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/
John of Kent says:
July 18, 2011 at 10:03 am
The atmosphere is most assuredly not encapsulated by glass. Dog in car analogy comes to mind.
AGW is an epicyclic hypothesis, being encapsulated in mythological glass.
So, this is really about how much CRF makes how much cloud.
The words cloud chamber denier come to mind.
Hesitant to state agreement with a commentor who goes by “commieBob”, but in this case, I agree with his POV. Publish the data, all of the data, and then let the dueling intrpretations begin.
Switzerland and all other european countries give a lot of money to the CERN. Without this money the CERN is dead.
European and swiss politics are driven by ‘greens’. Media continues to talk about global warming (they still not have evolved in to climate change).
The official swiss government site talk only about CO2 and global warming – site http://www.uvek.admin.ch/themen/umwelt/00640/00839/index.html?lang=fr
Sorry no english, it’s in french, but you can have it in italian or in german.
The other european countries have the same message.
Conclusion : How can the CERN say that Svensmark is right ? That means IPCC report AR4 is wrong and the computer models are wrong as well (even without that they are wrong !).
Politics will not accept to be ridiculous. They will try to manipulate the message to find the way to continue to be right all the time … but this will take … time.
Move along, nothing to see here.
Ed says:
July 18, 2011 at 9:40 am
They are, apparently, hinting that they will release the underlying data without interpretation.
That seems better than the standard practice of releasing interpretations while hiding the data.
Thanks, Ed, that’s really GOOD!
“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.”
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The original German is better translated as “only one of very many parameters” (“nur um einen von sehr vielen Parametern”). Seems like strong words to me.
I’m with CERN on this one. I’m not convinced we understand the atmosphere well enough to reproduce its full conditions in a lab. There is enough complexity which we do not understand that what may cause an effect in a lab-experiment may have little, no, or opposite effect in nature.
The problem with interpreting inconclusive results is that it would put CERN on one side or the other of climate politics. Any interpretation, no matter how couched in terms of inconclusive results, will be interpreted by policy-makers as supporting one side or the other because they do not seem to understand the concept of uncertainty in science. Being the site of the largest scientific collaboration in history (in terms of Principal Investigators), whichever way things go that would be likely to alienate someone important there.
How shrewd! Nothing like a gag order to garner attention!
Very clever!
CERN Lecture on the subject
http://mediaarchive.cern.ch/MediaArchive/Video/Public/Conferences/2009/52576/52576-0753-kbps-480×360-25-fps-audio-64-kbps-44-kHz-stereo.flv
As I see it, they should simply report whether or not the introduction of simulated cosmic rays induced nucleation in the simulated atmosphere chamber and to quantify how much nucleation was observed. They don’t need to say a thing (and definitely shouldn’t say anything) about effects on global climate, as that is not what they are testing. Once we have sufficient data on the quantity of nucleation due to GCRs (among hundreds of other causes of cloud formation), then climate science can update some of the climate models to incorporate cloud effects. The water cycle is the wildcard in all these studies, and personally I don’t see that any of the models adequately (or even at all) accounting for this major energy transport mechanism. With that said, CERN’s experiment only sheds light on GCR induced nucleation and hopefully collected data from enough starting conditions for others to use the data to properly create simulations and shed some light on the albedo problems, it wasn’t constructed to answer any Earth environment questions. (I know, we all dislike models, but sometimes they are a good tool for seeing first-order effects and can suggest real-world things to measure.)
It is sensible for them to just present the raw data and leave interpretation to others. I see nothing wrong in that approach.
Mind you,would they have adopted that approach if the results were unfavourable to Svensmark’s hypothesis?
My personal view is that there are enough condensation nuclei in the air anyway so the variations in cosmic ray quantities would not have much if any effect but that won’t be resolved by the CERN experiment.
I think cosmic ray quantities are a good proxy for changes in solar activity levels but the climate effect lies elsewhere in the chemical reactions that occur in the atmosphere when the level of solar activity changes.
To get the observed cloudiness and surface pressure changes that we see in response to solar variability it is necessary to change the vertical temperature profile of the atmosphere. Changes in atmospheric chemistry could do that but not changes in cosmic ray quantities.
For the Svensmark hypothesis to gain any ground it needs to explain how changes in cosmic rays could alter the vertical temperature profile.
CERN has been getting some good results from the CLOUD experiment, but is nervous again about whether or not the experiment will continue to be funded. Most people in the know seem to agree that the chances of getting continued government funding in climate research, solar research (and now cosmic ray/atmospheric cloud research!) are greatly increased if a disclaimer is included stating that the current results do not indicate that climate change is caused by anything but mankind. That is why virtually all government-funded-climate-research journal articles contain such a disclaimer. CERN would be happy with a slightly less blatant version of the standard disclaimer, namely “We can’t say whether or not our findings have any relevance to climate change.”
If we recall that NASA has given up manned space flights and is instead funding climate blogging and censoring, it appears obvious, that other branches of science do not intend to end like that.
I have no problem with CERN’s position on this at all, just so there is no censoring or fudging of data, which I would certainly not expect from them. In fact this position may have been part of the ground rules for this project from the get-go, and why Svensmark has remained uninvolved.
Paul Neczypir says:
July 18, 2011 at 9:41 am
The CERN Director-General isn’t otherwise shy of dubious publicity or dubious science:
CERN is extremely shy of dubious science. The place costs a fortune (literally) and they don’t want any ructions which could put them under. Any serious suspicion that they are making stuff up and the place will be shut down.
Their response to the nonsense of Dan Brown’s “Angels and Demons” was not to ride the publicity, but to point out the major scientific errors.
http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/Spotlight/SpotlightAandD-en.html
There is no “censoring” going on:
1. If CERN (which is hardly a monolithic enterprise in the first place) wanted to prevent Svensmark’s theories from being tested, they would have not tested them.
2. Svensmark does not work at CERN. How is he gagged?
3. The rest of the world will be welcome to interpret the findings as they like.
CERN is fully multinational and that means people from very different political backgrounds. They are alike in one respect: they love pure science. They don’t want or need internal political debates about what that science means. They are wise to leave that to outsiders.
I’m not clear why folks are complaining about. The way I see it, a nice, clean, dataset, sans interpretation, and/or speculation, is as good as it gets.
Just show me the data. I’m ok with that.
CERN has been getting some good results from the CLOUD experiment, but is nervous again about whether or not the experiment will continue to be funded. Most people in the know seem to agree that the chances of getting continued funding in climate research, solar research (and now cosmic ray/atmospheric cloud research!) are greatly increased if a disclaimer is included stating that the current results do not indicate that climate change is caused by anything but mankind. That is why virtually all government-funded-climate-research journal articles contain such a disclaimer. CERN wants a slightly less blatant version of the standard disclaimer, namely “We can’t say whether or not our findings have any relevance to climate change.”
Experiment on the Cause of Real Greenhouses’ Effect – Repeatability of Prof. Robert W. Wood’s experiment
(Article by Nasif S. Nahle)
GENERAL CONCLUSIONS:
The greenhouse effect inside greenhouses is due to the blockage of convective heat transfer with the environment and it is not related, neither obeys, to any kind of “trapped” radiation. Therefore, the greenhouse effect does not exist as it is described in many didactic books and articles.
The experiment performed by Prof. Robert W. Wood in 1909 is absolutely valid and systematically repeatable.
In average, the blockage of convective heat transfer with the surroundings causes an increase of temperature inside the greenhouses of 10.03 °C with respect to the surroundings temperature.
http://www.biocab.org/Wood_Experiment_Repeated.html
(tips and notes doesn’t seem to be working)
There could be concerns about panic being induced. Especially if the results point to GCRs and hence clouds as the “MOSFET” that turns on and off the glacials and interglacials. It could be that the actual situation with GCRs and clouds is rather disturbing and there is a desire to avoid panic buying of food, etc.
Bob the swiss says:
July 18, 2011 at 12:54 pm
“”””Switzerland and all other european countries give a lot of money to the CERN. Without this money the CERN is dead.
European and swiss politics are driven by ‘greens’. Media continues to talk about global warming (they still not have evolved in to climate change).”””
————–
Bob the swiss,
You, unfortunately, make sense.
Being American with little European experience, I cannot be critical of your comment.
Thanks for your insight.
John
Calder is utterly wrong. If results are made available without interpretation, the science is preserved intact, and the institution remains exempt from charges of editorializing. All sides may make of the work what they will. Calder’s objection is an embarrassment.
Stephen Rasey says:
July 18, 2011 at 1:04 pm
How shrewd! Nothing like a gag order to garner attention!
Very clever!
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I agree. This guy seems to understand the publicity game rather well.
You don’t get new discoveries when you prohibit your researchers from free thinking. Should be obvious, shouldn’t it? As the EU is Bizarro-Land, nobody here will wonder much or ask this question – that journalist surely didn’t. Bloc thinking.
– Svensmark is not the originator of the theory that Cosmic Rays influence cloud formation.
– The idea is not contentious. The theory is popularly accepted even though there is considerable uncertainty about the mechanisms involved.
– Svensmark’s contentious assertion is that Cosmic Rays are dominant in modern warming. This is shown to be false by the data.
– The CLOUD experiment at CERN explores the mechanism that Rays influence cloud formation. It does not asses the scope of influence that Rays may or may not have in modern warming. That is dealt with by comparison of direct measurements of rays and climate data.
– Comparing data for Rays vs climate shows very plainly that correlation between the two breaks down in modern times and affirms that CO2 is currently the primary driver of contemporary warming.
But if some of you guys ~ Calder included ~ want to keep on believing in a great big conspiracy, knock yourselves out.