Northern Annular Mode, is the most important wind pattern for controlling why one winter in the Northern Hemisphere is different from another. The researchers found that the mode also is important in controlling the arrival of the seasons each year.
Whatever the cause, Stine said, current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models do not predict this phase shift in the annual temperature cycle.”

Is there a link between Earth’s magnetic field and low-latitude precipitation?
http://geology.gsapubs.org/cgi/reprint/37/1/71.pdf
“In addition to supporting the notion that variations in the geomagnetic field may have influenced Earth’s climate in the past, our study also provides some
degree of support for the controversial link between GCR particles,
cloud formation, and climate.”

“What they observed was a strikingly close relationship between the cosmic-rays and stratospheric temperature – this they could understand: the cosmic-rays, known as muons are produced following the decay of other cosmic rays, known as mesons. Increasing the temperature of the atmosphere expands the atmosphere so that fewer mesons are destroyed on impact with air, leaving more to decay naturally to muons. Consequently, if temperature increases so does the number of muons detected.”
To a particle physicist, as I am, this is gobbledygook. I need to read the paper. Does anyone have a link?

Well lgl, I suppose it shows evidence of Cosmic rays having an effect on the atmosphere causing a change in the stratosphere…. It gives credibility for further investigation as to other interactions, namely cloud formation….. at a guess anyway.
Whereas the AGW proponents had been completely dismissive of any effect from Cosmic rays…. they are now forced to revisit and rethink….
That would be my thoughts on it anyway.

Ozzie,
I don’t think the increase in GCR has been sudden and it most likely is related to the decrease in solar activity. At least according to Svensmark, the more energetic cosmic rays coming from beyond the solar system are not affected by the earth’s magnetic field overmuch, they contain too much energy. They are affected by the Sun’s magnetic field and by the intensity of the solar wind, both of which have decreased. This is what has allowed more of the existing GCR to penetrate the earth’s atmosphere and create those interesting showers of secondary particles.
According to some work I’ve read the level of GCR changes over geologic timescales based on the solar systems orbit of the Galaxy and its location in the plane of the Galaxy, but those changes occur over millions of years, not a few decades or a few years. I’ve also seen some speculation that the solar system entered a sort of ‘magnetic bubble’ in near space that is increasing the number of GCR, but that again is over the course of a few million years.
Bottom line is the number of GCR available seems to be relatively constant in the short term (barring a supernova event locally or some other sudden event) but the intensity of the sun’s magnetic field and solar wind regulate the number that approach earth. This can change over the short term.

Oceans are cooling according to NASA.
http://tinyurl.com/afnvub

So which comes first, the stratospheric warming by other causes leading to greater detection of muons or lower solar flux allowing more mesons to hit the stratosphere causing the warming which then shows up as a detection of more muons?

There is possibly a link between events such as this and my supposition that when the air is deprived of energy from the oceans during a negative oceanic cycle then the response of the air is to adjust the circulation patterns in order to restore the energy balance of the air.
In that case there would be the observed sudden upper air warming followed by larger northern high pressure systems sending out more polar air over more oceans to pick up more energy and thereby restore the balance between energy going into space and energy being collected from the oceans.
On that basis I would speculate that the initial response of the planet to a developing energy deficit would first be a contraction of the equatorial high pressure systems which then allows an expansion of the high latitude high latitude systems.
A movement of the jet streams equatorward would follow with the climate shifts we observe on the ground.
Lots to be investigated here and highly relevant to the validity or otherwise of AGW theory because the same process of the air adjusting it’s own energy balance in response to variations in oceanic energy input could apply when the air’s own energy input is changed by, say, human CO2.

Ozzie John (03:43:04) :

Interesting Article….!
Are there any ideas thrown forward which might explain the sudden increase in the cosmic rays?

Yes. As the authors of the article in Geophys. Res. Letts. under discussion state:
There are two mechanisms by which the condition of the atmosphere affects the muon rate. Firstly, an increase in temperature causes the atmosphere to expand so muons are produced higher up and therefore have a larger probability to decay before being detected. Secondly, the mesons may interact (and thereby be lost) as well as decay. As the temperature increases, the probability of interaction becomes smaller because the local atmospheric density decreases, so more mesons decay, causing an increase in the muon rate. In deep underground detectors where muons with a high surface energy are measured, the second effect dominates and this causes a positive correlation between temperature and muon rate.
In other words, contrary to the impression in the top article of this thread and many comments, the article is about the ability to detect muons on Earth (or underground!), as a function of the temperature of the stratosphere. There’s no evidence that the cosmic rays are influencing the atmosphere at any level. The atmosphere (or stratosphere) is influencing the ability to detect the muons.

I am curious as to what causes the stratosphere to suddenly heat up? An electronic charge or magnetic event? I have a magnetic heater. It helps to unfreeze galvanized pipes. You plug it in, stick it to a metal pipe, and it heats the thing up, unfreezing the line. If a heated stratosphere then lets in more cosmic rays, would that lead to more cloud seeding? Or is it a way for us to understand how the Earth breaths out heat? If it is more porous coming in during these events, is that an indirect measure of porosity going out? Is it a way for heat to escape, suddenly?

I am not a scientist but this seems to indicate the existence of another negative forcing at work (as marked by the cosmic ray records even if not caused). I agree with those that believe that the earth is a negative feedback system and the threat of “runaway” global warming is unlikely.
The threat of a small amount of heat increase (caused by CO2 increase) tripping “runaway” global warming seems to be the most plausible (and scariest) scenario on the AGW side. We shall see, but if all it took was heat there certainly appear to have been times in the past when the temperature was rising (heat was being applied by some means) and no “runaway” occurred.

These events can have a significant effect on the severity of winters we experience, and also on the amount of ozone over the poles – being able to identify them and understand their frequency is crucial for informing our current climate and weather-forecasting models to improve predictions.
…
What they observed was a strikingly close relationship between the cosmic-rays and stratospheric temperature – this they could understand: the cosmic-rays, known as muons are produced following the decay of other cosmic rays, known as mesons. Increasing the temperature of the atmosphere expands the atmosphere so that fewer mesons are destroyed on impact with air, leaving more to decay naturally to muons. Consequently, if temperature increases so does the number of muons detected.
I have to disagree that this supports Svensmark’s theory. From the above, it seems clear that higher stratospheric temperatures lead to higher muon counts. I don’t see any implication that more mesons increase stratospheric temperatures. The “events” referred to that can have “a significant effect on the severity of winters we experience, and also on the amount of ozone over the poles” are Sudden Stratospheric Warming, not mesons or muons.

PS: The confusion one reads into Pamela’s comment just above, for instance, is just an example of the grave mental destruction that this thread is causing in less talented minds.
No, it doesn’t mean anything about cloud formation, it only means that someone figured out a way to measure temperature in the stratosphere with muons. That’s it.
Tom is even funnier:
So which comes first, the stratospheric warming by other causes leading to greater detection of muons or lower solar flux allowing more mesons to hit the stratosphere causing the warming which then shows up as a detection of more muons?
No, goddamit! It’s the mesons that get hit by the stratosphere, which then warm it up, and then make clouds or something, and then they turn themselves as muons, and then the solar flux says “hi” and then Muons get all excited and kill all the Michael Mann’s in this world and then the world is saved and then Will Smith kisses the bride, the movie is over and you wake up.

Dear Luis, my post was edited long before I saw and moderated your comment, and a slightly incorrect sentence could have been seen on my website for 90 seconds at most.
To claim that your comment was useful is ludicrous and I rejected the comment because it was very impolite (and obsolete, at the moment of moderation), much like your comment on Anthony’s blog above ~snip~

Actually the Lockwood & Frohlich (L&F) paper had dismissed the Svensmark & Friis-Christensen (S&F) paper partly on the basis that there was no apparent correlation between temperature and cosmic rays, S&F prepared a reply – here:
http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/Svensmark/Reply_to%20Lockwood_et_al_2007.pdf
They argue that L&F were erroneously using the surface temperature charts as comparisons and not making appropriate corrections – such as for volcanic events. In that reply paper they produce a very good correlation based on other temperature records.
So while everyone is free to make speculative guesses about the plausible mechanisms of cause and effect nevertheless Svensmark is clearly vindicated at least on the temperature correlation and Lockwood & Frohlich’s criticism of Svensmark & Friis-Christensen is now independently verified as being misguided and hence wrong. That is important.

Lubos, politeness is not the best quality of yours, and I have to say, no problems with that, I also think that politeness is completely overrated. I wrote no “bad words” and I didn’t call you any name at all.
So I fail to see anything rather than frustrated censorship on your part.
And yes, 2 minutes after I made the comment, you retracted. Sorry if I don’t believe your “ludicrousness”.
It smells a lot like Real Climate. Perhaps both extremes always touch, yes?
PS: Sorry for the extreme Off Topic on this, but as you may guess, I couldn’t have this discussion on his own blog due to censorship issues… I promise I won’t further this on.

Double PS, but On Topic :):
The opposite causation that Lubos refers to may be possible, but stinks. It remembers me too badly of the infamous Al Gorian graph linking CO2 with temperature for the last 650ky, and the ridiculous defense of it that some put in, as in saying that perhaps the first 800 years weren’t caused by CO2, but then CO2 “kicked in definitely”.
In this one, it’s definitely a warmer stratosphere that causes more Muons, but wait, isn’t it the other way around? Perhaps its more Mesons that Cause the Stratosphere to heat up, and then more Muons are created by that!
Occam’s razor anyone?
I give you a shot though. There is a way to see if this link is as presposterous as I claim or not. If you place a Muon detector above the stratosphere, you then CAN see who’s right or not.
Until then, Occam wins. Period.

JamesG (07:48:36) :

Actually the Lockwood & Frohlich (L&F) paper had dismissed the Svensmark & Friis-Christensen (S&F) paper partly on the basis that there was no apparent correlation between temperature and cosmic rays, S&F prepared a reply – here:
http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/Svensmark/Reply_to%20Lockwood_et_al_2007.pdf
They argue that L&F were erroneously using the surface temperature charts as comparisons and not making appropriate corrections – such as for volcanic events. In that reply paper they produce a very good correlation based on other temperature records.
So while everyone is free to make speculative guesses about the plausible mechanisms of cause and effect nevertheless Svensmark is clearly vindicated at least on the temperature correlation and Lockwood & Frohlich’s criticism of Svensmark & Friis-Christensen is now independently verified as being misguided and hence wrong. That is important.

Do you think so James? There’s no demonstrated correlation between temperature and cosmic rays in the web report that you linked to. There are two problems with that interpretation:
1. Svensmark and Friis-Christensen (S-FC) can’t seperate the cosmic ray flux from other elements of the solar cycle. What they show in their Figure 2b is a relationship between the solar cycle and a denuded tropospheric temperature anomaly in which the warming of the last 50 years or so has been removed by linear detrending. What they may have identified is a small residual sinusoidal variation in the tropospheric temperature that cycles in response to the solar cycle. That’s fine…no one would quibble with that, and it’s been identified before. But what’s the evidence it has anything to do with cosmic rays? It’s far more likely to be due to the small cyclic variation in solar irradiance.
2. The other problem that S-FC highlight is that there has been no long term trend in the cosmic ray flux. If anything this has been in the slightly cooling direction since 1958. That’s what S-FC show pretty clearly in their Figure 2b. Take out the warming and you get left with the bit that matches the solar cycle. This (as S-FC show) is a slight cooling contribution to the earth’s temperature evolution during the last 50-odd years. Clearly according to S-FC the cosmic ray flux is a non-player in relation to the contributions to the large warming of the last 30-odd years..
It seems that S-FC have rather misunderstood Lockwood and Frolich in any case. While S-FC state that (referring to Lockwood and Frolich) ”But they argue that this historical link between the Sun and climate came to an end about 20 years ago.”, I think you’ll find that Lockwood and Frolich say no such thing. What Lockwood and Frolich demonstrate is that the solar parameters that can influence the Earth’s temperature have been in the wrong direction for warming during the last 20 years. In other words the sun is contributing a slight cooling forcing during this period. Since that’s more or less what S-FC have shown in their own paper, it seems S-FC are tilting at a windmill here….
There’s another odd thing I’ve noticed. Figure 1 (top) seems to show a “match” between the CRF and the tropospheric temperature. But this very same data (it is isn’t it?) is presented in Figure 2 (top) with different smoothing on both data sets. S-FC have already demonstrated that there isn’t a correlation between the CRF and the tropospheric temperature (this only appears when the warming trend is removed as shown in Fig 2 (bottom)). And clearly the “correlation” in Figure 2 (top) is spurious since with the smoothing removed the temperature variations precede the CRF variations.

I’d have said Occam’s razor would suggest the cause of warming was the sun. It was good enough for most of our ancestors. Mesons, muons, cosmic rays and clouds are somewhat less simple explanations.

Lockwood & Fro[e]hlich (note the umlaut) have problems with their interpretation of satellite data for a start. Doug Hoyt fisked their paper at Warwick Hughes late 2007 or thereabouts.

This article says to me: record of cosmic rays incident on earth can be correlated to changes in weather/climate on earth, Unlike carbon dioxide.

BTW, if anyone is interested in the most logical case I have ever read for skepticism regarding the so-called scientific consensus on AGW, this is it:
http://commentlog.org/bid/4409/The-Case-for-Global-Warming-Skepticism

Lubos, it’s all pretty standard stuff on muons – see wikipedia for the basics.
Muons are produced in the upper atmosphere by the interaction of cosmic rays with nuclei in air molecules, and then travel down to earth. Most of them never arrive as they mostly decay on the way down (mean proper lifetime about 2 microseconds – the fact that any are seen at all is due to relativistic time dilation), and the number detected on earth is a very sensitive measure of the height at which they were produced.
If the stratosphere heats then the density drops, so the probability of a cosmic ray hitting a nucleus drops, so on average the cosmic rays have to travel further down before producing a muon. Thus the muons have less far to travel and a greater survival probability. Nothing more than that.

Oops, I see from one of the quotes above that it’s a little more complex than I first said, but the essentials remain.
Part of the problem is that people are confusing muons with csomic rays: if you put a muon detector above the atmosphere you would see nothing because they are produced in the atmosphere.

REPLY: True but muons are a proxy for mesons, which ARE above the atmosphere, which was my point all along. It is the mesons we are interested in. – Anthony

EricR (08:38:12) :
Yes there’s a lot that’s interesting in science. As far as theories (hypothesis might be a better term for some of the ideas you describe) go, the very least that one can expect from them is that they are compatible with the scientific evidence. I don’t think anyone has that much of a problem with Svensmark’s hypothesis about the CRF. It’s just that there’s precious little evidence for it in the real world. After all the very marked warming of the last 30-odd years has occurred during a period in which the trend in the CRF is, if anything, a cooling one. If we’re interested in the very marked contemporary warming we obviously look elsewhere. Does that mean that there isn’t an influence of the CRF on the Earth’s weather? There’s a bit of marginal evidence for a small contribution. Does the CRF impact on the Earth’s energy budget to the extent that it can significantly influence climate? There isn’t really any evidence in support of that notion, and the theoretical basis is not strong.
It’s really all about the evidence. If something is wrong one may as well point it out. I’m not familiar with “Grey” or what his theory/hypothesis might be. Does Wilde have “theories” in the scientific sense?

However, when it comes to the theory of CO2-induced climate change, no such attempts to disprove the theory are made. Where are the high numbers of government grants being distributed to scientists who have alternate theories that would contradict the CO2 theory, or those that would try to disprove it directly?

really? The blogosphere seems to be chock-a-block with efforts to “disprove” CO2-induced climate change! I haven’t seen anything of any substance along those lines in the scientific literature, but it’s devillishly difficult to “disprove” something for which there is pretty rock-solid theoretical and empirical evidence. Does the greenhouse effect exist or doesn’t it? Is CO2 a greenhouse gas or not?
Notice that grants are not awarded to “disprove” anything, and if you think about it you might see that a research programme funded by a grant with the aim of disproving a theory, doesn’t make a lot of sense. One might devise a research programme to assess/test aspects of a theory. But one could only set out to “disprove” a theory if there was good evidence that the theory was wrong, and in this case the theory would likely whither away of its own accord anyway. Grant awarding bodies (and scientists) are much more interested in science that addresses positive outcomes (finding out something new and useful). It’s generally only crackpots that aim actively to “disprove” theories, and most theories that do become disproven become so in a rather passive manner, being left by the wayside as productive approaches provide support for alternative interpretations…
So grants are awarded to explore areas of uncertainty in important areas of science, and require that the proposer has a coherent programme of study/experimentation/observation that bears on the particular question(s) addressed, and that these questions are considered worth addressing and tractable, and that the resources available to the potential awardee are sufficient, the programme is achievable within the time allocated and the awardee has demonstrated a solid competence in the research area (unless s/he is a young ‘un in which case s/he is likely to be helped develop a research programme from scratch)….and so on…

RE: Stratospheric heating. Here at WUWT a posting months back revealed the stunning rise in noctilucent clouds near the Mesosphere ostensibly requiring increased H2O following heating.
The historical graph of this phenomenon(provided by Malfi?) was strikingly correlated with solar minima.

JamesG (09:13:19) :

Foinavon
On your point 1, In that report by S&F-C the solar cycle was represented by cosmic ray counts in Figure1and in Figure 2 there was a correlation between mean tropo temps and galactic cosmic rays. In any event they said there was a correlation, Lockwood et al said there wasn’t and now there is independent correlation verification. Regardless of any other arguments Svensmark is thusly vindicated on that point. On your point 2, Figure 2 was detrended so it’s not surprising you see no trend. You can see a trend in Figure 1.

Yes that’s right James. The problem is that the cosmic ray flux (CRF) cycles in pretty much exact (anti-)phase with the solar parameters like solar irradiance/sunspot numbers and so on. Therefore if one observes a cyclic variation in a parameter (tropospheric temperature, say) that varies in sync with the solar cycle, one can’t ascribe this to any specific solar contribution unless the latter is somehow specifically identified. This can’t be done with the CRF in Svensmark and Friis-Christensen’s analysis. So even ‘though they’re measuring the CRF directly, any effect they observe can’t be ascribed specifically to the CRF. In fact it’s far more likely to be due to the solar irradiance.
You can see what i mean by observing the solar cycle with it’s CRF contributions and sunspot cycle (a proxy for solar irradiance), individually plotted together:
e.g.:
http://ulysses.sr.unh.edu/NeutronMonitor/Misc/neutron2.html
does that make sense? If not I’ll have another go…

Lubos Motl (09:28:40) :

But I will happily repeat what is the basic mechanism behind cosmoclimatology. Cosmic rays create condensation centers for low-lying clouds – a statement already demonstrated in Danish labs and under investigation at CERN right now. More cosmic rays means more low-lying clouds. These clouds reflect solar radiation, cool the surface, but that also increases the amount of radiation reflected back to/through the stratosphere which therefore warms up.

Not really Lubos. One can’t demonstrate the formation of low-lying clouds in laboratories, Danish or otherwise! One might be able to demonstrate nucleation of microscopic “aerosol” particles under controlled conditions in a lab, which is what Svensmark has done I believe. Whether this has relevance for low cloud formation in the real world remains to be determined.

Again, this effect is surely there, the question is how much it is. There are many experimental papers that show this effect at the extremely long time scales – hundreds of millions of years when the Solar System bubbled through the spiral arms of the Milky Way and the temperature correspondingly fluctuated at least by +2 and -2 deg C.

That’s interesting. Can you cite one or two of those papers? Whether or not that’s the case (I suspect the correlation is not terribly good, but perhaps you can show otherwise), the fact that there is an effect on the (hundreds of?) millions of years time scale as the Solar System cycles through the spiral arms of the Galaxy is probably not very relevant to the effects of the CRF on the Earth’s energy budget on the decadal-centenial-millenial-multi-millenial year timescales that are of rather more direct relevance to us!

But I still fail to understand both the sign and non-vanishing of this effect (your favorite one). The warmer atmosphere is expanded but the total amount of air molecules is what controls the cross section so it is unchanged by the temperature, isn’t it? Moreover, if I imagined that the warmer stratosphere is thicker, most of the processes would occur higher in the stratosphere which means that all the pions and muons would have more time to decay and we would observe fewer muons under the ground, wouldn’t we?

That’s odd. I’ve given you the quotation from the paper we’re discussing (Osprey et al 2009; Geophys. res. Lett. in press) that addresses your point twice already. Here it is for a third time:
There are two mechanisms by which the condition of the atmosphere affects the muon rate. Firstly, an increase in temperature causes the atmosphere to expand so muons are produced higher up and therefore have a larger probability to decay before being detected. Secondly, the mesons may interact (and thereby be lost) as well as decay. As the temperature increases, the probability of interaction becomes smaller because the local atmospheric density decreases, so more mesons decay, causing an increase in the muon rate. In deep underground detectors where muons with a high surface energy are measured, the second effect dominates and this causes a positive correlation between temperature and muon rate

“a warmer atmosphere results in more space between atmospheric molecules”
These interactions are probabalistic, where a weakon, weakforce boson is exchanged. Line-of-sight, optical depth heuristics are an out-of-date simplification.
As the depth of the layer where interaction takes place deepens the probability of interaction probably oscillates in magnitude just as light behaves passing thru different thicknesses of glass (“QED”,Feynman,Priceton,1985).

JamesG (09:13:19) :
I didn’t answer your second point:

Lockwood was, I believe, more explicit in previous papers that he believed there was a possibility of a sun-climate link – in line with many other researchers in the same field. S&F-C are very aware of Lockwood’s previous work and his leanings re-sun-climate so it’s likely you who misunderstands him, not them. Many believed or believe any plausible link must have stopped around ‘85. S&F-C simply point out otherwise by using different temperature data.

I don’t think that’s really the case. The point is that there is always a sun-climate link. Sometimes the solar contribution enhances the Earth’s energy budget and the Earth tends to a higher equilibrium temperature…sometimes the solar contribution is a cooling one….sometimes the solar contribution is minimal/steady and the Earth more or less progresses through time at an equilibrium temperature set by the solar output and the greenhouse gas forcing, with variations due to stochastic (and maybe cyclic) contributions internal (e.g. ocean currents) or external (volcanic eruptions/ extraterrestrial impacts) to the climate system.
Lockwood and Frolich have pointed out (and did so in their paper) that the recent (millenial/multi-millenial scale) climate history of the Earth has a strong solar signature. However it so happens that the sun hasn’t done anything very much in the last 50 years (pretty steady with a slight cooling contribution for the last 20 years), and the very marked warming of the last 30-odd years has occured while the solar contribution has been flat/cooling a tad. That doesn’t mean that the sun-climate connection has disappeared! It’s just not made much of a contribution (a slight cooling one if anything) to recent and contemporary warming.
Notice that Svensmark and Friis-Christensen come up with exactly the same conclusion. The solar signature is only identifiable in the tropospheric temperature record once all the warming has been removed by linear detrending. And (as S-FC show) the trend in the solar contribution is close to flat (a slight cooling trend. That’s pretty much in line with Lockwood and Frolich…

Haven’t read the articel yet, or any of the above posts; but anthony, is it possible to download that video clip, and save it in my Climate library. That is very illuminating.
George

Foinavon
Avoiding the correlation issues which I don’t really disagree with, if I understand you correctly you say that Svensmarks basic theory is demonstrated to be valid but whether the overall effect is important is disputable. Yet this is what Lubos has already said too. And as Luis said, only experiment will really tell us. The curious thing is that you are rather more confident of the “rock-solid” case for CO2 based on “empirical” data. In fact though there is a case for saying the same thing about CO2; there should be an effect but how much of an effect is disputable. Lindzen puts this case best. In the IPCC scenarios there is even a distinct possibility of just a 1 degree effect per doubling of CO2 and only then because possible negative feedbacks have been ignored. Do we ever get the postulated 3 degrees which comes from postulated positive feedbacks. Not in the empirical data we don’t! This 3 degrees comes only from certain biased interpretations of data – every bit as biased as Svensmarks interpretations – and which often seem to be confusing cause with effect. Worse the models which had the 3 degrees sensitivity built-in as input are then used as “evidence” when they naturally output that same 3 degrees sensitivity. The empirical temperature data don’t by themselves make any case at all. It is the adamant nature of the climate modelers that the effect must be there even if it is not yet observable that seems to be the dominant theme in climate science as far as i can see. Are you sure you aren’t letting your natural skepticism be swayed by the arguments from authority?

Luis Dias
when an atmospheric region gets warmer, it spreads the air horizontally (but also vertically) towards the coldest regions, and form this queer thing called “wind”.
That is one of the most creative and outlandish explanations for wind I have ever read. Surely, sir, you jest!
I think you will find that winds behave somewhat differently than that.

Sorry, posted at the wrong article.
Ron de Haan (10:11:22) :
Anthony, not as spectacular as this article but in my opinion a possible second piece of the climate/weather puzzle:
“Climate records stretching back 5000 years seem to show a strong link between rainfall in the tropics and changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, according to new research”.
http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/news/story.aspx?id=296

I’m a bit bamboozled along with Anna v.
The report as shown above (not the paper) reads like a Japanese transistor radio manual; like Katie Couric trying to explain relativity to Albert Einstein.
I don’t have the whole Standard Model of Particle Physics in my head; and they keep tinkering with it to stop me from remembering; but when I went to school, (pre standard model) a Muon WAS a Meson; specifically it was a mu Meson, which distinguished it from the pi Meson. Now of course we have the tau meson as well; and each meson is associated with one family of subatomic particles in the Standard Model.
So as Anna says; it’s gobbledegook, although the underlying message if you can find it, sounds pretty interesting; and as Anthony points out; we can’t tell how this ties Svensmark’s thesis into clouds; but I would sure like to get clear in my mind (and Anna’s too) just what is really the story here.
I did find out how to save a copy of the video clip, which is very interesting. Lots of other things, I would like to see in similar video clips, such as continuous coverage of cloud formation and dispersal.
Nice hunting trophy though Anthony.
Are you actively working in Particle Physics, Anna; or just schooled in it?
George

George E. Smith (11:21:51) :
Are you actively working in Particle Physics, Anna; or just schooled in it?
I retired in 2000 after 35 years in the field. Started with cosmic rays but ended with CERN experiments of course, bubble chambers and then a big LEP detector. I keep a bit my hand in, but not seriously.

Anthony-not on topic. But I thought you would find it funny you are now beating Al Gore’s “We can solve it” without spending $300M!
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2009/01/absolutely-stunning-failure-of-al-gore.html

A muon which penetrates through 500 m of solid rock, has to have a pretty high energy. Much, much higher than the cosmic rays which are screened by magnetic fields in solar active times and do not make it to the earth. So the cosmic particle, which by collision with a stratospheric air molecule generates this muon, has to have had an even higher energy.
I got the press release on Wednesday, but do not have seen the paper yet. I am quite sceptical of their claims.

des332: Here’s a good comment on the BBC Panorama / Obama speech story:
http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/editordetail.php?preview=1&id=251#comment

JamesG (10:59:05)

Avoiding the correlation issues which I don’t really disagree with, if I understand you correctly you say that Svensmarks basic theory is demonstrated to be valid but whether the overall effect is important is disputable.

I’m not sure what you mean by “correlation issues”! But no I don’t think Svensmarks “basic theory” is demonstrated to be valid. Does variation of the CRF have a significant effect on climate? There’s no particular evidence for that notion is there? If we’re interested in the very large warming of the the last 30-odd years it can’t have a significant contribution from changes in the CRF since any changes in the CRF have been in the wrong direction as Svensmark and Friis-Christensen show in the web site you linked to. So we reject that hypothesis, at least for contemporary warming.

The curious thing is that you are rather more confident of the “rock-solid” case for CO2 based on “empirical” data…

Well yes…there’s very little empirical evidence in support of a significant CRF contribution to the Earth’s energy budget, and a massive amount of empirical evidence in support of a major contribution from atmospheric CO2 concentrations. That’s obvious isn’t it?

In the IPCC scenarios there is even a distinct possibility of just a 1 degree effect per doubling of CO2 and only then because possible negative feedbacks have been ignored. Do we ever get the postulated 3 degrees which comes from postulated positive feedbacks. Not in the empirical data we don’t!

Really? The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report assesses the climate sensitivity to be in the range 2 – 4.5 oC. The data that informs the conclusion of a climate sensitivity in that range is pretty much entirely empirical.
JamesG (11:19:53)

You failed to note that S&F-C said that if the correlation is clear in some temperature datasets then it calls into question the surface measurements that L&F used.

But according to the website you linked to the “correlation” isn’t clear in any data sets. It only becomes “clear” if one removes all the warming of the last 50 years (see Figure 2 of the web site you linked to:
: http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/Svensmark/Reply_to%20Lockwood_et_al_2007.pdf )
I’m not really sure what you’re arguing over. You chose to bring this web page to our attention, and yet you don’t seem to want to address the data that’s presented there. The web site data says nothing at all about the CRF. S-FC show that there is only a match between the solar cycle and the tropospheric temperature once all the warming has been removed by linear detrending. That’s what Figure 2 (bottom) shows doesn’t it? So the CRF is irrelevant (it perhaps makes a slight cooling effect) for the warming of the last 30-odd years.

Although the Svensmark idea is promising and is yet to be affirmed or rebutted I don’t think the above article helps either way.
I tend to agree with those who suggest that the changes in the air come first and the muon signal is a response ( though the matter of causation is still speculative).
We currently have a cooling ocean and a quiet sun. The observed changes seem to normally be winter phenomena.
Perhaps they are cooling phenomena generally.
The sun is not putting as much energy onto the oceans. The oceans are releasing less energy to the air. The air is cooling.
Anything we currently observe is more likely to be an air circulation response to overall cooling of the air above us than anything else. If that also produces a muon signal then so be it.
In my speculative opinion we are observing the natural changes that inevitably occur when the air is attempting to balance the global energy budget in the face of a reduction in energy input from both sun and ocean.

There’s a nice little comment piece by Giles Barr and Scott Osprey here (not a stable link but should work for a day or two).

Leif,
Any chance that the events causing the SSW are related to the large transfers of energy from the solar magnetic field to the earth that was documented last year? I am assuming that to get a SSW, you need a huge source of energy somewhere, and the only logical source that I see is the sun. It should be pretty easy to rule out momentary TSI changes or flares/CMEs as the cause, which leaves some invisible but potent connection as the likely cause I would assume? Has there been any good work done on the causes of SSWs?

Foinavon
“Does variation of the CRF have a significant effect on climate? There’s no particular evidence for that notion is there?”
–There is merely a very strong correlation and a theory. What do we have for CO2?: A very weak correlation and a theory. I remain skeptical of both because both are short on real data.
“If we’re interested in the very large warming of the the last 30-odd years it can’t have a significant contribution from changes in the CRF since any changes in the CRF have been in the wrong direction as Svensmark and Friis-Christensen show in the web site you linked to”
–Svensmark uses cosmic rays as a solar proxy. Even Lockwood said that just 20 years out of 110 didn’t match for the sun-climate connection. Svensmark showed even those 20 years aren’t far away when you use less-tainted temperature data – and they show 3 separate dataset correlations. In contrast CO2 doesn’t show any correlation whatsoever to any temperature dataset. So clearly strong correlation isn’t that important to you AGW believers in the first place. I see a trend upwards in figure 1 – where do you see a trend downwards? Figure 2 is detrended. They postulate a positive feedback from water vapor for the higher rise – hey why not; handwaving explanations are common enough in the AGW camp. Tit for tat I say. They could have used the fewer-aerosols handwave too, which is also in vogue with some climate scientists.
“massive amount of empirical evidence in support of a major contribution from atmospheric CO2 concentrations. That’s obvious isn’t it?”
–This is something that people repeat endlessly but have you actually looked for this evidence? It’s just not there! What we have instead is a collection of opinions that directly follow from the initial assumption that all warming in the past must have been from CO2. If it wasn’t then the entire argument falls down. This kind of confirmation bias is what seems to be called “evidence” in climate science.
“The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report assesses the climate sensitivity to be in the range 2 – 4.5 oC. The data that informs the conclusion of a climate sensitivity in that range is pretty much entirely empirical.”
–Even in these IPCC reports they admit that most of that sensitivity is from assumed positive feedback, which is up to 3 times the directly calculated CO2 effect. Did you miss that part? Such feedback is postulated and inferred but not yet actually observed. The data used to determine the climate sensitivities in these sensitivity calculations – and there aren’t that many – doesn’t in any way support the conclusions: It is all biased opinion. You can actually postulate negligible CO2 sensitivity – all you have to do is assume natural variation is dominant and hey presto.
“But according to the website you linked to the “correlation” isn’t clear in any data sets. It only becomes “clear” if one removes all the warming of the last 50 years”
–You need to clean your spectacles. The correlation is outstanding in 3 separate datasets and now – to cap it all – there is yet another apparent correlation in this independent work. Detrending to find a correlation is, btw, a very common procedure.
“The web site data says nothing at all about the CRF”
The paper is entirely about cosmic rays. They only talk about the solar cycle by using cosmic rays as a proxy.

Tex (14:45:48)
The authors of the study under discussion discuss the origin of the SSW in some detail. They’re due to Rossby waves. These (I’m paraphrasing/quoting the authors) propagate up from the troposphere to the stratosphere during winter. In analogy to water waves these can break causing temperatures in the polar stratosphere to rise by over 50K in a few days. The Rossby waves form particularly over major land masses as air moving over steep terrain is “pushed up” . Since most land mass is in the Northern hemisphere, Rossby Waves occur almost exclusively in the N. hemisphere. The frequency of Rossby Waves are thought to be tied loosly to wind direction in the tropical stratosphere and sea surface temperature…
(paraphrasing/quoting from Osprey et al. (2009) Sudden stratospheric warmings seen in MINOS deep underground muon data. Geophys. Res. Lett. in the press.)

JamesG (15:00:59)
You’re not addressing the Svensmark and Friis-Christensen (S-FC) web site article you brought to our attention scientifically, and it’s questionable whether you have any plans to do so! But I’ll have one more go, focussing exclusively on the S-FC web site which we can both look at and discuss dispassionately…the rest of your post is unsupported (and incorrect largely) assertion and not really relevant to the subject of the thread:
here’s the link to the S-FC web-site article:
http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/Svensmark/Reply_to%20Lockwood_et_al_2007.pdf
1. S-FC compare CRF data and tropospheric temperature (from radiosondes). They show essentially the same data in Figure 1 and in Figure 2 (top). These data are rather poorly correlated. We know this because S-FC give us the correlation coefficient (-0.31) [I assume you’ve noticed that the CRF data has been “turned upside down”]. In addition while S-FC smooth the CRF data in Figure 1 which makes it appear as if there is a goodish match, the data is much less smoothed in |Figure 2 (top) and we can see that the temperature rises starting near 1967, 1977, 1987 precede the “rises” (which are actually drops!) in the CRF. In other words there’s (i) little correlation between the CRF and the tropospheric temperature, and (ii) what correlation there is doesn’t indicate causality.
Are we agreed with that? f not why not?
2. In Figure 2 (bottom) S-FC remove the warming in the tropospheric temperature evolution by linear detrending, and extracting El Nino, volcanic etc. contributions by unspecified means. (they call this “removal of confusions”!.) They don’t give us any indications at all about how they do this, other than that the linear trend removed is 0.14 K (almost 0.7 K of warming).
Are we still agreed so far?
3. This denuded temperature profile shows a minor cooling trend over the last 50 years (not surprising if one removes all the warming) and it is this that S-FC plot with the CRF. Now the correlation is somewhat bettter (-0.47). That’s all very nice. But that analysis indicates that there has been no CRF contribution to warming during the last 50 years. The CRF trend is mildly cooling over this period (we knew this anyway of course [***]), and there is only a CRF-temperature match once all of the late 20th century and contemporary warming is removed.
Agreed? Or not?
We can conclude:
4. Variations in the CRF have made (according to S-FC) no contribution to the warming of interest.
We can also conclude:
5. We can’t say anything about the CRF anyway other than that we’ve measured it. The CRF cycles in antiphase with the other solar parameters [***] so that any parameter that is part of the solar cycle will generate essentially the same profile. Any changes we see in the tropospheric temperature are just as likely (in fact rather more likely) to be due to the cyclic variation in the solar irradiance.
Can we conclude anything constructive?
Yes, two things I would say, taking S-FC at face value:
(a.) The CRF (and solar output variation) has made no significant contribution to late 20th century and contemporary warming. If anything the contribution has been a slight cooling contribution ([Figure 2 (bottom)]
(b) It seems to be possible to “tease out” the solar cycle contribution to tropospheric warming through deconvolution of the temperature evolution tor emove greenhouse gas warming and other “confusions” (!). Of course if we were going to assess this properly we’d like to know how S-FC did their “removal of confusions”….
[***] http://ulysses.sr.unh.edu/NeutronMonitor/Misc/neutron2.html

Thanks Anna, sounds like you had a very interesting 35 years. Particle Physics was pretty Rube Goldberg, when I was learning about it at Uof Auckland. The 8 fold way was the cats meow.
Seems a lot more orderly now; which I guess means we do eventually make progress.
George
Nice to know what people around here do or have done.

“” Jonathan (11:38:04) :
George: in modern terminology the muon is not a meson. Mesons are quark-antiquark pairs, such as the pion. The muon is a lepton, like the electron and the tauon. “”
Jonathan, thanks for the heads up. You have to bear in mind, that my first electronics text book was the 1938 “Admiralty Handbook of wireless Telegraphy.” All about spark transmitters and “coherers”. As I recall that book depicted the copper atom as having 63 protons in the nucleus, which was like a plum pudding with 34 electron raisins stuck in the pudding surface, and another 29 electrons orbiting around like planets. Seems that book came out just before the discovery of the neutron. Of course I didn’t get the book till around 1953 when I got out of highschool; and it was regarded as a quaint classic then. My recollection was that the half life of a free neutron then was 12 minutes, but I see it is now more like 14; clearly a time dilation effect !
But the general state of particle physics was pretty bleak, and mus and pis were simply mesons, and all the quarks wer not even twinkles in someones eye.
So if the electron is stable why aren’t the the muon and Tauon stable.
Presumably the pion is an up/down pair, then there would be a strange/charm pair and a top/bottom pair.
So who the blazes are Truth and Beauty ?
Well it sounds like they had fun putting all that stuff together. I think it is something like general relativity; totally intractible when it first came up, but as others streamlined the mathematics; it starts to get almost ho-hum.
Nice to know that Anna made a life long career out of those little buggers.
I had to slide over into electronics, and Optics, but I found that my Physics base was far more useful, than going the EE route.
We have an eclectic population here in this clubhouse.
George

realitycheck and Joe D’Aleo linked earlier in the thread to the fact that one of these Stratosphere Sudden Warming Events is now occuring. The last one in the northern hemipshere was 2001.
It looks to be a truly huge event now in the latest chart. A 50C event is ocurring which is as big as these get. One of the Spitsbergen radiosondes has recorded an 80C temp increase over 5 days.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/temperature/10mb9065.gif
I don’t know much about these events but any kind of change like this has got to have far reaching effects. The northern polar vortex has literally stopped as part of this event – the weather could start coming from the east in high and mid-latititudes. The forecasts for the NAO have been drastically reduced in the last few days.
There is no way that sudden warming in the high stratosphere like this does not result in a lot of heat/energy escaping to space.
Anyone know more about this?
And the cosmic ray charts seem to have recontinued their march up with the decline in the solar cycle.
http://www.netweather.tv/forum/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=76151

Leif Svalgaard (16:36:08) :
Leif,
I’m trying to get a handle on the Rossby waves, and am a bit confused by your statement “These waves propagate up from the troposphere to the stratosphere during the winter.”
Do you mean to use the word migrate rather than propogate? My understanding is that Rossby Wave propagation is east-west, and I’m having a hard time picturing the waves taking a right-angle turn to the vertical.
Earle

Foinavon
I’m not here to defend all Svensmarks work. He can do that himself. I merely noted that one of his predictions – a correlation between temps and cosmic rays, which was poo-poo’d by the establishment, has been independently verified.
Detrending is intended to give a zero trend not a cooling trend. That cooling trend that you see just isn’t there. Also the cosmic rays clearly seem (especially visible in figure 1) to be on a rising trend to me. Since your arguments rest on that fallacy there’s really nothing to discuss. I grant that the water vapor positive feedback explanation for the trend difference is a bit ropey and ALL adjustments to temperatures are to be treated with suspicion.
However, unlike you I am able to see that such handwaves appear with greater frequency in the pro-AGW camp than among skeptics. I am also able to note, and which you ritually ignore, that whatever the potential deficiencies in Svensmarks theories, it is being asked to pass tests that the CO2 theory is clearly exempt from. For example, if I point out the lack of correlation of CO2 to temperatures to anyone I get the parrot-type response that the inclusion of the “well-established” aerosol argument explains the difference. Yet if Svensmark or others come up with lesser magic bullets to force a correlation or explain away a simple lack of trend then you come down on him like a ton of bricks. Consistency please: why not look equally skeptically at the ritual handwaving explanations from the AGW camp: There are certainly lots to choose from.

What a fascinating and mind opening article. (And what an absolutely absorbing theory I might add!) I can always expect a good read at this site. So many open and thoughtful minds!
Refreshing!
Cheers all!

Would this correlation fit in with Charles Wilson’s work on ionizing radiation and cloud formation back in the 1920’s?
Just asking.

If I could add however, that I have been keeping daily track of the weather in my neck of the woods (literally) for quite a few years now, and have been amazed at the strength and tenacity of the large mass of high pressure over the arctic. Our early cold weather, and the current deep freeze just beginning here, are clearly the result of that persistent mass.
A clue as to my whereabouts and hobbies: I am a business owner and very amateur pilot/meteorologist, living in paradise at the foot of the very North West slopes of the Cascades. 20 Km’s. or so East x Southeast of Chilliwack BC. I have always followed the weather closely, and can only recall back to the ’69/’70 winter for such lingering cold air flowing out through the valleys for so long a period. The entire North and central area of Canada has been breathtakingly cold for a long time this year, and none of the even vigorous pineapple expresses we are famous for has made much of a dent. The cold air mass receded for a few weeks to mostly right around where I live, and consequently we have had much colder weather than what gets reported out of YVR. (Vancouver International) It must be noted that I am a mere 60 clicks east of the Lower Mainland, and generally over the past 20 years or so we get pretty much the same weather as the greater Vancouver area, minus a few degrees. Often, we are much warmer and wetter.
I will go out on a very precarious limb here and predict that things are going to be very cold in the Pacific NW for many more days this winter. If the postulations mentioned here turn out correct, we should be in this for even longer. Most unfortunate as Cold = Death.
Keep in mind those that have to bear this burden outside.

Dear DavidGMills:
The abstract you link to has the full paper as well. Thank you for both.

Oceanic Rossby waves also overturn the thermocline… pulling cold nutrient rich water from below it and replacing it with warm….. They travel from east to west and are very slow moving.
Read this introduction to oceanic Rossby waves from the Southhampton Oceanography Center…. Rossby waves or Planetary waves occur in all fluids subjected to the rotational forces of a planetary body…. including the atmosphere.
It would seem Rossby waves transfer heat at boundary layers quite efficiently… The thermocline in the ocean, and the stratosphere in the atmosphere….
Just musing…. It’s a complicated thing, this climate… 🙂

Syl (18:44:45) wrote (regarding climate sensitivity):
“Climate model output is not evidence, neither is it proof of anything. It must match the real-world data, which it doesn’t. The ‘pretty much’ in your statement is a gaping black hole.”
Paleoclimate studies (which don’t use GCMs) also yield climate sensitivities of 2-4.5 degrees.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v360/n6404/abs/360573a0.html
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=2999010
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003AGUFMPP22B..07L

In 2005, I found a direct correlation between interstellar cosmic rays and the oscillations of temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere. I could corroborate that the ICR warms the Earth’s atmosphere. The measurements of the intensity of the ICR were obtained by the Voyagers I and II in the Shock Bow of the Solar System. Calculating an average speed of 213 Km/s and the distance from the Shock Bow to our planet, the ICR nucleons and subatomic particles would delay about 14 months on reaching the Earth. Considering that the supersonic nucleons which have overcome upstream the Solar Wind could carry Energy up to 70 MeV or higher, their effect on the Stratosphere’s temperature is persistent and intense. The article from the Journal of Geophysical Research explains the mechanism which I couldn’t explain in its moment.
My report was published here: http://biocab.org/Cosmic_Rays_Graph.html
I detest to promulgate my own articles, but I think now it could be relevant.

Chris V. (21:00:54) :
from the abstract in your link: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v360/n6404/abs/360573a0.html
. Here we retrieve the sensitivity of two palaeoclimates, one colder and one warmer than present, by independently reconstructing both the equilibrium surface tem-perature change and the radiative forcing. Our results yield DeltaT 2x = 2.3 plusminus0.9 °C.
Radiative forcing? in paleoclimate? and what happened to those 800 to 2000 year delays of CO2 rise from temperature rise?

The Labrador ice has returned:
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=01&fd=22&fy=2009&sm=01&sd=23&sy=2009

carlbrannen(23:54:51)
Thank you for the reference on the reduction of muon flux .
My guess is based on the fact that MINOS is a neutrino detector and the backgrounds that could confuse the data would be neutrino like and thus would be of interest to be recorded.
As there is no open link to the publication I guess I will have to wait and see what is really being measured( energy spectrum etc) and how, and also how the backgrounds were corrected for.

Here is the sad part, even if all the rational, intelligent people conclude that global warming is produced by cosmic rays, this will not deter the man made global warming charlatans. The reason it won’t is that their aims where political–not scientific. Their goal was to destroy capitalism in general and the United States in particular. If they were serious for a micro second they would never say another word about man made global warming in English. Rather, they would learn Mandarin. Laying aside global warming and looking at the pollution effects of combustion energy, only China can save the world. Any honest person can see that one billion people trying to reach western standards will dwarf anything the US or even all the west is doing. The solution to pollution or even man made global warming will be spoken in Mandarin. Not English.

Damn, this is interesting.

Syl (18:44:45)
[and Roger Carr (03:35:32)]
Careful with your reading, Syl. My response to JamesG in relation to the IPCC likely climate sensitivity range (2 – 4.5 oC) was in relation to James’ comment ” In the IPCC scenarios there is even a distinct possibility of just a 1 degree effect per doubling of CO2 and only then because possible negative feedbacks have been ignored.”. In fact the IPCC range of likelihood is 2 -4.5 oC0 and 1 oC is very unlikely indeed.
You’re seemingly unhappy with my statement:
“Really? The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report assesses the climate sensitivity to be in the range 2 – 4.5 oC. The data that informs the conclusion of a climate sensitivity in that range is pretty much entirely empirical.”

Syl:”Unresponsive.
Climate model output is not evidence, neither is it proof of anything. It must match the real-world data, which it doesn’t. The ‘pretty much’ in your statement is a gaping black hole.”

This thread isn’t really the place to discuss this stuff, and so I didn’t above. But let’s do so briefly. I would say there is abundant evidence for a significant climate sensitivity (near 3 oC) and this is largely empirical. Here’s some of the data below [***]. Likewise there’s a vast amount of evidence for a strong coupling of temperatures and CO2 concentrations in the deep past [*****].
It would be foolish to ignore this or pretend it doesn’t exist, while embracing notions for which there is simply no compelling evidence in the real world.

you do realize it’s a negative correlation between temperature and cosmic ray flux, don’t you…
… I think you simply don’t grok Svensmark yet.

If “grok” means what I think it means, then I grog Svensmark pretty well! Of course there’s an inverse correlation between the CRF and putative effects on temperature.
But where’s the evidence? On this thread we have an unsupported allusion to Svensmark’s idea in the introductory article and a web-based report that JamesG kindly showed us. However on reading the web-based report we find it presents zero evidence for a relationship between the CRF and the earth’s temperature. In fact, taking it at face value, it demonstrates clearly that the CRF can have made no contribution to the late 20th century and contemporary warming.
It doesn’t seem very constructive to adopt a weird “Alice in Wonderland” stance in which you ignore the real world data on CO2 contributions, and pursue unsubstantiated notions that even the proponents demonstrate is largely irrelevant in their own report….
……………………………………………………..
[***]
Some of the data up to 2006 is reviewed here (ignore the modelling bits if you don’t like them!):
Annan JD, Hargreaves JC (2006) Using multiple observationally-based constraints to estimate climate sensitivity. Geophys. Res. Lett. 33, art #L06704
http://www.jamstec.go.jp/frcgc/research/d5/jdannan/GRL_sensitivity.pdf
More recent estimates of climate sensitivity from observational data are:
K-T Tung and CD Camp (2007) Solar cycle warming at the Earth’s surface and an observational determination of climate sensitivity (in press) [not sure I really like this paper!)
http://www.amath.washington.edu/research/articles/Tung/journals/solar-jgr.pdf
Royer DL et al. (2007) Climate sensitivity constrained by CO2 concentrations over the past 420 million years Nature 446, 530-532
[*****]
A recent review compiles much of the data:
D.L. Royer (2006) “CO2-forced climate thresholds during the Phanerozoic” Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta 70, 5665-5675.
Even more recent studies supplement the information in Royers review/compilation and cover additional periods with new data sets right through the past several hundreds of millions of years:
R.E. Carne, J.M. Eiler, J. Veizer et al (2007) “Coupling of surface temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations during the Palaeozoic era” Nature 449, 198-202
W. M. Kurschner et al (2008) “The impact of Miocene atmospheric carbon dioxide fluctuations on climate and the evolution of the terrestrial ecosystem” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 105, 499-453.
D. L. Royer (2008) “Linkages between CO2, climate, and evolution in deep time” Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105, 407-408
Zachos JC (2008) “An early Cenozoic perspective on greenhouse warming and carbon-cycle dynamics” Nature 451, 279-283.
Doney SC et al (2007) “Carbon and climate system coupling on timescales from the Precambrian to the Anthropocene” Ann. Rev. Environ. Resources 32, 31-66.
Horton DE et al (2007) “Orbital and CO2 forcing of late Paleozoic continental ice sheets” Geophys. Res. Lett. L19708 (Oct. 11 2007).
B. J. Fletcher et al. (2008) “Atmospheric carbon dioxide linked with Mesozoic and early Cenozoic climate change” Nature Geoscience 1, 43-48.

anna v (22:18:26) :
Radiative forcing? in paleoclimate? and what happened to those 800 to 2000 year delays of CO2 rise from temperature rise?
The paleoclimate studies normally compare time periods when temperatures, CO2, and other forcings were relatively stable (i.e., at equilibrium). They then compare the difference in forcings (CO2, albedo…) between those two time periods to determine the sensitivity.

JamesG (18:04:30) :

Foinavon
I’m not here to defend all Svensmarks work. He can do that himself. I merely noted that one of his predictions – a correlation between temps and cosmic rays, which was poo-poo’d by the establishment, has been independently verified.

But where has it been independently verified? Not in the web-site report you linked to and that we’ve discussed rather thoroughly. They showed there that the solar cycle contribution to tropospheric temperature can perhaps be “teased out”. They don’t present any evidence that there is any temperature response to variations in the CRF. Are you thinking of some other paper that demonstrates a causal relationship between the CRF and temperature?

if I point out the lack of correlation of CO2 to temperatures to anyone I get the parrot-type response that the inclusion of the “well-established” aerosol argument explains the difference.

I think one needs to consider the relationship between CO2 levels and temperature more thoroughly. As well as the last 100/200-odd years, there is strong evidence for a major role for CO2 contributions throughout the ice age cycles and the deeper past. I’ve cited some of this here: [foinavon (07:16:38)]

At lower levels, C02 on Earth is antifreeze solution with water vapor. At elevated levels, it is a one-time miniscule forcing that does not increase linearly as it’s levels rise.
Probably what happened to Mars. Once it fell into an Ice Age, it never warmed enough to recover the water vapor and the attendant CO2 antifreeze mix.
Nothing like an independent test case to clear things up.

Nasif Nahle (21:43:27) :
In 2005, I found a direct correlation between interstellar cosmic rays and the oscillations of temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere. I could corroborate that the ICR warms the Earth’s atmosphere. The measurements of the intensity of the ICR were obtained by the Voyagers I and II in the Shock Bow of the Solar System. Calculating an average speed of 213 Km/s and the distance from the Shock Bow to our planet, the ICR nucleons and subatomic particles would delay about 14 months on reaching the Earth. Considering that the supersonic nucleons which have overcome upstream the Solar Wind could carry Energy up to 70 MeV or higher, their effect on the Stratosphere’s temperature is persistent and intense. The article from the Journal of Geophysical Research explains the mechanism which I couldn’t explain in its moment.
My report was published here: http://biocab.org/Cosmic_Rays_Graph.html
I detest to promulgate my own articles, but I think now it could be relevant.
Nasif,
This is very interesting information for a whole array of reasons which have a direct impact on the current AGW Doctrine dispute.
The most important ones:
1. Your conclusions eliminate human kind to effect the earth climate (AGW by CO2 emissions).
2. The data presented in your report makes you conclude that the Svensmark Theory could be correct.
I have the following questions:
A. Is it possible to update the graph in the articles to our current day and time.
B. Does the position of the shock Bow vary with the strength of the Earths Magnetic field and the current Solar Minimum.
If this is the case what would be it’s current position and what would be the implementation for the travel time of the IIGC to reach Earth
C. Is our solar system currently effected by the gas cloud mentioned in the 1978 article to dominate our climate for the next 10.000 years, confirmed by Voyager I and II measurements
D. What could be the consequence of this cloud for life on Earth.
E. Perhaps off topic:
Last year German Scientists found evidence of a sudden shift in the Earth’s climate
into a Glaciation Fase within a period of 1 year caused by a radical shift of the jet streams and wind patterns.
Is there any evidence that the found mechanism could trigger such an event?
F. Joe D’Aleo just posted a response stating that at this moment in time a major warming of the Stratosphere is taking place.
Is it possible to simulate this event based on your theory?

The best independent real world verifications of Svensmark and the rest of the cosmic crowd include Shaviv & Veizer (2003) who, one working astrophysics and the other geochemistry, found they’d independently produced the same basic graph, but one was for temperatures over the Phanerozoic and the other for galactic cosmic ray flux.
Jan Veizer has stated on camera (the Danish documentary Klimamysteriet) that he was expecting good correlation with CO2 and was about to abandon that line of research. His measurement of temperature by oxygen isotope chemical analysis wasn’t making sense in light of CO2 variability, which he, like most folk, including Shaviv, had thought was the cause of warming in the 20th century.
If great correlation over 550 million years doesn’t do it for you, there was published research that took British weather observations and compared it to cosmic ray flux, and noticed something like a 17% higher probability for overcast skies on high flux days over low flux days.
Svensmark, Kirkby and others might not yet have the mechanisms correct, but I take their models to be much more compelling than the handwaving of the science and ad hominems from IPCC partisans.

foinavon = Gavin as joyned WuWT . Congratulations Anthony.
REPLY: No this is a UK address, not the same person. – Anthony

Chris V. (07:34:37)
“The paleoclimate studies normally compare time periods when temperatures, CO2, and other forcings were relatively stable (i.e., at equilibrium). They then compare the difference in forcings (CO2, albedo…) between those two time periods to determine the sensitivity.”
And here enters the march of the paradox’s.
As Michael Ghil explains
As the relatively new science of climate dynamics evolved through the 1980s and 1990s, it became quite clear from observational data, both instrumental and paleoclimatic, as well as model studies that Earth’s climate never was and is unlikely to ever be in equilibrium….
…The difficulty in narrowing the range of estimates for either equilibrium sensitivity of climate or for end-of-the-century temperatures is clearly connected to the complexity of the climate system, the multiplicity and nonlinearity of the processes and feedbacks it contains, and the obstacles to a faithful representation of these processes and feedbacks in GCMs. The practice of the science and engineering of GCMs over several decades has amply demonstrated that any addition or change in the model’s parametrizations” i.e., of the representation of subgrid-scale processes in terms of the model’s explicit, large-scale variables may result in noticeable changes in the model solutions’ behavior.
The divergence from reality(from unknown quantities of ‘natural variation”) at present bringing a significant level of uncertainty.
Mathematical physics tells us why.Eg Nicolis and Prigogine
“Abstract
The theory of fluctuations is extended to nonlinear systems far from equilibrium. Systems whose evolution involves two separate time scales, e.g., chemically reacting mixtures near a local equilibrium regime, are studied in detail. It is shown that the usual stochastic description of chemical kinetics based on a “birth and death” model is inadequate and has to be replaced by a more detailed phase-space description. This enables one to develop for such systems a plausible mechanism for the emergence of instabilities, in which the departure from the steady state is governed by large fluctuations of macroscopic size, while small thermal fluctuations are still described by a generalization of Einstein’s equilibrium theory. On the other hand, far from a local equilibrium regime, infinitesimal fluctuations may increase and attain macroscopic values. In this case the system evolves to a state of “generalized turbulence”, in which the distinction between macroscopic averages and fluctuations becomes meaningless. ”
http://de.scientificcommons.org/19226239
An in Paleoclimate studies we see the Milankovitch “forcings” introduce a paradox,that there is an additional mechanism for amplification(attenuation) present.
EG Nicolis and Noolis.
The oxygen isotope record of the last million years, as provided by a deep sea core sediment, is analyzed by a method recently developed in the theory of dynamical systems. The analysis suggests that climatic variability is the manifestation of a chaotic dynamics described by an attractor of fractal dimensionality. A quantitative measure of the limited predictability of the climatic system is provided by the evaluation of the time-correlation function and the largest positive Lyapounov exponent of the system.
http://www.pnas.org/content/83/3/536
Hence the conundrum or paradox eg as Nalimov explains
1. A thing, in fact becomes a manifold when, unable to remain
self-centered, it flows outward and by that dissipation takes extension:
utterly losing unity it becomes a manifold, since there is nothing
to bind part to part; when, with all this overflowing, it becomes
something definite, there is a magnitude.
3. Whatever is an actual existence is by that very fact determined
numerically . . . approach the thing as a unit and you find it
manifold; call it a manifold, and again you falsify, for when the
single thing is not a unity neither is the total a manifold . . . Thus it is
not true to speak of it [matter, the unlimited] as being solely in flux.
7. It is inevitably necessary to think of all as contained within one
nature; one nature must hold and encompass all; . . . But within the
unity There, the several entities have each its own distinct existence.
10. When it takes lot with multiplicity, Being becomes Number
by the fact of awakening to manifoldness;
13. If, then, unity is more pronounced in the continuous, and
more again where there is no separation by part, this is clearly because
there exists, in real existence, something which is a Nature or
Principle of Unity.
14. . . . while continuous quantity exists, discrete quantity does
not-and this though continuous quantity is measured by the
discrete.
So what are we saying here?.That reasonable questions can be asked about the level of natural variation of climate “states” We can ask this say for example in the question of say “solar-gcr coupling by correctly posing the questions eg.GCR.
Q1) Do GCR change the state of the earths atmosphere and hence climate state?
A1) Yes,this is not controversial attribute eg Crutzen 1975, Reid 1978.This is a well developed theory.
Q2) Where would one expect to see the “signature” of GCR forcing ?
A2) In the stratosphere , and in the Polar regions.
Q3) why to A2 ?
A3) There are two limiting qualities
A3.1)the atmospheric cutoff (where the density of the atmosphere precludes lower energy GCR from penetrating EG Dorfman 2004.
A3.2)The Geomagnetic cutoff EG Stormer
Q4) Is there any observable trend in GCR from the Neutron monitors(and distinguishable from solar cycle modulation?.
A4) No.
Q5) Is there any observable trend in GCR flux from other instruments?
A6) Yes.
Q7) Where ?
A7) In the stratosphere eg Bazilevskaya and Svirzhevskaya, 1998 On the stratospheric measurements of cosmic rays, Space Sci. Rev., 85, 31-521. Stozhkov et al., 2000; cf Ahluwalia, 2000
Over a 30-year period the solar minimum value of the stratospheric flux decreases by ~2.5%
Bieber 2007 notes
A long-term decline has also been reported in the >95 MeV proton rate measured aboard the IMP 7 and IMP 8 satellites [Ahluwalia and Lopate, 2001].
Hence the conundrum.Real climate like to tell the world that there is no “trend”in gcr (and if one only uses the NM) one could say ok.However if we use other observables we can falsify that.

Dear Ron de Haan,
Thanks a lot! I’ve tried to answer your questions. I’ve numbered my answers:
A. Is it possible to update the graph in the articles to our current day and time.
1- Yes, it is possible, as long as NASA releases the database obtained from Voyagers I and II after the period indicated in my article, or at least for the next 14 months. It seems a new article on the matter is in preparation and perhaps it has been an impediment for us, outside NASA, to have access to those databases.
B. Does the position of the shock Bow vary with the strength of the Earths Magnetic field and the current Solar Minimum?
If this is the case what would be its current position and what would be the implementation for the travel time of the IIGC to reach Earth
2- The subject is still not clear. The present calculation proposes a distance of 80 to 84 AU, which is the distance that we could consider it’s the shortest distance from the Earth to the Shock Bow, taking into account that under conditions of solar maxima the distance would be about 95 UA, on condition that the intensity of the currents of interstellar plasma are “normal”. All we can give for sure is that Voyagers encountered something massive and anomalous out there, at a distance of 84-90 AU from Earth, and that, as the solar wind weakens, the intensity of the interstellar plasma, which could hit on planets, increases. This would be valid for highly energized particles because when the solar wind is strong, the weakly energized particles are those which overcome the trajectory of the solar wind in crosscurrent.
C. Is our solar system currently effected by the gas cloud mentioned in the 1978 article to dominate our climate for the next 10.000 years, confirmed by Voyager I and II measurements?
3- Definitely, yes, it is; although we could conjecture that we would be barely clearing the border of the cosmic cloud and that few decades stay ahead for our Solar System gets inside the center of the cosmic cloud. I wrote a note in red in my article in reference to some criticisms made on Vidal Madjaar’s observations; what satellites are corroborating currently is a verification of Madjaar’s predictions.
D. What could be the consequence of this cloud for life on Earth?
4- I think it would not be of severe consequences for life on Earth. Our Solar System has crossed many cosmic clouds many times and nothing “weird” has happened. My speculation would be most on the kind of species which would survive to the increased radiation and Earth”s electrodynamic changes and which ones would evolve favorably or would perish.
E. Perhaps off topic:
Last year German Scientists found evidence of a sudden shift in the Earth’s climate
into a Glaciations Fase within a period of 1 year caused by a radical shift of the jet streams and wind patterns.
Is there any evidence that the found mechanism could trigger such an event?
5- I don’t know, but it could be possible if the geomagnetic field affects to the jet streams and wind patterns. Something very interestingly new and that could be related with the German scientists’ finding is the discovery of a “mysterious” electric charge in the Moon dust and an increase of Moon’s magnetism. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/21nov_abbas.htm and http://www.astrobio.net/news/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1949&theme=Printer
F. Joe D’Aleo just posted a response stating that at this moment in time a major warming of the Stratosphere is taking place.
Is it possible to simulate this event based on your theory?
6- Of course it is possible; however, I have not the complete database, as I have said in # 1. I will be insisting on the issue until someone at NASA has mercy and send me the complete database.

As time goes by the emergence of studies that claim causes for warming other than CO2 will eradicate the AGW Doctrine.
This is another example:
A European Study claims that the clean air in Europe is responsible for 10-20% of the day time warming in Western Europe and 50% of the day time warming in Eastern Europe. Combine this effect with the ICR effects, an objective presentation of the temps statistics and tell me what’s left of AGW?
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ngeo414.html

Greg Goodknight (14:35:48) :

The best independent real world verifications of Svensmark and the rest of the cosmic crowd include Shaviv & Veizer (2003) who, one working astrophysics and the other geochemistry, found they’d independently produced the same basic graph, but one was for temperatures over the Phanerozoic and the other for galactic cosmic ray flux.

The evidence for that “correlation” is rather contrived unfortunately Greg. We could discuss that if you like.
However a more serious problem with that hypothesis is that Veizer himself has reassessed the plaeotemperature and has shown (at least to his own satisfaction) that a full cycle of the supposed CRF-temperature link is dis-correlated (Veizer now shows that the early Silurian was very warm when the supposed CRF-temperature “correlation” predicts a cold period). In fact Veizer now considers that it’s atmospheric carbon dioxide that drives/amplifies increased global temperatures (see citation and abstract below). Again that doesn’t mean that the CRF-temperature hypothesis isn’t of potential interest. However it’s a hypothesis which doesn’t accord with real world evidence as shown by the proponents themselves (Veizer….Svensmark….see my posts above).
R.E. Carne, J.M. Eiler, J. Veizer et al (2007) “Coupling of surface temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations during the Palaeozoic era” Nature 449, 198-202
Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations seem to have been several times modern levels during much of the Palaeozoic era (543–248 million years ago), but decreased during the Carboniferous period to concentrations similar to that of today1, 2, 3. Given that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, it has been proposed that surface temperatures were significantly higher during the earlier portions of the Palaeozoic era1. A reconstruction of tropical sea surface temperatures based on the 18O of carbonate fossils indicates, however, that the magnitude of temperature variability throughout this period was small4, suggesting that global climate may be independent of variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Here we present estimates of sea surface temperatures that were obtained from fossil brachiopod and mollusc shells using the ‘carbonate clumped isotope’ method5—an approach that, unlike the 18O method, does not require independent estimates of the isotopic composition of the Palaeozoic ocean. Our results indicate that tropical sea surface temperatures were significantly higher than today during the Early Silurian period (443–423 Myr ago), when carbon dioxide concentrations are thought to have been relatively high, and were broadly similar to today during the Late Carboniferous period (314–300 Myr ago), when carbon dioxide concentrations are thought to have been similar to the present-day value. Our results are consistent with the proposal that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations drive or amplify increased global temperatures1, 6.

Erl:
You are likely outstripping my awareness(in fact, 1-2 ought probably to be 2-3 degrees).
I did note the recent NASA release indicating(I gathered during minima) that the heretofore required IMF flipping south was incomplete; a more serious conduit of the charged particle streaming occurs with IMF north.
My intuition is that the direct heating of the (current cool and dense) Ionosphere is circumvented. This might lead to UV heating of lower layers, despite the low levels of this spectrum at minimum(no flares since Feb. 2007), as a higher percentage passes thru to them.

foinavon (02:15:09) :
R.E. Carne, J.M. Eiler, J. Veizer et al (2007) “Coupling of surface temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations during the Palaeozoic era” Nature 449, 198-202
from Berner (2001
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Monckton2.jpg
I do not see any correlation:
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate/gores_10_errors_old_and_new_scientific_mistakes_and_exaggerations_in_an_int/
Obviously is spoiled to change the discussion to a field that you know is a dominant characteristics.
But. I know that you will respond.
The paleoproxy data for contemporaneous CO2 and temperature data is reviewed in detail here:
D.L. Royer (2006) “CO2-forced climate thresholds during the Phanerozoic” Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta 70, 5665-5675.
Even more recent studies supplement the information in Royers compilation and cover additional periods with new data sets right through the past several hundreds of millions of years:
R.E. Carne, J.M. Eiler, J. Veizer et al (2007) “Coupling of surface temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations during the Palaeozoic era” Nature 449, 198-202
W. M. Kurschner et al (2008) “The impact of Miocene atmospheric carbon dioxide fluctuations on climate and the evolution of the terrestrial ecosystem” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 105, 499-453.
D. L. Royer (2008) “Linkages between CO2, climate, and evolution in deep time” Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105, 407-408
Zachos JC (2008) “An early Cenozoic perspective on greenhouse warming and carbon-cycle dynamics” Nature 451, 279-283.
Doney SC et al (2007) “Carbon and climate system coupling on timescales from the Precambrian to the Anthropocene” Ann. Rev. Environ. Resources 32, 31-66.
Horton DE et al (2007) “Orbital and CO2 forcing of late Paleozoic continental ice sheets” Geophys. Res. Lett. L19708 (Oct. 11 2007).
B. J. Fletcher et al. (2008) “Atmospheric carbon dioxide linked with Mesozoic and early Cenozoic climate change” Nature Geoscience 1, 43-48.
FM

Bill Illis (08:14:39) :

To foinavon.
Early Silurian (443Mya to 423Mya)
– CO2: 4,500 ppm to 5,500 ppm

No those values are rather too high I think. The proxy CO2 data are in the range 3000 – 4000 ppm for this period, certainly for the later parts that overlap Veizer’s revised paleotemp data. One needs to go a bit futher back in time to get proxy CO2 data that goes up to 5000 ppm and above. Of course there is some uncertaintly in all of these data…
Again these data are compiled in Royer’s review of this subject:
D.L. Royer (2006) “CO2-forced climate thresholds during the Phanerozoic” Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta 70, 5665-5675.

Question – Do such cosmic rays have variations in intensity depending on where they originate? For example, can we be more specific about where on the globe increases of cloud cover occur and correlate this information with the direction and intensity of these cosmics ray?

foinavon
I agree with you:
“Of course there is some uncertaintly in all of these data… ”
2008 …..is Palaeozoic era?
The rule of the game is this;
Structural uncertainty
Indicative examples of sources:
Inadequate models, incomplete or competing conceptual frameworks, lack
of agreement on model structure, ambiguous system boundaries or
definitions, significant processes or relationships wrongly specified or not
considered.
Typical approaches or considerations:
Specify assumptions and system definitions clearly, compare models with
observations for a range of conditions,assess maturity of the underlying science and degree to which understanding is based on fundamental concepts tested in other areas.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-uncertaintyguidancenote.pdf

Dear Lucy Skywalker,
Thanks a lot for your comment. I’ll try to answer your question on the periodicity of the Flux of ICR, which could be the answer for Carlo’s question: In 2003, V.E. Timofeev and coworkers from the “Yuri Gagarin Shafer Institute of Cosmo-physical Research and Aeronomy” in Yakutsk, Russia studied the periodicity of the increasing intensity of Galactic Cosmic Rays and they found it is around 243 days (around eight months) due to an Interplanetary Magnetic Field cavity situated near Jupiter which acts like a magnetic bottleneck that traps most of the particles incoming from the interstellar medium. They also found that the Cosmic Rays do not flow in a parallel trajectory with respect to the Solar System equator, but directly perpendicular to the Solar System plane. I think the latter is due to the tilt of the Solar System with respect to the galactic plane, which is near to 90°. The evidence on the origin of the suprathermal and highly energetic particles populations resides on the intensity of the anisotropy of the Cosmic Rays detected by the Voyagers I and II, which is extremely high, for saying it in some way, while the anisotropy of the Solar Cosmic Rays decreases as they reach the termination shock and scatter in all directions as they cross the Termination Shock, especially during the high flux of a streaming away from the Sun. Nevertheless, I adopted the period of 14 months for not creating confusion with the highly energetic electrons towards the Sun emitted by Jupiter. On the other hand, the present encounter of the Solar System (SS) with the Cosmic Cloud could coincide with the orbital period of the SS around the galactic center, which is about 225 million years. Vidal-Madjar et al calculated the distance at which the cloud was in 1978 and concluded that it was at 0.03 ps (9.3 x 10^11 Km) away from the SS and moving towards the SS at a speed of 20 Km/s, which would represent a period of about 50 years. However, as the SS is moving also towards the cloud, the vectors sum offers a speed of 237 Km/s, which, as Alfred Vidal-Madjar pointed up in his article, has abridged the time of encounter to only four years, i.e. the encounter took place in 1982. Any correlation with the beginning of the hard period of global warming is mere coincidence (?)

Anthony,
I am an avid observer of WUWT and greatly respect it’s current objectives and it’s achievements. However I don’t wish to appear paranoid but if you look through the last few threads the “Team” are swarming all over your blogs like a rash. As I see it, as a lurker, they appear to be the equivalent of hired guns brought in to disrupt this blogsite. They are persuasive, articulate and full of information that only someone employed professionally would have time to assimilate. One as to wonder what there objective is and who sent them.
From my own perspective there is no way I could compete with their knowledge, and I think this applies to the vast majority of amateur blogers on this site. I’m sure though that what ever our qualifications or credentials most of us have the innate ability to recognise “dog dirt” when we see it. No matter how much the dog is excused, no matter how much the dog is defended, no matter how scented they try to make it, no matter where they try to sweep it, the inescapably odour is that of “dog dirt“. They live in a virtual world, indoctrinating each other with the theology, until they are cast out as missionaries to convert or subvert anybody who is not a believer.
Sorry if I appear too biblical but it all seems to fit, and no doubt the Team will be all over me, not like a rash, but more like a dog.
REPLY: I think that is a bit much. Please tone down such accusations, as they are without serious merit as far as I can tell, and I know who visits. – Anthony

Here’s a serious question for the many experts that roam this blog:
Establishing that there is a correlation between solar activity, sunspots, and global temperatures, I am interested in “thermal inertia” and the possibility of a delayed response when it comes to arctic sea ice levels. In particular, how long of a delay do you think there is? In other words, how many years do you think it will be before we really start seeing the effects of this solar downturn on NH sea ice levels? I know there already has been some rebound, but I think there’s still quite a ways to go.

David Porter (13:11:50) :
…if you look through the last few threads the “Team” are swarming all over your blogs like a rash. As I see it, as a lurker, they appear to be the equivalent of hired guns brought in to disrupt this blogsite. They are persuasive, articulate and full of information that only someone employed professionally would have time to assimilate. One as to wonder what there objective is and who sent them.
You come across some articulate and informed posters who shoot half-baked ideas out of the water and rather than tackling what they say you fall back upon the ad hominem insinuation that those who disagree with you are “hired guns”.
Science is articulate, informed, and intelligent. If you really want this to be a useful science blog then I’d suggest you get used to it.

Ok, Ok, hang on a second here….
So the sun has something to do with the temperature of the planet?
We need to consult with the Goracle.