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/
burnside says:
July 18, 2011 at 1:51 pm
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.
______
But that’s not all that Heuer said. He finished saying “One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of very many parameters.”
And that’s already a spin, an instruction for interpretation in itself.
Stephen Wilde,
Check out this presentation by Jasper Kirby. YES, you are right that most everyone agrees that there are already enough atmospheric particles over land to make cosmic ray ionization superfluous to cloud generation – so the hypothesis is really concerned about the effect of cosmic rays on low cloud cover over the oceans (where air is much much cleaner)
This is explained in this presentation, which has only been watched by 1900 people! (a fact that I find shocking) As someone suggested above, everything suggests we are living in an era not so very different from Galileo, a time when preconceived notions dominated over critical thought. In fact, I am starting to apply a healthy dose of cynicism towards everything we currently “accept as givens in the West” – our democracy, our free press, our economic model, our free enterprise, our banking system….etc.
If the scientists doing the research will not be allowed to interpret their results, then fools will rush in where angels fear to tread. First of all, politicians, fools par excellence, will comment and interpret. It’s in their genes, they can’t help themselves. But they will be ignored by all [but] other fools, so who can the layman turn to to find out what the data might mean?
In the interests of democracy, we should all have a vote for who we would like to interpret the results. My vote would go to Rodney, Del Boy’s brother in ‘Only Fools and Horses’, he had an interest in everything ‘cosmic’.
SteveSadlov says:
July 18, 2011 at 1:43 pm
That, and the results may place the AGW pig on a spit over an open fire.
Greg Goodnight said:
“To use an American football metaphor, my take is that Heuer has merely asked his colleagues working on the CLOUD team to refrain from spiking the ball in the endzone and doing a little victory dance to rub it in.”
— That is the funniest post I’ve read on this blog….ever!
“That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate.”
To admit that the climate change debate is “highly political” just about says it all anyway. That alone is a huge admission.
I’m not supposed to talk about harps that angels don’t play. And I’m not supposed to remind people that dutchsinse.com tells you all you need to know about why angels don’t play these harps.
Why would they level a hill to build a massive reactor array on the beach and store the spent fuel on top and wait for a major tsunami? To play a harp? Oh! Did I misspell harp?
I can’t imagine why Rolf-Dieter Heuer felt he had to speak out about this, as the results will either support Svensmark’s theory on cloud cover changes being caused by GCRs or will refute it – no interpretation is necessary. From what has already been announced, it looks like Svensmark has the results he wanted and his theory has not yet been falsified.
Politics have no place in science and only the truth is important. Observation has proved that the CAGW conjecture is already very shaky and hopefully this will be another nail in the coffin lid.
Meanwhile the sun is still in the doldrums and global temperatures continue to show no statistically significant warming. Make sure you have plenty of fuel stockpiled ready for the coming NH winter.
I think Calder could be reading too much into Heuer’s comments. Heuer says the results will be made clear. Is it really their job to interpret them and to tell us how this impacts the climate. I think it isn’t. That ought be left to the experts in atmospheric sciences and climate.
SteveSadlov says on July 18, 2011 at 1:43 pm
That has not fazed the media-pseudo-science complex before now … there have been predictions of returning to an ice age and then that we would all burn in the hell fires of damnation if we didn’t cut our carbon footprints … need I remind you?
Really excellent link (50 min video) posted by Sandy McClintock to chiefio’s blog about Svensmark’s journey to where we are now. I learnt at least three new things from it.
This is much ado about nothing.
If the scientists “interpret” the forthcoming scientific results before publication, that will diminish the credibility of the results when they finally are published. Non-commenting on results in press is the best policy.
@burnside
> 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.
No, I think you’re wrong. You are conflating ‘interpretation’ with ‘opinion’. Opinions based on subjective feelings are not the same as conclusions drawn from observation or experiment.
There is no science without interpretation. Interpretations are conclusions, predictions and explanations based on observation and experiments. When a climatologist interprets historical data, he is entitled to make predictions like “temperatures in the future will become lower OR stay the same OR get higher etc. They are entitled to make causal judgments, again based on observation or experiment: A causes B but does not cause C unless D etc.
Researchers who don’t interpret their data are just “data loggers”, not scientists.
[soap_box] Perhaps Heuer knows this but is only acting out of desperation, to preserve his funding and existence, a reaction to Lysenkoism on a scale that boggles the imagination: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism [/soap_box]
“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.”
Let’s be clear, they did that back in1998 when CLOUD was first put on ice, only to be resurrected when Svensmark’s SKY experiment was successful in 2006 and replicated in CLOUD-06. Give Heuer a break; it’s his job to keep the stokers shoveling money to keep CERN going, and it’s politic to ask the CLOUD collaborators to not rub salt in the wounds of the alarmists (and in the wounds of their patrons in CERN member country legislatures and bureaucracies) in their journal submissions.
I am of two minds on this.
On the one hand, I think just giving the data without interpretation is admirable.
On the other hand, I am sick and tired of cowardly scientists who seem to care more about their careers than standing up and being counted when standing up is what is needed. Non-scientists depend on scientists to stand up and be counted when the going gets tough. That is when the rest of the world needs scientific integrity the most, not the least.
This just seems like one of those times when standing up and laying it on the line is what is needed. CERN scientists did the work, CERN has great scientists the world respects, and for CERN authorities to even give the slightest indication that CERN authorities are silencing their scientists or controlling their freedom of expression is quite disturbing to me.
Took me a while to figure out how to approach this.
If this experiment was applied to the atmosphere of MARS, JUPITER, VENUS, SATURN, there would be NO hesitation of applying the results and “interpreting” them.
The EARTH is not “special”. We are a planet.
Thus the ‘Director’s directive” is pure cowardice. He should be fired. Period, he has no legitimacy now.
Max
davidgmills says:
July 18, 2011 at 3:33 pm
CERN scientists did the work
I don’t think this is correct. Outside scientists did the work. CERN only provided facilities.
You HAVE to interpret the results of an experiment.
Does the results of the experiment support the hypothesis that the experiment was set up to test.
It is basic science; the person/team that does the experiment interpret the result. Other scientists can then apply the hypothesis under test; replicate the experiment and INTERPRET the results of THEIR experiment.
It isn’t damn well science if the experimenter does not interpret the results.
The CLOUD experiment (as I understand it) is to validate the hypothesis that Cosmic Rays in certain energy levels DO create nucleation particles.
The results that have already leaked out have already confirmed that part of the experiment.
Do CR provide SUFFICIENT nucleation particles to cause clouds to form ? This is the part that requires interpretation. From a model (albeit a physical model rather than a computer model) we then could/can/will extrapolate to real world conditions.
The problem here is perhaps a mis-understanding of who means what by ‘interpret’.
Interpretation – science talk : x = y therefore if by experiment we can show that x happens; then y happens.
Interpretation – political style x (may) = y therefore z;q and famine and flooding and drought and the end of the world.
The Head of CERN will be talking POLITICALLY – unfortunately he is talking to scientists who will perhaps mis-understand and assume he is talking scientifically.
The one is of course correct – it is exactly what the CAGW scam is based on. No interpretation is good.
As an engineer I find the request not to interpret the results to be perverse and anti-science. But than I find the CAGW position perverse and anti-science for that very reason
I can appreciate Heuer’s position and his need not to offend his funders.
OTOH, it’s normal for scientific articles to contain a “discussion” section where the authors present their “take” on what-it-all-means. Prohibiting this is abnormal.
Since CERN is only studying how Y is affected by X, they’d prefer not to get into how much X (cosmic radiation) varies, or how much Z (global temperature) is affected by Y (clouds). The instructions to stay within the scope of the experiment sound like good science to me.
The view that CERN Director-General Heuer expressed is SUPPOSED to be the normal, default, goes-without-saying scientific stance. That he felt obligated to say it anyway speaks volumes about modern politicized government-funded science.
Yes, I realize the phrase “politicized government-funded’ is redundant.
I also suspect the phrase “government-funded science” is something of an oxymoron.
There’s a fine line between analysis and interpretation.
At least it wasn’t GISS doing the experiment. The results would have been peer reviewed and in the news BEFORE the facility was built……… just sayin.
regards
well done CERN & Svensmark
Just one by-the-way clarification: AGW is not the greatest scandal and fraud ever to be perpetrated “in the name of science”. That dishonour belongs to Lyssenkoism, which after all caused thousands of scientists to die in the GULag. It is just the greatest fraud to be launched in the free world, by scientists not enslaved to the beck and favour of a tyranny. Morally, that makes it worse.
The question must be asked – to what extent does extensive stratocumulus cover over the North Pacific during Summer affect the global pattern.
The latest runs depict a robust cold front coming down from the Bering Sea on Saturday, giving the Pacific High a pretty good whack. Perhaps the storm door will open and the rainy season will start – earrrrrrrrliest everrrrrr.