Svensmark has a new paper and it is a doozy: Cosmic ray decreases affect atmospheric aerosols and clouds (full text PDF).
The major conclusion: “A link between the Sun, cosmic rays, aerosols, and liquid-water clouds appears to exist on a global scale…”
This paper confirms 13 years of discoveries that suggest a key role for cosmic rays in climate change. It links observable variations in the world’s cloudiness to laboratory experiments in Copenhagen showing how cosmic rays help generate atmospheric aerosols.
This is important, because it confirms the existence of a sun-earth atmospheric modulation mechanism for clouds and aerosols. It is seen in an event called a Forbush Decrease, which A Forbush decrease is a rapid decrease in the observed galactic cosmic raycoronal mass ejection (CME). It occurs due to the magnetic field of the plasma solar wind sweeping some of the galactic cosmic rays away from Earth. Here is what the Oulu Neutron Monitor plot looked like during such and event on May15th, 2005:
When the CME hit Earth, the magnetic field of the CME deflects the Galactic Cosmic Rays and the secondary particle flux (Neutrons) decreases. In this graph there is also another Forbush decrease visible, which was caused by another, not that powerful flare, which CME passed Earth a few days before this event.
See more from CosmicRays.org Now at last, a linkage has been established on earth showing such events affect cloud cover and aerosols. Luboš Motl gives a good summary ina post from a few days ago, shown below.
Forbush decreases confirm cosmoclimatology
By Luboš Motl
Recall that cosmoclimatology of Henrik Svensmark and others postulates that the galactic cosmic rays are able to create “seeds” of low-lying clouds that may cool the Earth’s surface. A higher number of cosmic rays can therefore decrease the temperature. The creation of the cloud nuclei is caused by ionization and resembles the processes in a cloud chamber.
The fluctuations of the cosmic ray flux may occur due to the variable galactic environment as well as the solar activity: a more active Sun protects us from a part of the cosmic rays. It means that a more active Sun decreases the amounts of low-lying clouds, which means that it warms the Earth.
Because the low-lying clouds remove 30 Watts per squared meter in average (over time and the Earth) or so, one has to be very careful not only about the very existence of the clouds but also about the variations of cloudiness by 5% or so which translates to a degree of temperature change.
A systematic effect on the clouds – e.g. one of the cosmic origin – is a nightmare for the champions of the silly CO2 toy model of climatology because the cloud variations easily beat any effect of CO2. Two alarmists, Sloan and Wolfendale, wanted to rule out Svensmark’s theory by looking at the Forbush decreases, specific events of a solar origin named after Scott Forbush who studied them 6 decades ago, involving the plasma. However, their paper was incorrect.
In April 2008, this blog (The Reference Frame) published the following relevant article:
Sloan and Wolfendale complained that no cosmoclimatological signal could have been seen during the Forbush decreases, i.e. short episodes when the activity of our beloved star decreases the amount of cosmic rays reaching Earth. However, Nir Shaviv explained that it should be expected that such a signal is not seen in the averaged monthly data they had used.
In order to see the “tiger in the jungle”, using Svensmark’s words from a press release
that will be published tomorrow (I am allowed to read it now because my uncle lives in Melbourne which already has August), and in order to separate these clean effects from the huge meteorological noise, one needs to increase the temporal resolution to several days and also cover the whole globe to dilute the effects of local weather.
Newest paper
Tomorrow, on August 1st, 2009, Geophysical Research Letters will publish a new paper by Henrik Svensmark, Torsten Bondo, and Jacob Svensmark:
The People’s Voice (summary of the paper)
Cosmic ray decreases affect atmospheric aerosols and clouds (full text).
When you click the second link above and obtain an error message, press alt/d and enter to reload the URL: without a direct external link, the PDF file will be displayed correctly. Or open the Google cache as PDF-like HTML.
Svensmark and his collaborators have looked at 26 Forbush events since 1987 (those that were strong according to their impact on the spectrum seen in the low troposphere where it matters): most of them occur close to the solar maxima (in the middle of the 11-year cycles). The observations with a much better temporal resolution imply that the mass of water stored in clouds decreases by 4-7%, with the minimum reached after a nearly 1-week delay needed for the cloud nuclei to get mature. Roughly three billions of tons of water droplets suddenly disappear from the atmosphere (they remain there as vapor, which is more likely to warm the air than to cool it down).
An independent set of measurements has also shown that the amount of aerosols, i.e. potential nuclei of the new clouds, also decreases. All these “strength vs decrease” graphs display a lot of noise but the negative slopes are almost always significant at the 95% level (with one dataset being an exception, at 92%, which is still higher than the official IPCC confidence level that climate change is mostly man-made).
Each Forbush decrease can therefore warm up the Earth by the same temperature change as the effect of all carbon dioxide emitted by the mankind since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. While you might think that such an effect is temporary and lasts a few weeks only, it is important to notice that similar variations in the solar activity, the solar magnetic field, and the galactic cosmic rays take place at many different conceivable frequencies, so there are almost certainly many effects whose impact on the temperature – through the clouds – is at least equal to the whole effect of man-made carbon dioxide.
|
18 votes
|
It would be great if professor Svensmark is invited to address the UN Copenhaguen Meeting on “climate change”.
Will the first world stubbornly insist in destroying their economies by the application of anti CO2 measures?
What is it behind if this is done anyway so? Can anyone reasonably explain it?
Anthony;
FYI if you go noaa and look up july temp. graph from 1931 to 2009 you will see that the temp. of the U.S. shows not temp gain for the last 78 years!
You have to enter 1931 and 2009 in both data parameters
Record highs AND lows are being set. They always will be. As you add more data points to the mess, you’re going to get more outliers.
Adding to my comment at (09:16:37) . At 1988-1992 both things happened together: An increase in TSI and a low cloud cover caused by the deep in GCR, resulting in the heating of the sea, which after a time lag of about 6 years produced the big el nino.
Bret (07:42:23) :
So why is there a several day delay between the Forbush event and the decrease in clouds when clouds only live for a few hours?
The FD doesn’t affect currently existing clouds at the time of the event, it affects the propensity for clouds to form ~7 days later. Isn’t this obvious?
It does not matter how many clouds could cover the world …it keeps on fire !(according to Noaa):
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomnight.8.3.2009.gif
So perhaps we should also ask and observe:
What happens when we experience a sudden burst of Cosmic Rays?
Louisville Kentucky Record Flooding 8-4-2009
It would be interesting to hear any comments from Louisville….
Perhaps this is for the Weather Is Not Climate department…
Or perhaps not…
Very interesting times…
Svennsmark is one interesting fellow. I posted this five-part video series about this research on my blog months ago, and it is just fascinating.
Here’s a great quote from Svennsmark:
“Instead of thinking of clouds as a result of the climate, it’s actually showing that the climate is a result of the clouds, because the clouds take their orders from the stars.”
http://algorelied.com/?p=2423
I’d invite Anthony and the moderators to post this series on WUWT
“The FD doesn’t affect currently existing clouds at the time of the event, it affects the propensity for clouds to form ~7 days later. Isn’t this obvious?”
Not really. We know tropical cu-nims form every day sweeping vast volumes of air clear of CCNs by putting them through a cu-nim.
I’d look closely at how early cu-nims start immediately after an event.
Incidentally convection does not stop at the troposphere despite the inversion, the sheer momentum carries cu-nims well into the troposphere around the tropics. Which is probably why the modellers will never see their ‘hot-spot’.
Sandy (10:11:31) :
Not really. We know tropical cu-nims form every day sweeping vast volumes of air clear of CCNs by putting them through a cu-nim.
The air swept clear of CCNs is not the air in that same place 7 days later.
…but but but, the ‘science’…i thought it was settled???…wasn’t the ‘debate’ supposed to be over???
Ed Scott (07:52:00) :
NASA showing the way to a cooler Earth.
———————————————————–
The plan put forward by Dr Laughlin, and his colleagues Don Korycansky and Fred Adams, involves carefully directing a comet or asteroid so that it sweeps close past our planet and transfers some of its gravitational energy to Earth
Do you conceive something more stupid?
Are these the “new age” most respectful “scientists”?
For another recent paper by different authors that describes a possible thunderstorm cosmic ray link see below. It is a long paper but worth the read. Towards the middle it turns to a mechanism whereby cosmic ray bursts may interact with thunderclouds.
http://crd.yerphi.am/files/Reports/CRD_report-2009.pdf
Well halelujah. I have been convinced, since I read ‘Willie’ Wei-Hock Soon’s book, that the sun is linked to earth climate in more ways than simply the TSI (solar constant). No I can’t claim that I understood all the details. And I didn’t need much prompting from Hendrik Svensmark and his team to embrace the thesis he puts forward; since the cloud nucleation concept had seemed apparent to me (without proof) many years ago when I actually studied cosmic rays in school; (with absolutely no inkling of the important climate role.)
The Wentz et al paper from Science July -7 2007 convinced me of the cloud feedback control of earth’s temperature; although they didn’t specifically address that; but I concluded that you can’t get a 7% increase in total global precipitation (for a one deg C mean temperature rise) without a similar increase in ‘precipitable’ cloud cover; providing the control mechanism I was sure existed.
I haven’t read this new Svensmark paper yet; but I suspect that his idea is getting harder to ignore all the time; and this new work couldn’t come at a better time; given that the current US administration and Congress seem determined to drive a final nail in the coffin of the once great United States of America; and all over a totally phony and thoroughly discredited concept; namely the Arrhenius theory of a CO2 “climate sensitivity”.
I suspect that as time progresses; that Svensmark’s team is going to build this CR connection puzzle to the point where it can no longer be ignored by the ‘deniers’ of the MMGWCC religion.
I hope there is a Physics Nobel Prize in Hendrik Svensmark’s future; methinks that is one that would be well earned. Humanity will owe him and his team a great debt, if they can rid us of the CO2 genii; and its borderline criminal curb on energy resource availability.
George
Maybe the delay can be attributed to the Hadley cell? If the GCRs induce CN just above the sea surface, then the flow of the Hadley cell would feed those into the tropics.
Pamela, I’m not sure I understand your point but if I have understood it and understand Svensmark’s work, it isn’t the cosmic ray itself that causes the mainstay of ionisation events, it’s the shower of secondary particles from collisions in the atmosphere with the original ray.
As an appendix to the above; the July 24-2009 issue of Science has a paper on page 460 by Amy C Clement, Robert Burgman, and Joel R. Norris claiming observational evidence of a Positive Low Level Cloud Feedback. They start by stating that low level clouds provide a net cooling effect (who would have guessed that); and then they proceed to twist that into positive feedback.
Well actually they cheat, and combine low level clouds with mid level clouds; on the theory that ; well who can tell the difference between low and mid level clouds anyway; but they of course ascribe their results to low level clouds, although they don’t say just how come they know they are low level clouds, and not mid level clouds.
Well it is all done witrh statistics from COADS and ISCCP, and SST, and SLP, not to mention PATMOS-X; and since I don’t have a cell phone, I don’t do ‘texting’ whatwever that is, so you can descramble those yuppie terms for yourselves.
I found the paper confusing on a brief scan; but I agree with the claim that clouds cause cooling (any clouds), since by definition they must block (some) solar energy from reaching the surface; ergo cooling QED.
In view of Wentz et al, since warming causes more clouds (maybe 7% per deg C), and clouds cause cooling; that sounds like negative feedback to me; yet somehow Clement et al come out with positive feedback. The paper includes an e-mail to the principal researcher at the Rosentiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Miami; Division of Meteorology and Physical Oceanography. I think I will ask her to send me a picture of their owl box heat island to compare with the University of Arizona one.
But I truly am going to try and figure out how they get from cloud cooling to positive feedback; that’s got to be a humdinger.
George
Leif Svalgaard writes…”My main criticism of of the paper is the cherry picking of Forbush Decreases, namely selecting only those that had a large effect. What I would have done would be to split the data into three groups …
That would have been convincing; as it stands now, this paper is yet another contradicting paper on FDs. That they didn’t do the separation into three groups may be telling… Perhaps it didn’t pan out. Scientists rarely publish negative tests of their own theories.”
As an amateur astronomer I’m intrigued by Svensmark’s idea, but I’m quite skeptical. Leif’s criticisms concern me. As an engineer and technologist, not a scientist, I’m unclear on the boundary where the proponent of a scientific hypothethis needs to give up on the hypothethis. It bothers my idealistic view of how science should be done when Leif says that folks rarely publish negative data. That’s cherry picking.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/090504-sun-global-cooling_2.html
A passage from the, above, link:
“The visible light doesn’t vary that much, but UV varies 20 percent, [and] x-rays can vary by a factor of ten,” Hall said. “What we don’t understand so well is the impact of that differing spectral irradiance.”
“Solar UV light, for example, affects mostly the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere, where the effects are not as noticeable to humans. But some researchers suspect those effects could trickle down into the lower layers, where weather happens.”
“In general, recent research has been building a case that the sun has a slightly bigger influence on Earth’s climate than most theories have predicted.”
Pamela Gray (08:30:00) :
In case you missed it in another thread, there is a “fall” major storm tract and track (NOAA’s word, not mine) heading to the Northwest states that will likely bring lotsa clouds, heavy rain, and record low daytime temps. It’s source is of course the ocean. Currently, we are in El Nino neutral territory for the month. Which to me means cold and wet, not warm and wet (El Nino condition), and not cold and dry (La Nina condition).
Heard on the NOAA Wx radio this morning too.Loved the -“This is NOT
associated with EL Nino OR “Climate Change” and then” The extended forcast is for a retun to cooler and wetter than normal conditions for the rest of:
(what is laugingly referred to as ‘summer’-my addition)) I think you have it nailed….
Well, with all the discussion of RC, I succumbed to curiousity and went over there. I cannot believe the contortions of hand-waving, obfuscation, and deliberate misinterpretation in that post! The Svensmark paper may indeed be worthy of criticism as Lief says. Most studies have holes that need to be filled, and the suggested improvements will be directly proportional to the number of colleagues commenting. But, I was frankly embarrassed by the childishness displayed.
I’m off to wash my eyeballs, now. Thanks for the interesting post!
Real Climate: The paper doesn’t provide any proof that GCR affect the low clouds
I’d like RC to provide proof that man is increasing global temperatures through CO2 emissions.
George E. Smith (10:59:18)
I hope there is a Physics Nobel Prize in Hendrik Svensmark’s future
Don’t wish him bad. That prize is only for levogyres’ scientists and fake ones.
George E. Smith (11:18:34) :But I truly am going to try and figure out how they get from cloud cooling to positive feedback
That’s easy: It’s Fred’s blanket!
“My main criticism of of the paper is the cherry picking of Forbush Decreases, namely selecting only those that had a large effect.”
Svensmark explained that small FD’s don’t have an effect. I thought this was perfectly understood. Why include something that is not germain to your hypothesis?