From the Register and Nigel Calder’s blog via bunches of people who submitted in Tips and Notes, hints of a new project, the RCC (Real Climate Collider) /sarc.
CERN ‘gags’ physicists in cosmic ray climate experiment
What do these results mean? Not allowed to tell you
The chief of the world’s leading physics lab at CERN in Geneva has prohibited scientists from drawing conclusions from a major experiment. The CLOUD (“Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets”) experiment examines the role that energetic particles from deep space play in cloud formation. CLOUD uses CERN’s proton synchrotron to examine nucleation.
CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer told Welt Online that the scientists should refrain from drawing conclusions from the latest experiment.
“I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them,” reports veteran science editor Nigel Calder on his blog. Why?
Because, Heuer says, “That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.”
Full story here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/18/cern_cosmic_ray_gag/
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Calder writes on his blog:
Four quick inferences:
1) The results must be favourable for Svensmark or there would be no such anxiety about them.
2) CERN has joined a long line of lesser institutions obliged to remain politically correct about the man-made global warming hypothesis. It’s OK to enter “the highly political arena of the climate change debate” provided your results endorse man-made warming, but not if they support Svensmark’s heresy that the Sun alters the climate by influencing the cosmic ray influx and cloud formation.
3) The once illustrious CERN laboratory ceases to be a truly scientific institute when its Director General forbids its physicists and visiting experimenters to draw the obvious scientific conclusions from their results.
4) The resulting publication may be rather boring.
The interview with Welt Online (in German) is here:
http://www.welt.de/wissenschaft/article13488331/Wie-Illuminati-den-Cern-Forschern-geholfen-hat.html
http://calderup.wordpress.com/2011/07/17/%E2%80%9Cno-you-mustnt-say-what-it-means%E2%80%9D/
Would that the IPCC would be so reluctant to draw conclusions about their massaged data and papers tinged with confirmation bias.
Actually guys and gals, this is a step in the right direction. I don’t want political advocates masquerading as scientists to interpret anything for me. I’ll do it myself if I have to, or take the data to someone credible and ask for their interpretation. Then judge if the interpretation is credible or not. Just like Dragnet, “Just the facts.” That is all that is required, that is all that is desired.
So… truckloads of money to repeat what is essentially a Wilson cloud chamber (circa 1911) and they are afraid that their might actually prove that GCR’s can cause vapor nucleation.
Yeah… a lot of integrity there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_cloud_chamber
And how about that search for truth? The Holy Grail of science.
Obviously, the AGW hoaxers have another Oh, oh, that needs to be buried. Else why would they have anything to hide?
BREAKING NEWS!
Greenhouse effect “Deniers” Vindicated!
(This simply can’t wait to see if lukewarmer WUWT deem to post this as an article- so I apologise for the OT posting, BUT this story is huge….)
BREAKING NEWS :Greenhouse Gas Theory Trashed in Groundbreaking Lab Experiment by John O’Sullivan, guest post at Climate Realists
Monday, July 18th 2011, 10:58 AM EDT
Greenhouse gas theory of global warming is refuted in momentous Mexican lab experiment. Results mean epic fail for doomsaying cult and climate taxes.
Professor Nahle of Monterrey, Mexico backed by a team of international scientists has faithfully recreated a famous experiment from 1909 to confirm that the greenhouse effect cannot cause global warming.
Astonishingly, the 1909 greenhouse gas experiment first performed by Professor Robert W. Wood at John Hopkins University hadn’t been replicated for a century. This despite over $100 billion spent by the man-made global warming industry trying to prove its case that carbon dioxide is a dangerous atmospheric pollutant.
The analogy had been that greenhouse gases (e.g. CO2) act like the glass in a greenhouse trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere and if they build up (due to human industrial emissions) the planet would dangerously overheat.
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=8073#post_comments
also download Nahle’s experiment here :- http://www.globalwarmingskeptics.info/forums/attachment.php?aid=378
Of course, and I expect that future papers about the Higgs boson will include the appropriate mention of all the neutrinos that traversed the particle accelerator during the experiment.
/sarc
cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.
Hmm, sounds familiar. Does not fit with the mantra “fossil fuel CO2 caused most of the warming”, though.
The CERN Director General may be able to gag CERN experimenters, but the results will get interpreted once they’re out in the blogosphere.
After I broke a few things, roared for several minutes, and got my blood pressure under control, my reaction was similar to several others above.
Soft tyranny tends to ratchet up without much notice, but HARD tyranny rouses the hackles.
I suspect several lukewarm scientists will find this too much to take.
Is this the proverbial chondrichthyan saltation? Maybe.
The link to the original German story is now a story about antimatter – no reference to the cloud study at all. Perhaps the link is in error…this is the Google translation of the link mentioned in the article.
John :-#)#
This is absolutely scandalous and unacceptable. Blogging is not doing anything. Write to the German/EU government and ask that this man be fired for attempted fraud/deception etc. Totally unfit for the job
I can’t see the problem. CERN is not involved in climatology, and if it interpreted the results then it would be accused of partisanship and, quite possibly, incompetence. And why would we want the results ‘interpreted’? Isn’t that what ‘hide the decline’ is all about?
Let’s just have the clear presentation of the results we’re promised. I for one don’t want to see an ‘interpreted’ version of the CERN results, just the results please, presented clearly. So I applaud the approach taken by Rolf-Dieter Heuer in wanting to give us the results, but not wanting his staff to get involved in issues and interpretations that would risk CERN’s reputation.
All data ends up getting interpreted, so let’s just have the results so that we can detect whether someone’s interpretation is plausible.
If they didn’t want to get involved in the cAGW debate, why did they perform the experiment in the first place? It seems inherent that an experiment attempting to explore the relationship between GCRs and cloud formation would have obvious cAGW overtones.
I think they didn’t expect for the experiment to come out in the ‘deniers’ favor….funny how those pesky preconceived notions can ruin a good experiment!
@John Whitman
> I do not see Calder’s conclusion follow from Heuer’s statement
> unless we invoke a deep cynicism; a cynicis[m] that is likely to be
> counterproductive on healthy skepticism.
That’s a bit harsh. A cynic is someone who has a negative attitude for the sake of having a negative attitude. I don’t think you need any negativity at all to see the implications in Heuer’s words, just a bit of healthy skepticism.
The words Heuer used per se are harmless, but their implications are not hard to see. Here, let me translate for you:
“That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate.”
Why would they fuel debate? There would be no “debate” if the results supported the AGW/CAGW hypotheses. This certainly hints that the results (whatever they are) appear to stir the debate up a bit, in the “wrong” direction.
“One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.”
Again, a strong hint that the results are pointing in the “wrong” direction. Why not say the same about the CO2 record? Surely a rising CO2 level is only “one of many parameters”, so let’s not draw any hasty conclusions about rising CO2 levels, shall we?
😐
“Because, Heuer says, “That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate…””
Smart man, 100% correct. Not that there’s a debate (have to have two sides in a debate, the Gore crowd isn’t participating.)
That is OK. If the high priests of so-called “science” are forbidden to think and interpret data, then we crowd-sourced actual scientists will do it for them. That is, if they don’t conceal the data in clay jars in a cave somewhere.
Science…has become perverted by activists. CERN is not immune to activism.
I really don’t read it that way. What I see is a quite sensible attempt to keep CERN scientific, rather than enter the unscientific/anti-science political quagmire which is the Church of Global Warming. The advice/request/instruction (choose your favourite) to refrain from commenting on the impact or otherwise on Global Warming is simply an attempt to keep CERN’s hands clean. In any case, these guys aren’t climatologists: they are real scientists. We should applaud this attempt to keep things that way.
I’ll be more interested to learn what the results are: do we know when they will be published?. And am I right to conclude that it’s unlikely to “prove” Svensmark’s theory, but it could either partially support, or completely falsify it?
” I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them,…”
LOL!!!
From the annals of “non-interpreted climate science” I offer Hansen et al. (2007)…with abstract bolded for your reading pleasure…
Hansen, J., Mki. Sato, P. Kharecha, G. Russell, D.W. Lea, and M. Siddall, 2007: Climate change and trace gases. Phil. Trans. Royal. Soc. A, 365, 1925-1954, doi:10.1098/rsta.2007.2052.
Paleoclimate data show that the Earth’s climate is remarkably sensitive to global forcings. Positive feedbacks predominate. This allows the entire planet to be whipsawed between climate states. One feedback, the “albedo flip” property of water substance, provides a powerful trigger mechanism. A climate forcing that “flips” the albedo of a sufficient portion of an ice sheet can spark a cataclysm. Ice sheet and ocean inertia provides only moderate delay to ice sheet disintegration and a burst of added global warming. Recent greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of our control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the largest human-made climate forcing, but other trace constituents are important. Only intense simultaneous efforts to slow CO2 emissions and reduce non-CO2 forcings can keep climate within or near the range of the past million years. The most important of the non-CO2 forcings is methane (CH4), as it causes the 2nd largest human-made GHG climate forcing and is the principal cause of increased tropospheric ozone (O3), which is the 3rd largest GHG forcing. Nitrous oxide (N2O) should also be a focus of climate mitigation efforts. Black carbon (“black soot”) has a high global warming potential (~2000, 500, and 200 for 20, 100 and 500 years, respectively) and deserves greater attention. Some forcings are especially effective at high latitudes, so concerted efforts to reduce their emissions could still “save the Arctic”, while also having major benefits for human health, agricultural productivity, and the global environment.
—
Yep. Straight-up science there…And this was published back when Hansen and his gang were being “muzzled” by the Bush Administration [LOL!!!].
Two words. Streisand, Effect.
Please, having worked with CERN as a member of an external group taking part in experiments for over 30 years and having spent about 7 of those years in CERN , and sat in various decision making committees, I can assure you that the Director General of CERN has no control on what the groups publish in any way.
Even if he could “advise” the groups under him on how to publish and comment on results, he has absolutely no power over the individual groups taking part in the experiments from universities and research institutes the world over. The collaborations decide what and how they interpret and publish results If ( and I doubt he could do it) he does not allow a research result to go out as a CERN preprint, there are all the other groups involved that have the data and can publish them.
No panic.
@PearlandAggie says:
> If they [CERN] didn’t want to get involved in the cAGW debate,
> why did they perform the experiment in the first place?
CERN did not propose the experiment, but merely made their particle beams available for research by the Cloud team in Switzerland, who requested access by submitting a proposal.
Here’s a link to the Cloud group’s website, including a link to their proposal to CERN:
http://cloud.web.cern.ch/cloud/
Similar to the way most large observatories offer their telescopes for time-sharing on an experiment by experiment basis to outside researchers.
JJohn Day says:
July 18, 2011 at 10:35 am
“”””That’s a bit harsh. A cynic is someone who has a negative attitude for the sake of having a negative attitude. I don’t think you need any negativity at all to see the implications in Heuer’s words, just a bit of healthy skepticism. “”””
—————-
John Day,
Thanks for your reply.
Speaking, hmmmm, John-to-John it is just that I am concerned with what seems to be a default negative view of virtually all postings on many blogs populated mostly by skeptics (I prefer to call them independents). Therefore, my statement about cynicism being unhealthy. Unhealthy if it is a default setting on our comment response mode selector.
NOTE: Likewise, I find cynicism rampant of blogs focused on supporting IPCC so-called consensus climate science. So, it makes me uncomfortable to act like them . . . we can be better?
Take care,
John
So, essentially, the CLOUDs didn’t go their preferred catastrophic anthropogenic global warming way, so now they don’t want to speak about it, but please send more money to afford to get the research just “right”.
I could do without recommendations of people defining, a priori, the Great Divide between “healthy skepticism” and “deep cynicism.”
History shows that even “deep cynicism” is usually not deep enough to describe the cynicism of Academia mountebanks who make good living off ignorance and superstition.
And yet it does..
I’m not overly concerned by this revelation. I’m quite happy to accept that these CERN scientists are probably good experimentallists, and know how to fire particles at water vapor laden pseudo atmospheres, and record, whatever the heck they think they observed..
I’m also happy to accept that they can probably write up their results so that other scientists and even us lay folks can read and understand what they observed.
That to me gives no inference that these researchers, are necessarily the best persons to interpret for the theoretical community, the meaning of their observation results.
So let’s not all panic. Tell us what you found, and maybe some of us, can even decide for ourselves what WE think YOUR observations mean.
So nothing to see here folks, so move along now. And get a move on in getting those experimental reults out where WE can see what YOU observed