From Nature blog: Sunny days for CLOUD experiment
An experiment designed to investigate the link between solar activity and the climate has its first results in the bag. At the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco today, Joachim Curtius presented data from the first runs of the CLOUD (‘cosmics leaving outdoor droplets’) experiment at CERN – the European particle physics lab outside of Geneva.
The experiment has a long and bumpy history. The idea is to test the theory that cosmic rays spur the formation of particles in the air that nucleate clouds, in turn making skies cloudier and the planet cooler. Researchers have noted a dearth of sunspots (which is linked to more cosmic rays) during the ‘little ice age’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and a peak in sunspots (linked to a drop in cosmic rays) during the late 1980s, when global cloudiness dropped by about 3% (see Nature‘s feature on the project). No one knows how big this effect might be, and the idea that it might account for a big chunk of the warming over the last century is highly controversial.
CLOUD uses a particle beam from CERN as a stand-in for cosmic rays, and fires them through an ultra-clean steel chamber filled with select atmospheric gases, to see if and how particles that could nucleate clouds are formed. Project head Jasper Kirkby proposed the experiment back in 1998. But it had a hard time getting off the ground – perhaps in part because Kirkby received bad press for emphasizing the importance of cosmic rays to climate change (see this story from the National Post). CLOUD finally got going in 2006, and they started work with the full kit in November 2009 (here’s a CERN video update about that).
The results haven’t yet been published, so Curtius declined to discuss the details. But the important thing is that the project is working – they have seen sulphuric acid and water combine to make particles when blasted by the CERN beam, for example, in a way that matches predictions of the most recent models. The data should help the team to quantify how much of an impact the Sun is having on climate within 2-3 years, Curtius says – though there are a lot more pieces of the puzzle to fill in.
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Dr. Roy Spencer has mentioned that it doesn’t take much in the way of cloud cover changes to add up to the “global warming signal” that has been observed. He writes in The Great Global Warming Blunder:
The most obvious way for warming to be caused naturally is for small, natural fluctuations in the circulation patterns of the atmosphere and ocean to result in a 1% or 2% decrease in global cloud cover. Clouds are the Earth’s sunshade, and if cloud cover changes for any reason, you have global warming — or global cooling.
This graph certainly lends credence to the theory:
Here’s a longer record of cosmic rays:
See also this WUWT story:
Something to be thankful for! At last: Cosmic rays linked to rapid mid-latitude cloud changes
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It’s actually pretty simple: Temperature changes PRECEDE CO2 changes; not FOLLOW them.
And WARM SURFACE conditions PRECEDE HIGH CLOUD conditions; not FOLLOW them.
But that’s not inconsistent with cosmic rays causing clouds, is it?
In a situation that had 30% cloud cover in a low ray period, there might be 34% in a high ray period (as a result of forming more quickly, rather than more cloudily).
Likewise a situation with 5% cloud cover might get 7% as a result of more rays causing quicker condensation.
So the rays don’t “cause” cloudiness, but that is not inconsistent with them affecting it.
Since the warming comes down a few percentages either side of equilibrium that might make the crucial difference. Might.
How sweet of Sol to arrange to go spotless just as this new paper is released.
Perhaps Douglas Adams was on to something. Those whom the gods……..
“Caleb says: “…When I think back to the blasting I used to get, back around 2007, when I so much as suggested the sun had any influence on warming and/or cooling periods on earth, it amazes me. I wonder if those folk will ever get around to eating crow, or their hats, or whether they will simply fade away quietly, and hope no one remembers how amazingly rude they once were.”
TheChuckr replies: “Nah, they’ll claim that it is exactly what is predicted by global warming “science” and the models.”
Yes. In the 2 or 3 year interim, they’ll torture the temperature records some more and then quietly twiddle their knobs until the models crank out postdictions that mimic the altered record. Vwallah! “We said it all along… robust… worse than we thought… unprecedented…” The models probably have dozens upon dozens of coefficients to tweak–they’ll get virtually any output they want. Of course, the models’ skill at prediction will tank, but all they have to do is get the IPCC appointed Guardians of the Earth before the predictions fail. I’ll bet they get nifty uniforms!
Darell C. Phillips says:
December 16, 2010 at 10:51 am
Sadly the preposterous awards to Gore and Obama have traduced the entire Nobel concept.
If Svensmark and Kirby do get a Nobel, make sure it’s areal one, not that Peace Prize they give out like candy to murderers.
tallbloke says:
December 16, 2010 at 8:31 am
I would like to see Svensmark and Kirby jointly recieve a Nobel Prize one day in the not too distant future
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and Al Gore’s humbly returned to Olso.
So Hansen’s et al’s cli-mythology is over and done with.
Does that real clean science magic really fit in with all the pseudo science crap that are otherwise portrayed on display, all naked like, here, where it also runs the risk of becoming smeared with climate hippie’s excrement in surf-by-snideness commenting?
tallbloke says:
I would like to see Svensmark and Kirby jointly recieve a Nobel Prize one day in the not too distant future.
I concur. If his model is corroborated — which all indications suggest it will be — there is no doubt that Svensmark deserves a Nobel prize.
3 years is a good-enough and fair time for Hansen, Jones, Briffa et al kooks to find another job.
David S: your
So which effect dominates?
Depends on cloud altitude and time of day. High clouds tend to allow cooling at night, and warming during the day, while low clouds cause warming at night, and cooling in the daytime.
It also depends on the dew point. A hot clear day can become a warm night, if cloud cover forms during the evening.
But, the warming effect from lack of clouds should dominate. Assuming equal galactic Cosmic ray (GCR) concentration globally, there should be less cloud on the daylight side, NOT forming in otherwise marginal areas where sufficient “seeding” would form cloud cover if not for the lack of GCR. This non-cloud formation would be from solar heating, and marginally (or maybe more) from being in the solar GCR “shadow”.
This paper suggests that GCR preferentially forms lower cloud cover (3 km). There is a 2%-3% change in lower cover with changes in GCR, but less than 1% in high cloud cover.
http://orbit.dtu.dk/getResource?recordId=205271&objectId=1&versionId=1
@ur momisugly Olen
I’m with you. I’m an AGW skeptic but I believe we shouldn’t burn all the fossil fuels we been blessed with, for a variety of reasons. Our research dollars would be much better spent on nuclear fuel cycle improvements and fusion research instead of being wasted on “settled science”. That being said, throwing money at the current crop of physicists, who seem to have allowed themselves to be completely duped by the physics dropouts who have become credentialed climate scientists, seems like a waste, too. We need to de-fund PPL and other existing lines of research that have putrefied and start over with a more private-sector capitalistic approach to research, such as used by NASA to accomplish the moon landings (and not used much since).
It would be big step forward to establish a firm relationship between clouds and cosmic rays. It would provide the ‘magnetic effect’ with a plausible mechanism, geomagnetic field is far stronger modulator of the CRs than the sunspot cycle.
I can see lot of uncertainty in the numbers since according to the graph cloud cover varies on average by only plus/minus 1%.
The Nobel Peace Prize selection is a completely separate process from all other Nobel awards
I had been waiting for this news ever since I stumbled upon Jasper Kirkby’s now famous lecture: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1181073 . I had no doubt about the outcome and I am sure that the panic that the warmists were in lately, even fudging the past records to ‘show’ that the decade just ended was the warmest on record, was in anticipation of the CERN CLOUD experiment outcome. Kirkby had been trying to carry out this experiment since the late ’90’s, but the warmists had great power then, even more than the geniuses at CERN. But to his credit, (and more so to Svensmark who practically had already proven the effect) Kirkby managed to go the subtle way and instead of saying: AGW is nonsense he reworded his original push by stating that the GCR’s effect is an unkown factor but could be large enough to be one the major forcings on the earth’s climate and therefore needs to be looked into. So he managed to get the go ahead and the funds for the CLOUD experiment. Now he and Svensmark must be the happiest people on this (currently freezing) planet.
I personally consider the science as settled now, that is, climate change is mostly natural and we 5 foot-8 inch of human beings have a very minor, if any, and insignificant effect on the climate.
So where do we go from here? Do we pull the plug on WUWT and its heroes and go home? Definitely not. We still need to keep on telling the truth, to save the planet, humanity, from the red/green cabal who defintely will not disband or disappear from sight. They have the money, the newspapers and a handful of alchemistic scientists who would continue to sell their scientific soul to the red-green politicians.
This international left-wing, world-dominating cabal are currently seeing their second temple, AGW, (their first was the Soviet Union) collapse within a span of twenty years. Their next trick could be ocean acidification/oxygen depletion, whatever, to try to keep their control on global energy sources. (He who controls energy controls the world).
But, as Forbes magazine publisher Steve Forbes optimistically asserted a few days ago, the whole world is “awash in energy.” This energy is in the form of hydrocabons, that energy that has produced the modern society, where people live to a ripe old age of 80+ years, can warm our homes in winter and cool them during the hot summer months, produce cheap, plentiful and healthy food for all, cheap medicines, fast and cheap travel etc etc.
But the green/left cabal does not want this, no matter what; over their dead bodies.
This is our next fight for the truth: WE HAVE CHEAP AND ABUNDANT ENERGY FOR ALL.
So, having proven that the energy sources that God or mother nature have provided us are not harming the planet in any way whatsoever, but actually increasing global food production due to the higher levels of CO2, we now need to tell the world that it is good for all humanity, especially the poor of the third world, that we get as much hydrocarbons as possible out of the bowels of the earth for the benefit of all and that the technology that was utilised two centuries ago, namely windmills and drying things by placing them in the sun will only send us back two centuries into the past.
Abiotic oil is now being found at levels that could only be described as abiotic and not biotic and there is more and more evidence that oil and natural gas are the product of geological activity and not dead dinasours or microbes.
And tell the UN that the OPEC cartel, like any other cartel must be delared illegal. Does any democratic government on this planet accept any type of commercial cartel/ No. So why should we accept OPEC?
I may have digressed a bit from the CERN CLOUD experiment results, and I apoligise for this, but I strongly feel that the future of our children and grand children does not depend on CO2 ppm, but on the price and availablity of energy, as has been the case for our recent ancestors of thelast two centuries, who have seen their lot improve one generation after another due to this energy revolution.
Something else may come to light when CERN Cloud is completed:
Not only will they have some physics to rest on (if Cloud pans out what they are attempting to prove), but they should have the tools to attempt to discriminate between the Solar portion of rejecting the GCR’s vs the Galactic contribution to how much GCR’s are attempting to come in. i.e. – variance in local Milky Way GCR’s.
Please buy and read “The Chilling Stars” by Svensmark and Calder.
Great news.
David S says:
December 16, 2010 at 8:32 am
Ok I see a strong correlation between cosmic rays and cloud cover. But what about temperature? The year 1998 had high cloud cover, but that was a warm year. Cloud cover has diminished since then and so has the earth’s temperature. That seems to imply that clouds have a net warming effect.
It’s certainly true that clouds can block sunlight and that produces cooling. But it’s also true that clouds can act like radiation shields, absorbing radiant energy leaving earth and reradiating part of it back to earth. That produces warming. So which effect dominates?
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David, NASA says that clouds are “negative forcing”, averaging the effects of all the clouds around the globe, cooling predominates.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Clouds/
David S says:
December 16, 2010 at 8:32 am
During the day it’s a no-brainer. Is it cooler in the shade or in the direct sun?
At night it’s a different story. Clouds slow down how fast the surface cools at night.
So it boils down to a matter of which effect is greater: clouds as reflectors of sunlight during the day or clouds as insulators at night.
Since the global ocean dominates the earth’s surface we can focus on that. Water has a very low albedo when the sun is high in the sky – very close to zero percent reflection. Clouds have albedos varying from 10% to 90%. High thin clouds are at the lower end of the albedo range and low thick clouds at the higher end.
On average the energy emitted by the surface at night is the same as the amount absorbed during the day. This must be true according to the most basic laws of thermodynamics. A cloud can at best cut the rate of surface heat loss at night by 50% as it absorbs 100% of upwelling infrared radiation and emits 50% back toward the surface. However that same cloud during the day can block 90% of the incoming energy. So the answer, given equal day/night cloud cover, would be that low clouds have a net cooling effect. High thin clouds don’t reflect visible light as well but they are still usually good infrared absorbers so the net effect of high thin clouds will tend towards surface warming.
I wouldn’t trust that graph of “low cloud cover” one tiny bit. Measuring the earth’s average albedo to an accuracy of 1% is a difficult task where even today various ways of trying to measure it are not in satisfactory agreement. Trying to estimate low cloud cover from satellite images is error prone because high and middle level clouds block the view of low level clouds.
Your inclination to look for global average temperature vs. cosmic ray flux correlation is on the right track IMO.
The problem is that this is but one small factor of all the variables that influence regional and global climate trends. Most of those factors are poorly understood. Some are cyclical and predictable while others are not. Cycles from one thing overlap cycles from other things with different periodicities. Trying to pick the influence of just one factor out of all that is like trying to determine how how a flea perched on an elephant’s ass influences the way it’s ass wobbles as it walks. Obviously if the flea will have some small influence if off-center but the problem is there are ticks, flies, bits of mud, imperfect symmetry, and a host of other factors besides the flea and many if not most of them outweigh a single flea.
About the only thing that can be called “settled science” is the greenhouse effect due to non-condensing greenhouse gases. If everything else was equal and the effect of greenhouse gases was independent of and had no influence on any other factors then yes Virginia more CO2 equals warmer surface temperatures. The problem IMO is that warming is a good thing for the biosphere especially when most of it occurs in higher northern latitudes during the night where it is most needed by green plants to extend growing seasons. More green plants means more animals that eat plants and more animals that eat animals. Moreover CO2 is well known to increase plant growth rate regardless of climate warming and it also reduces the amount of water the plants need to grow. For the entire living world more CO2 is undeniably a good thing and it remains a good thing far past the point where fossil fuel combustion can possibly raise it – there isn’t enough fossil fuel to raise it higher than it’s been during most of the earth’s history – a history overwhelmingly dominated by much warmer temperatures and far greater biomass – after all those rich fossil fuel beds were laid down during the time of great biological abundance.
Given the lack of understanding of most of the things that effect the climate the two things we do understand – GHG effect and CO2 influence on green plant producitivity – it’s absolutely friggin’ insane to want to lower atmospheric CO2 levels. The sane thing is to keep it growing and hope it might end the ice age and restore the earth to its normal state which is green from pole to pole.
roger says:
December 16, 2010 at 12:52 pm
“Sadly the preposterous awards to Gore and Obama have traduced the entire Nobel concept.”
The Peace Prize is done by a commitee of norwegian ex-politicians in Oslo. Its political, remember? So its often given just to promote some political agenda.
Dont forget that the Nobel Prize in Physics is quite another ballgame.
Its also from another group of people, in Sweden.
I would say the Nobel Prize in Physics still is something to admire.
Alex the skeptic says:
December 16, 2010 at 2:07 pm
Fossils fuels are abundant and cheap but they’re not unlimited and not free. As the good stuff in convienient locations near the surface are used up it becomes more expensive to recover and distribute. We’ve basically been picking the low hanging fruit nearest where we live first and now have to go farther and farther afield at higher cost to keep up with demand.
There is a vastly greater potential source of energy that promises to be cheaper than any fossil fuel ever was. That source is the sun. We simply need better technology to capture and distribute it in ways that are copacetic with current infrastructure – i.e. liquid fuels, natural gas, and electricity. Synthetic biology is quickly nearing the point where it can be leveraged to turn sunlight, water, and air into liquid fuels and natural gas. IMO photovoltaics, which are just another form of solid state electronics, will soon reach a point where it’s cheaper to turn sunlight into electricity than it is to generate it with a natural gas fired turbine (the current cheapest way to generate electricity). There remains a problem with electricity in storing it and I don’t see any great leaps forward on the horizon for that problem. So unless we get our photovoltaics in orbit where the sun shines 24 hours a day and transmit it to the surface where it’s needed via microwaves we’ll still be depending on other sources of electricity to fill the gaps when the sun isn’t shining. I’m hopeful that there will be a breakthrough in cost of lifting mass from surface to orbit (space elevator) but that technology seems farther off than the others.
“”””” vukcevic says:
December 16, 2010 at 1:55 pm
It would be big step forward to establish a firm relationship between clouds and cosmic rays. It would provide the ‘magnetic effect’ with a plausible mechanism, geomagnetic field is far stronger modulator of the CRs than the sunspot cycle.
I can see lot of uncertainty in the numbers since according to the graph cloud cover varies on average by only plus/minus 1%. “””””
How could we possibly know that since there is NO global cloud monitoring network (that is Nyquist compliant); and that is true both exytermally, and internally.
Clouds are typically scattered/broken, on a global scale and they change by the minute. It would take a monstrous optical monitoring network, to even measure th3e surface sunlight suffriciently well to come up with a 1% precision of global cloud cover; and such a network, would NOT be capable of meauring the cloud back radiated thermal spectrum.
Satellite observations could certainly monitor the cloud ALBEDO contribution to some extent; probably want to filter out the blue sky scattered light so the oceans appear black. But that can’t possibly also monitor the internal absorption of those clouds, for just sunlight to determine the surface solar total insolation.
!% knowledge of cloud cover is pure mythology, as far as obtaining an energy variation effect either SW (solar) ore LWIR (thermal).
I only had to read the first part of this post to realise that this is a “skeptic” experiment.
The very fact that it is testing a hypothesis using real data as opposed to some hypothetical computer generated world that climate scientists live in was enough to label this as a “skeptic” experiment.
Physicists have spent decades designing and building experiments to test their hypothesis and yet despite the fact that climate scientists get billions in funding they have failed to do so much as grow a tree and measure the impact of various environmental factors on its growth. But then since the science is settled why should they design real experiments.
“”””” Mooloo says:
December 16, 2010 at 12:21 pm
It’s actually pretty simple: Temperature changes PRECEDE CO2 changes; not FOLLOW them.
And WARM SURFACE conditions PRECEDE HIGH CLOUD conditions; not FOLLOW them.
But that’s not inconsistent with cosmic rays causing clouds, is it? “””””
Well my comments are related to a more fourth grade level science view of cloud formation; in the provision of the basic condensation conditions for water droplet, and cloud formation (and ort ice crystals). In addition to the existence of those conditions, there is also the rate at which droplets might form under the correct conditions, and certainly cosmic ray nucleating of droplets is consistent with that.
I have no idea of the extent; but I believe that there is some effect.
The whole point is that what is at issue is CHANGES in total global cloud cover that persist for climate time scales aka 30 years.
NOT LAST NIGHT’S WEATHER.
kwik says on December 16, 2010 at 3:33 pm
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My point precisely and I quite agree.
kwik says:
December 16, 2010 at 3:33 pm
roger says:
December 16, 2010 at 12:52 pm
“Sadly the preposterous awards to Gore and Obama have traduced the entire Nobel concept.”
The Peace Prize is done by a commitee of norwegian ex-politicians in Oslo. Its political, remember? So its often given just to promote some political agenda.
Dont forget that the Nobel Prize in Physics is quite another ballgame.
Its also from another group of people, in Sweden.
I would say the Nobel Prize in Physics still is something to admire.
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I agree. Unfortunately, the Chemistry Prize was somewhat sullied by the 1995 Award for the Crutzen/Molina/Rowland Ozone nonsense.
But Svensmark’s et al. would clearly be in Physics.