Note: I’m going to leave this as a sticky “top post” for a day or so. new stories appear below.
Nigel Calder asks us to republish this post for maximum exposure. He writes:
Today the Royal Astronomical Society in London publishes (online) Henrik Svensmark’s latest paper entitled “Evidence of nearby supernovae affecting life on Earth”. After years of effort Svensmark shows how the variable frequency of stellar explosions not far from our planet has ruled over the changing fortunes of living things throughout the past half billion years. Appearing in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, it’s a giant of a paper, with 22 figures, 30 equations and about 15,000 words. See the RAS press release at http://www.ras.org.uk/news-and-press/219-news-2012/2117-did-exploding-stars-help-life-on-earth-to-thrive
By taking me back to when I reported the victory of the pioneers of plate tectonics in their battle against the most eminent geophysicists of the day, it makes me feel 40 years younger. Shredding the textbooks, Tuzo Wilson, Dan McKenzie and Jason Morgan merrily explained earthquakes, volcanoes, mountain-building, and even the varying depth of the ocean, simply by the drift of fragments of the lithosphere in various directions around the globe.
In Svensmark’s new paper an equally concise theory, that cosmic rays from exploded stars cool the world by increasing the cloud cover, leads to amazing explanations, not least for why evolution sometimes was rampant and sometimes faltered. In both senses of the word, this is a stellar revision of the story of life.
Here are the main results:
- The long-term diversity of life in the sea depends on the sea-level set by plate tectonics and the local supernova rate set by the astrophysics, and on virtually nothing else.
- The long-term primary productivity of life in the sea – the net growth of photosynthetic microbes – depends on the supernova rate, and on virtually nothing else.
- Exceptionally close supernovae account for short-lived falls in sea-level during the past 500 million years, long-known to geophysicists but never convincingly explained..
- As the geological and astronomical records converge, the match between climate and supernova rates gets better and better, with high rates bringing icy times.
Presented with due caution as well as with consideration for the feelings of experts in several fields of research, a story unfolds in which everything meshes like well-made clockwork. Anyone who wishes to pooh-pooh any piece of it by saying “correlation is not necessarily causality” should offer some other mega-theory that says why several mutually supportive coincidences arise between events in our galactic neighbourhood and living conditions on the Earth.
An amusing point is that Svensmark stands the currently popular carbon dioxide story on its head. Some geoscientists want to blame the drastic alternations of hot and icy conditions during the past 500 million years on increases and decreases in carbon dioxide, which they explain in intricate ways. For Svensmark, the changes driven by the stars govern the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. Climate and life control CO2, not the other way around.
By implication, supernovae also determine the amount of oxygen available for animals like you and me to breathe. So the inherently simple cosmic-ray/cloud hypothesis now has far-reaching consequences, which I’ve tried to sum up in this diagram.
By way of explanation
The text of “Evidence of nearby supernovae affecting life on Earth” is available via ftp://ftp2.space.dtu.dk/pub/Svensmark/MNRAS_Svensmark2012.pdf The paper is highly technical, as befits a professional journal, so to non-expert eyes even the illustrations may be a little puzzling. So I’ve enlisted the aid of Liz Calder to explain the way one of the most striking graphs, Svensmark’s Figure 20, was put together. That graph shows how, over the past 440 million years, the changing rates of supernova explosions relatively close to the Earth have strongly influenced the biodiversity of marine invertebrate animals, from trilobites of ancient times to lobsters of today. Svensmark’s published caption ends: “Evidently marine biodiversity is largely explained by a combination of sea-level and astrophysical activity.” To follow his argument you need to see how Figure 20 draws on information in Figure 19. That tells of the total diversity of the sea creatures in the fossil record, fluctuating between times of rapid evolution and times of recession.
The count is by genera, which are groups of similar animals. Here it’s shown freehand by Liz in Sketch A. Sketch B is from another part of Figure 19, telling how the long-term global sea-level changed during the same period. The broad correspondence isn’t surprising because a high sea-level floods continental margins and gives the marine invertebrates more extensive and varied habitats. But it obviously isn’t the whole story. For a start, there’s a conspicuous spike in diversity about 270 million years ago that contradicts the declining sea-level. Svensmark knew that there was a strong peak in the supernova rate around that time. So he looked to see what would happen to the wiggles over the whole 440 million years if he “normalized” the biodiversity to remove the influence of sea-level. That simple operation is shown in Sketch C, where the 270-million-year spike becomes broader and taller. Sketch D shows Svensmark’s reckoning of the changing rates of nearby supernovae during the same period. Let me stress that these are all freehand sketches to explain the operations, not to convey the data. In the published paper, the graphs as in C and D are drawn precisely and superimposed for comparison.
There are many fascinating particulars that I might use to illustrate the significance of Svensmark’s findings. To choose the Gorgon’s story that follows is not entirely arbitrary, because this brings in another of those top results, about supernovae and bio-productivity.
The great dying at the end of the Permian
Out of breath, poor gorgon? Gasping for some supernovae? Named after scary creatures of Greek myth, the Gorgonopsia of the Late Permian Period included this fossil species Sauroctonus progressus, 3 metres long. Like many of its therapsid cousins, near relatives of our own ancestors, it died out during the Permo-Triassic Event. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgonopsia
Luckiest among our ancestors was a mammal-like reptile, or therapsid, that scraped through the Permo-Triassic Event, the worst catastrophe in the history of animal life. The climax was 251 million years ago at the end of the Permian Period. Nearly all animal species in the sea went extinct, along with most on land. The event ended the era of “old life”, the Palaeozoic, and ushered in the Mesozoic Era, when our ancestors would become small mammals trying to keep clear of the dinosaurs. So what put to death our previously flourishing Gorgon-faced cousins of the Late Permian? According to Henrik Svensmark, the Galaxy let the reptiles down.
Forget old suggestions (by myself included) that the impact of a comet or asteroid was to blame, like the one that did for the dinosaurs at the end of the Mesozoic. The greatest dying was less sudden than that. Similarly the impressive evidence for an eruption 250 million years ago – a flood basalt event that smothered Siberia with noxious volcanic rocks covering an area half the size of Australia – tells of only a belated regional coup de grâce. It’s more to the point that oxygen was in short supply – geologists speak of a “superanoxic ocean”. And there was far more carbon dioxide in the air than there is now.
“Well there you go,” some people will say. “We told you CO2 is bad for you.” That, of course, overlooks the fact that the notorious gas keeps us alive. The recenty increased CO2 shares with the plant breeders the credit for feeding the growing human population. Plants and photosynthetic microbes covet CO2 to grow. So in the late Permian its high concentration was a symptom of a big shortfall in life’s productivity, due to few supernovae, ice-free conditions, and a lack of weather to circulate the nutrients. And as photosynthesis is also badly needed to turn H2O into O2, the doomed animals were left gasping for oxygen, with little more than half of what we’re lucky to breathe today.
When Svensmark comments briefly on the Permo-Triassic Event in his new paper, “Evidence of nearby supernovae affecting life on Earth,” he does so in the context of the finding that high rates of nearby supernovae promote life’s productivity by chilling the planet, and so improving the circulation of nutrients needed by the photosynthetic organisms.
Here’s a sketch (above) from Figure 22 in the paper, simplified to make it easier to read. Heavy carbon, 13C, is an indicator of how much photosynthesis was going on. Plumb in the middle is a downward pointing green dagger that marks the Permo-Triassic Event. And in the local supernova rate (black curve) Svensmark notes that the Late Permian saw the largest fall in the local supernova rate seen in the past 500 million years. This was when the Solar System had left the hyperactive Norma Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy behind it and entered the quiet space beyond. “Fatal consequences would ensue for marine life,” Svensmark writes, “if a rapid warming led to nutrient exhaustion … occurring too quickly for species to adapt.”
One size doesn’t fit all, and a fuller story of Late Permian biodiversity becomes subtler and even more persuasive. About 6 million years before the culminating mass extinction of 251 million years ago, a lesser one occurred at the end of the Guadalupian stage. This earlier extinction was linked with a brief resurgence in the supernova rate and a global cooling that interrupted the mid-Permian warming. In contrast with the end of the Permian, bio-productivity was high. The chief victims of this die-off were warm-water creatures including gigantic bivalves and rugose corals.
Why it’s tagged as “astrobiology”
So what, you may wonder, is the most life-enhancing supernova rate? Without wanting to sound like Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss, it’s probably not very far from the average rate for the past few hundred million years, nor very different from what we have now. Biodiversity and bio-productivity are both generous at present.
Svensmark has commented (not in the paper itself) on a closely related question – where’s the best place to live in the Galaxy?
“Too many supernovae can threaten life with extinction. Although they came before the time range of the present paper, very severe episodes called Snowball Earth have been blamed on bursts of rapid star formation. I’ve tagged the paper as ‘Astrobiology’ because we may be very lucky in our location in the Galaxy. Other regions may be inhospitable for advanced forms of life because of too many supernovae or too few.”
Astronomers searching for life elsewhere speak of a Goldilocks Zone in planetary systems. A planet fit for life should be neither too near to nor too far from the parent star. We’re there in the Solar System, sure enough. We may also be in a similar Goldilocks Zone of the Milky Way, and other galaxies with too many or too few supernovae may be unfit for life. Add to that the huge planetary collision that created the Earth’s disproportionately large Moon and provided the orbital stability and active geology on which life relies, and you may suspect that, astronomically at least, Dr Pangloss was right — “Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
Don’t fret about the diehards
If this blog has sometimes seemed too cocky about the Svensmark hypothesis, it’s because I’ve known what was in the pipeline, from theories, observations and experiments, long before publication. Since 1996 the hypothesis has brought new successes year by year and has resisted umpteen attempts to falsify it.
New additions at the level of microphysics include a previously unknown reaction of sulphuric acid, as in a recent preprint. On a vastly different scale, Svensmark’s present supernova paper gives us better knowledge of the shape of the Milky Way Galaxy.
A mark of a good hypothesis is that it looks better and better as time passes. With the triumph of plate tectonics, diehard opponents were left redfaced and blustering. In 1960 you’d not get a job in an American geology department if you believed in continental drift, but by 1970 you’d not get the job if you didn’t. That’s what a paradigm shift means in practice and it will happen sometime soon with cosmic rays in climate physics.
Plate tectonics was never much of a political issue, except in the Communist bloc. There, the immobility of continents was doctrinally imposed by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. An analagous diehard doctrine in climate physics went global two decades ago, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was conceived to insist that natural causes of climate change are minor compared with human impacts.
Don’t fret about the diehards. The glory of empirical science is this: no matter how many years, decades, or sometimes centuries it may take, in the end the story will come out right.
===============================================================
For those who would doubt our cosmic connections, Svenmark’s work and Calder’s article reminds me to remind you of this well known quote:
The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff. – Carl Sagan
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Ian W: “…Pleiades is a very indistinct star cluster even on a dark clear night. Not particularly impressive. Yet the Pleiades seem to feature in almost every ‘ancient’ text and several ‘religions’ worldwide.”
Very interesting observation, Ian. I hope someone picks up on it and puzzles it further.
Great, following “combustion toilets”! Just checking in to state that I have had to stay up to try to get a nail hold on this GUT. I do recall having thoughts on this while perusing some of Henrik’s work last year. Congrats to Henrik for composing this great work and getting it through publishing. We need this great inspiration and possible guidance into the next earth/cosmological era.
gymnosperm says: “…Explain to me one more time how GCR’s affect sea level? How GCR’s affect ocean floor spreading rates?…” They don’t. They, according to this, affect the cloudiness of the planet, allowing it to heat or cool more. Plate tectonics affects sea level (big spreading times raise the sea level, like during the Cretaceous, which featured a giant intercontinental (epeiric) sea in North America, among other things). Plate tectonics, again in the active (spreading) phase, throws up mountains and such that are sources of nutrients to the sea. The GCRs are just one component of the system. Go back and look at the first color-banded chart, along its left edge: Solid Earth, Ocean, Life, Atmosphere, Solar System, Galaxy from bottom to top. Each band shows the role of its respective component in the model.
wayne Job says:
April 24, 2012 at 8:35 pm
Ya know, if you have a bone to pick with me, provide a link. I haven’t a clue what you are talking about, I reply to hundreds of folks every week.
My latest motto is “Nature simply isn’t that simple” … although I do think that climate is governed by robust processes, I doubt greatly that they are simple.
Perhaps … and perhaps it’s just a sad case of too many tunable parameters leading an honest scientist astray down the primrose path …
w.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 24, 2012 at 9:58 pm
But the x-rays emitted by the supernova remnants should be quite visible, and we don’t find those … why is that? Where are the supernova remnants? Doesn’t the lack of said remnants argue strongly for some problems with out model of supernova production?
I go sleep now, but here is an article on supernovae in x-rays http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.0576v2.pdf
Willis,
Physics and engineering require understanding assumptions about real world processes (physics) that are then used to support analysis techniques. Svensmark uses the derivative of Co2 because his hypothesis assumes that Co2 concentrations will be self limiting which means he expects the concentration (the integral of the derivative) will not correlate as well as the derivative. As Johnny Depp might say, “Physics, you savvy?”
I would agree with you however that his hypothesis needs further testing before it can be accepted. Correlation is NOT causation and there could be coincidence/wishful thinking or analysis bias. The neat thing is that his hypothesis can be tested as it suggests that the geological record should tell us things about the galaxy -all we need do is check and see if it does!
“Stephen Wilde says:
April 24, 2012 at 8:11 am
I think that variations in cosmic rays reaching the surface are merely a proxy for solar variability with no significant direct effect on global cloudiness.”
Certainly in the short term, but over tens of thousands of solar cycles that variability averages out.
In Shaviv & Veizer’s “Celestial driver of phanerozoic climate?” (2003), there’s a clear graph of galactic cosmic ray flux (from Shaviv) and ocean temperature over geologic time. This integrates out solar variability, and what we have is a clear inverse correlation of temperature with galactic cosmic ray flux, over the entire 500+ million year phanerozoic. The coldest periods coincide with our solar system being in spiral arms of the galaxy, the hottest periods coincide with our solar system being between spiral arms.
It might not yet be proven that it’s clouds that are the connection, but it sure seems to be the leading candidate.
I first read Svensmark’s Cosmoclimatology survey article a few weeks after it was published in early 2007; it seemed clear then that the general circulation models were missing an essential piece of the puzzle and the IPCC AR4 conclusions were therefore fatally flawed.
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 24, 2012 at 10:53 pm
Thanks, Leif, looks interesting. Sleep well.
You had sent me to a totally gray square that you said represented the map of galactic cosmic rays. Here’s the map you cited:
When you have time, perhaps you could comment on the following (emphasis mine):
Here’s their map to compare with the one you sent me …
Stephen Wilde says:
Not only are we not really sure what happened or why, all those millions of years ago, but the estimated timings are potentially way out.
Henry says:
Hi Stephen! I agree with you. I think we should stay at relatively short time spans that we more or less can double ckeck with man’s record of history.
BTW, I finished that data analysis of 44 weather stations that I talked to you about some time ago and was surpised to find earth has been cooling since 1994.
I wonder what your take is on that ?
http://www.letterdash.com/henryp/global-cooling-is-here
Would appreciate to hear from you about my result.
Jeremy says:
April 24, 2012 at 10:55 pm
No, that’s not what he did at all. He used the logarithm of CO2, not the derivative nor the integral of CO2 … as Johnny Depp might say, “Mathematics, you savvy?”
In any case, I have no problem with him using the log of CO2. I was just surprised that in one chart he used log(CO2), and in the very next chart he used straight CO2, and in both cases he declared they were a good fit to the numbers of supernovas … I didn’t understand how that works.
w.
“I’ve tagged the paper as ‘Astrobiology’ because we may be very lucky in our location in the Galaxy.”
I know what you mean, Dr. Svensmark. But; It is a very ill-formed sentence. We are not here because we are lucky. We evolved here as a result of how the environtment is.
So it is quite the opposite.
Environment is as is => We evolved because each mutation that fit in got more children that survided, and therefore it looks like we fit in. So we fit in!
Not like;
Hey, this is a nice place ! We are lucky! lets live here!
But yes, I know, its just a figure of speech.
ggoodknight says:
April 24, 2012 at 10:58 pm
This is a perfect example of the kind of post-hoc fitting problems inherent in both papers, that of S&V and that of Svensmark. As you say, Shaviv and Veizer show cosmic rays matching up with temperature. What’s not to like?
Well, here’s Svensmark Figure 10 showing supernovas (and presumably cosmic rays) …
And here I’ve overlaid the Shaviv/Veizer cosmic ray history per the paper you linked to:
I’m sure you can see the problem …
w.
It is clear that Leif has a much better understanding on this than Willis, who is only adding confusion.
Due to the tangled galactic magnetic field, and the fact that cosmic rays are charged particles, the source of cosmic rays cannot be directly traced back to their apparent source in the sky.
However the total flux of cosmic rays received by Earth will change with the occurrence of SN’s. Each SuperNova will add to the total flux received by the Earth. This can be influenced by how active the Sun is and the extent of the heliosphere, but is probably a reasonable correlation. No local supernovas, low cosmic ray flux, supernovas, higher flux.
Knowing that the cosmic ray flux increases due to local SN’s, you can then go back in history to determine when SN’s occurred in the local neighbourhood, and assume that this corresponds to an increase in the exposure of the Earth to cosmic rays. Note that when I say local I mean within several hundreds of light-years (LY) of Earth. (As an aside, note that professionals do not use LY for measuring distances, they use parsecs).
When stars go supernova, it is believed that the resulting shock wave expands outwards and causes the formation of star clusters. Accordingly, the date of formation of a local star cluster can be used to determine when a local SN occurred. Other measures are the expanding shells of gas, faintly visible for several thousands of years, that expand outwards from the source of the event. The speed of this gas can be traced backwards to a origin point to give an estimate of age. The Vela SNR and the Crab Nebula are prime examples of this. Another measure is the existence of millisecond pulsars, which are supernova remnants (SNR’s), and whose formation date can be estimated from the slow down time of their rotation.
This lack of hard data leaves the Svensmark paper intriguing, but not compelling.
That aside, I find it more compelling than blaming plant food.
Willis Eschenbach, I have read your comments. I would say that, whereas I called the paper a “hit”, you have proven that it is not a home run.
About this: Svensmark’s theory rests heavily on the idea that the source of cosmic rays is supernovae.
That’s too strong. This paper identifies the supernovae as one class of cosmic ray sources, and looks for their hypothesized effects. It finds them, with a degree of uncertainty. This is a good paper that, I predict, will stimulate a lot of follow-up research. Any one following up this paper would be advised to read your critiques. But as it stands, the paper is pretty good.
This is a perfect example of the kind of post-hoc fitting problems inherent in both papers, that of S&V and that of Svensmark.
Fair enough, as is your earlier comment about the number of tunable parameters. I wrote that the number of tunable parameters (not using that phrase) was not uncacceptibly large, given the lengths of the time series. More data are needed. Only time will tell. Some post-hoc fitting is good (Kepler’s Laws), some not so much.
This is not a field that will have the equivalent of the Michelson-Morely experiment. It is more like AIDS/HIV research in the early 80s, where everything is confused, but on a much larger scale. I am partial to your “thermostat hypothesis” (Gaia-lite) without the teleological implication of a designed thermostat. But overall I think that this is a good paper that will have influence.
Good work. Any serious person should read your critiques.
=—
”
Piers Corbyn (@Piers_Corbyn) says:
April 24, 2012 at 10:01 pm
Citizens, Svensmark is a good guy but his theory does not work and he will become a fall guy for the CO2 warmists: “AAh you are wrong so it must be CO2″.
It elevates proxies to a causal role. GCR is a proxy for solar scalar magnetic activity. Increases in GCR sources (supernovae) are a proxy for dust which also causes solar dimming.
SEE http://climaterealists.com/?id=9491
Thanks Piers
“
—=
Thanks for stopping by Piers.
I encourage everyone to patiently & thoroughly read all of the cautionary notes volunteered by Piers (stamped “Posted by Piers Corbyn (Twitter) on Apr 24th 2012, 7:54 PM EDT”) here: http://climaterealists.com/?id=9491
Regards.
–
Dr Svalgaard (solar scientist) and Dr. Corbyn (astrophysicist) agree !
No further comment needed.
William says:
April 25, 2012 at 12:08 am
I have no doubt that Leif understands this better. However, both he and you appear to be wrong. If you look at the picture at the end of my post above above, you’ll notice that there is a “hot-spot” in Cygnus, which is the home of one of the most active nearby supernova remnants … could be coincidence, it’s true, but …
In any case, the article accompanying the picture is from the website of the American Physical Society. Let me repeat what the article says:
Note that this is exactly the claim espoused by you and Leif. The article goes on to say
It says quite specifically that the belief put forward by you and Leif, that there are no hot spots in the cosmic ray map, has come into question. Am I “adding confusion”? Sure, science is like that. People like you claim the answer is known, nothing to see here, move along, folks.
Me, I cause confusion by pointing out that the answer “has now come into question” … so sue me.
Finally, neither you nor Leif have solved the question of the missing supernova remnants. There should be a whole bunch of them in the MIlky Way visible in the x-ray frequencies. No one can find them, which adds even more confusion by calling into question our theories and models of supernovas.
So yes, I add confusion … when people claim that everything is understood and solved.
w.
[quote April 24, 2012 at 7:28 am]
Svensmark points out:
“The energetic GCR that ionize the lower atmosphere are only weakly influenced by variations in the geomagnetic field or by solar magnetic activity. Both cause low-altitude ionization rates to vary by (≈10%) in the course of a magnetic reversal or during a solar cycle. Over decades to millennia the GCR influx to the Solar System scarcely changes.”
Thus the climate scarcely changes as well.
[/quote]
I’d have to disagree. In Svensmark’s therory, clouds magnify the effects of GCRs, so small changes in GCRs can have noticeable effects.
It’s similar to magnifiers in AGW, where it’s demonstrateable that CO2 by itself can’t produce the warming alarmist claim, so a magnifier, such as water vapor, is said to cause the change.
William says:
April 25, 2012 at 12:08 am
If only supernovas within “several hundreds of light-years” should be considered as affecting the Earth, perhaps you can explain, then, why Svensmark is using star clusters within 2,700 light years (850 parsecs), ten times as far away as you recommend?
I’d have to see a citation for that claim, William. Svensmark takes the reverse tack, saying that the star clusters begin to generate supernovas about three million years after their formation …
w.
To the person asking why there are differences in the two cosmic ray maps, I have two answers.
1) I’d hazard a guess that the scale on the two maps is different, with the grey map being very coarse grained and the other map being more fine grained. For example, if I drew a map of the human population over the last 10000 years with grey used to represent a population between 1 and 100 billion, the entire map would be grey.
2) The real answer is it doesn’t matter as as far as GCRSs causing cloud formations. What matters is the GCRs hitting the earth, which is known to change.
Typed on an iPad, so sorry for any ridiculous typos.
When stars go supernova, it is believed that the resulting shock wave expands outwards and causes the formation of star clusters. I’d have to see a citation for that claim, William. Svensmark takes the reverse tack, saying that the star clusters begin to generate supernovas about three million years after their formation …
It is a well known process Willis, see here
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova#cite_note-102
This does not discount the fact that, once a star cluster forms, the most massive stars in that cluster (classified as O and B type stars) will have a very short life and go supernova fairly rapidly. Three million years may well be correct, although this is just an estimate as modelling on very massive stars has many gaps and no one has actually observed the process.
And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
(with no apologies to Lewis Carroll at all!)
I’ve been waiting for this paper!
Anthony says:
“Don’t fret about the diehards. The glory of empirical science is this: no matter how many years, decades, or sometimes centuries it may take, in the end the story will come out right.”
Unfortunately we still have to live through these times, with all the diehards grabbing for the levers of power and taxation, so please excuse me if I continue to fret … hard …
I wonder how long it will be before the Piltdowner rethinks or resiles from his latest literary effort?
Willis said:
“…However, both he and you appear to be wrong. If you look at the picture at the end of my post above above, you’ll notice that there is a “hot-spot” in Cygnus, which is the home of one of the most active nearby supernova remnants … could be coincidence, it’s true, but …
In any case, the article accompanying the picture is from the website of the American Physical Society. Let me repeat what the article says:
In particular, no point sources of cosmic rays should be visible at TeV energy scales, where a typical Larmor radius (the radius of the circular motion of a charged particles in a magnetic field) in the galactic disc is relatively small, only about 100 astronomical units.
Note that this is exactly the claim espoused by you and Leif. ..”
You are very quick Willis. The Cygnus source is most likely Cygnus X-1, a black hole candidate which radiates over a wide spectrum of high energy wavelengths. Not sure how this can be confused with a cosmic ray source. If there are point sources of cosmic rays, it is likely due to funnelling by the galactic magnetic field, rather than pointing towards a defined object or source.
From Earth, cosmic rays come from all directions.
Willis said…”….People like you claim the answer is known, nothing to see here, move along, folks…”
is that what I claim?? You are putting words in my mouth.
John Coleman says:
April 24, 2012 at 5:00 pm
“This piece of research merits TV coverage. I have tried to write a simple news “package”. As an interesting exercise (which I may regret) I think I will try posting it here for comments and suggestions before I present it to my bosses for their consideration.”
I think it is great that you will be covering this on the news.
In the spirit of constructive criticism, I can best note, though, with regard to this:
“I have studied several Sun based climate theories and they never quite hold up when you put them to the test.”
In other publications about far shorter time periods, the author (Dr. Svensmark) himself supports solar-driven variation of non-deflected GCR flux greatly affecting terrestrial climate. Indirectly, if you agree with his work here, there are other consequences. As soon as one agrees with any of the cosmic ray theory work, in terms of not denying that GCR variation affects cloud formation (unlike the CAGW side), a whole new world is opened of climate understanding on multiple time scales.
This is actually indirectly related to theories of solar variation being a major climate influence and in support of them, not as utterly the sole factor determining climate (for there is no single factor accounting for absolutely everything) but as a major influence.
On really long timescales, like hundreds of millions of years, the galactic cosmic ray (GCR) flux varies heavily from events outside the solar system, including supernovas and the very slow movement of our solar system around the galaxy. However, on far shorter timescales like decades and centuries, the flux entering the solar system is more constant, yet the solar-driven interplanetary magnetic field varies in strength. Variation in solar activity affects that magnetic field and how much it deflects the incoming GCR flux away from Earth itself.
Both are shown in one of the images for this article, the second graphic from the top of the page.
See another publication by the author of this paper, Dr. Svensmark, an article in which he gives a general overview of cosmoclimatology theory (best copy and pasted):
http://www.space.dtu.dk/upload/institutter/space/forskning/05_afdelinger/sun-climate/full_text_publications/svensmark_2007cosmoclimatology.pdf
As he puts matters (referring in this other paper to shorter time scales):
“The title reflected a topical puzzle, that of how to reconcile abundant indications of the Sun’s influence on climate (e.g. Herschel 1801, Eddy 1976, Friis-Christensen and Lassen 1991), with the small 0.1% variations in the solar irradiance over a solar cycle measured by satellites. Clouds exert (on average) a strong cooling effect, and cosmic-ray counts vary with the strength of the solar magnetic field, which repels much of the influx of relativistic particles from the galaxy. The connection offers a mechanism for solardriven climate change much more powerful than changes in solar irradiance.”
As one of the examples of the “abundant indications of the Sun’s influence on climate,” Dr. Svensmark mentions Eddy 1976 in the above quote (though there are far more examples than his concise sample list alone):
http://journals.ametsoc.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/ams/journals/content/clim/1998/15200442-11.12/1520-0442%281998%29011%3C3069%3Acfbcsr%3E2.0.co%3B2/production/images/large/i1520-0442-11-12-3069-f15.jpeg
Carbon-14 indirectly shows the cosmic ray flux (with such shifted by the author to account for time lag in assimilation into tree rings).
There are some who will just deny everything by saying correlation does not imply causation. However, actually, the chance that a correlation is due to mere coincidence diminishes the more correlations are seen. One peak / trough matching would not be strong evidence. Two is better. Three still better. And so on. And there are many more examples, in total adding up to way too much to be all dismissed as strange coincidences. The fact that there is a totally plausible and independently supported causation mechanism for the correlation is what solidifies the matter.
Older studies on solar variation versus temperature reconstructions tend to be more likely to be honest non-ideology-based unbiased studies, as, for instance, in the 1970s in the era of the Eddy study there was no political war over CAGW yet and no bias in funding, but, by the end of the 1990s and beyond, matters got worse. According, it is not surprising to see some recent studies making it through “peer review” completely overturn and blatantly contradict earlier results, but that does not make them the ones most probable to be accurate.
As a skeptic, you are probably familar with the hockey stick. That was the tip of the iceberg, as there are too many on the CAGW side cunning enough to realize they need to revise even cosmogenic isotope reconstructions as well as temperature history.
But, anyway, also see, among other examples of what happens with true data:
http://www.sciencebits.com/CosmicRaysClimate
Everywhere, even here, there may be some individuals denying all of that, but one can not be a skeptic without realizing that some have actual motives, ideologies, and levels of honesty (or not!) different from what they pretend in order to fit in or to get the naive trusting them.
Not every peak and trough matches exactly, particularly if shorter time scales are zoomed in upon. There are other climate influences too. For instance, the oceans have a “memory” of older time periods (quadrillions of tons of water thousands of meters deep not changing overnight), and sometimes influence of ocean circulation amplifies the result of a recent change in GCR flux / solar activity, while at other times it temporarily neutralizes one, a bit like superimposing two wave functions which sometimes reinforce each other and sometimes interfere destructively. At the very shortest time scales, average atmospheric temperature fluctuates a lot from essentially complex weather, with variations in precipitation affecting temperature. (And there is some effect from humans recently, just with it commonly vastly overrated). But plenty enough matches up.
Alternatives dismissing the effect of solar (and GCR) variation tend to be lol BS if someone ever seriously attempts to apply them to the past few centuries or millenia at once, either so vaguely unbaked that nobody can even link to a write-up in any detail or else lousy like the recently falsified attempt at trying to explain the Little Ice Age through volcano eruptions alone, neglecting the sun.
While partially admitting the effect of solar variation (though dismissing most of it by denying GCR effects), CAGW-side climate models tend to attempt backcasting only the past century or so, and even that they only superficially sometimes manage by creatively adjusting assumed aerosol values to whatever makes a curve fit under unrealistic sensitivity assumptions: GIGO in computer programming = Garbage In, Garbage Out.
And excuse my bluntness and implied annoyance, which is not directed at you at all, just appropriate parties.