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.
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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
This is some great cosmogeologic arm waving on an epic scale. I like it! We’ll see how I feel after I read the paper. Regardless, there are some very interesting correlations in those hand-drawn figures. I particularly like the tie between oceanic highstands, plate tectonics and biologic diversity. One sees something like this in forested areas. Lots of unbroken forest (deep water), low diversity. Start adding fields into the forest tract (shallows, epeiric seas), much higher diversity.
As to “Plate Tectonics”: information that began leading to this idea was being gathered from the late ’40s, at a minimum (and there was Wegener’s ideas and data, which anybody with half a brain had to look at and give some credence to. Wegener’s biggest problem was that he had no plausible mechanism to power continental drift, and he made some bad assessments, for example positing that the North Atlantic Ocean had formed in the last million years, that aided those who contested him to ridicule his theory). The 1960s were a time of great excitement as some people began to put together all kinds of new data, and by about 1967-68, there were numerous additional discoveries and papers being published concerning the theory of seafloor spreading and subduction; i.e. Plate Tectonics. The idea probably became mainstream thinking around 1972-74, although there were contending driving mechanisms (Carey’s expanding earth idea, for example) and various denunciations for some time after that.
Willis Eschenbach says:
April 24, 2012 at 7:00 pm
Here’s the kind of thing that makes me skeptical of modeling the number of supernovas, from NatGeo:
The brightness of supernova remnants (SNRs) can easily be obscured from optical telescopes by gas and dust, but are usually visible to x-ray and radio telescopes.
“Astronomers have been puzzled, however, by a shortage of young supernova remnants in our galaxy. Only half a dozen have been found, as opposed to the more than 30—roughly two a century—predicted to exist.”
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The last paragraph implies that young, supernova remnants can only be detected for a limited amount of time (1500-2000 years?) after they have exploded, which strikes me as somewhat odd.
If that is true however, it may merely be a statistical blip. In astronomical terms, 1500-2000 years is the mere blinking of an eye.
Hi Mr. Coleman
I would recommend in the intro, not focusing primarily on your skepticism of AGW. I think it will immediately turn off a good chunk of your audience. It come across as adversarial. I’d say something more generic like “founder of the Weather Channel”, etc.
Early when you first talk of our sun’s movement through the galaxy I suggest bringing up the idea that the spiral arms move at a different rate than the sun, so we periodically move in and out of these arms over millions of years. This leads to a periodicity of effects that might be a factor in the ice ages and extinctions.
Instead of “eradicated the dinosaurs”, which most associate with an asteroid, mention the periodic extinctions of many species, and the periodic blooms of diversity.
Instead of the ominous Keeling curve, perhaps a curve over millions of years showing very large changes in CO2 content over history, including much higher CO2 than today. Especially since the theory attempts to explain the inverse relationship between CO2 and SN rates.
Instead of saying AGW has “just not been at all convincing” one could say AGW predictions have failed to explain the… pick your poison: lack of warming, lack of acceleration of sea level rise, near normal Arctic ice, non-melting glaciers, healthy polar bear population, lack of stronger hurricanes, lack of tropospheric temp rise…
Couple of top-of-the-head thoughts.
The logical gap most folks miss is this.
1. grant that increased GCRs increases cloudiness and has a cooling effect.
2. grant that during the past there were periods where GCRs were exceptionally high
and that the earth cooled greatly effecting bio diversity.
Neither of these addresses the question: What will doubling C02 do the temperature?
Basically the CGR hypothesis is orthogonal to the central question.
This just showed up….seems to be relevant !
” Lack of Oxygen Led to 1st Mass Extinction
By Kristian Sjogren
Editor’s Note: The content of this article was provided by our partner, ScienceNordic.
With its warm climate and plenty of food, the Earth was a good place to live for the many animals with shells, legs and teeth.
Animal life had just conquered the oceans 440 million years ago. But suddenly something happened that over the following half a million years wiped out almost 86 percent of all species of animals that lived in the oceans.
Researchers have speculated for decades about the cause of this catastrophe, which occurred towards the end of the Ordovician geological period……”.
http://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2012/04/24/lack_of_oxygen_led_to_1st_mass_extinction_106266.html
Lucy
“No comparison with Mann at all.”
It is illogical for you to focus on the differences from Mann when I point out the similarities.
Especially when I point out a specific similarity on testing the hypothesis by withholding data.
Something that both authors refuse to do.
Dont be emotional
I would like to emphasize a point about modelling GCRs.
Because the cosmic ray sky is uniform static as shown at http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/cosmic_rays.html
then the statistical approach to modelling the earth’s varying exposure to cosmic rays is possible, valid, and mandatory (mandatory in that no other method is possible).
His data are from the WEBDA database. He compares with Dias et al. and Kharchenko et al. but conclude they don’t change the picture so he stays with WEBDA.
So the WEBDA data are the only real hard data he uses. The rest are calculations, statistics and modeling. So I can understand the comment of Steven Mosher as he says April 24, 2012 at 11:53 am:
Its estimated. And Its modeled. It’s not an observation. There are other “records” of the count. He looks at them, calls them “similar” and doesn’t test his calculations WRT the selection of records.
If Mann wrote this, people here would be hooting and hollaring.
So his calculations on the data from WEBDA are critical. I am curious what astronomers would say about them. That would be the real test I would think.
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Yes. I dont know how his decision gets past peer review. I would expect at least a cursory test about how his conclusions hold up if you accept the other databases. That is just grade school sensitivity testing. testing your analytical decisions 101. Its brain dead NOT to do this test.
You have 3 possible data sources. You dont just pick one and say the other two are ‘no different”
You run the math with all three and SHOW that your choice of one doesnt matter.
Sheesh. Why do you think we folks demanded that mann try his method with BCP held out or with tiljander held out. This is just basic. Now it may very well be that this choice doesnt make a difference. THAT is important to show., even if you bury it in the SI.
Especially since its the only thing that comes close to being “data” in the paper.
Tobias Nysa says:
April 24, 2012 at 5:24 pm
Along the line of a few other comments, I am not sure plate tectonics belongs in the discussion. The question here is cloud formation
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Plate tectonics have a lot to do with climate (and biology) so Svenmark does not leave it out. SEE: http://www-odp.tamu.edu/publications/202_SR/synth/synth_5.htm
Steven Mosher says:
The logical gap most folks miss is this.
1. grant that increased GCRs increases cloudiness and has a cooling effect.
2. grant that during the past there were periods where GCRs were exceptionally high
and that the earth cooled greatly effecting bio diversity.
Neither of these addresses the question: What will doubling C02 do the temperature?
Basically the CGR hypothesis is orthogonal to the central question.
The logic gap you are missing is:
If increasing GCRs increase cloudiness and cooling, then…
Decreasing GCR’s may decrease cloudiness and create more warmth.
The warmth currently attributed to manmade CO2 may be largely because of decreased GCR’s instead.
Therefor the question of GCRs is central to the idea of climate change.
Absolutly central.
Steven Mosher says: April 24, 2012 at 7:34 pm
The logical gap most folks miss is this.
1. grant that increased GCRs increases cloudiness and has a cooling effect.
2. grant that during the past there were periods where GCRs were exceptionally high
and that the earth cooled greatly effecting bio diversity.
Neither of these addresses the question: What will doubling C02 do the temperature?
Basically the CGR hypothesis is orthogonal to the central question.
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http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/09/apparently-ive-irritated-the-fruit-fly/
Steven – I think I briefly covered both axes of your “orthogonal” question here:
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My Summary – The “Mainstream” Catastrophic Humanmade Global Warming Debate:
Conventional climate theory, assuming zero feedback, suggests that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would result in ~1 degree C of global warming.
Warming alarmists say there are positive feedbacks to increasing CO2 (and build this assumption aggressively into their climate models), whereas climate skeptics say there are negative feedbacks.
The skeptics easily win this mainstream debate, because there is no evidence of net positive feedbacks to increased CO2 in the climate system, and ample evidence of negative feedbacks.
Also, despite increased atmospheric CO2, there has been no net global warming in about a decade.
The probability therefore is that “climate sensitivity” to a hypothetical doubling of atmospheric CO2 is less than 1 degree C.
Furthermore, I suspect that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 is unlikely to happen due to human activity – so we can expect much less than 1 degree C of global warming.
The above ASSUMES that one accepts the premises of the mainstream debate.
BUT there is perhaps a bigger problem with the mainstream debate:
Atmospheric CO2 LAGS temperature at all measured time scales, from hundreds of years on a long cycle, to 9 months on a short cycle;
SO
the hypothesis that CO2 is a significant driver of global temperature, core to the mainstream debate, apparently assumes that the future is causing the past.
The popular counterarguments are:
a) The lag of CO2 after temperature is a “feedback effect”,
OR
b) It is clear evidence that time machines really do exist.
Both counterarguments a) and b) are supported by equal amounts of compelling evidence. 🙂
This thorny point may not be resolved in my lifetime, but I’ll just remind you of some of the assumptions that are near and dear to the hearts and “logic” of the global warming alarmists:
1. They apparently assume that the Uniformitarian Principle has been especially exempted for their particular brand of “science”.
2. The also assume that Occam’s Razor can similarly be ignored, apparently again, just for them.
The increasing desperation of the warming alarmists is evidenced by their evermore Byzantine explanations of the observed flat or cooling global temperatures in this century. What is it this week – aerosols, dust, volcanoes. the appalling scarcity of buffalo farts… the list of farfetched apologia is endless and increasingly pathetic.
Earlier, there was Mann-made global warming, the “Divergence Problem” and “Hide the Decline”. The list of global warmist chicanery is increasingly long and unprincipled.
It is notable that not one of the very-scary global warming predictions of the IPCC has materialized. The IPCC has demonstrated negative predictive skill. All its scary predictions have proven false.
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If the above post is too political, try this one:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/06/a-reply-shakun-et-al-dr-munchausen-explains-science-by-proxy/#comment-948287
CO2 lags temperature at all measured time scales from ~~600-800 years in the ice core records on a long temperature-time cycle, to 9 months on a much shorter time scale.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2vsTMacRae.pdf
We really don’t know how much of the recent increase in atmospheric CO2 is natural and how much is manmade – possibilities range from entirely natural (~~600-800 years ago was the Medieval Warm Period) to entirely manmade (the “material balance argument”). I lean towards mostly natural, but I’m not certain.
Although this questions is scientifically crucial, it is not that critical to the current “social debate” about alleged catastrophic manmade global warming (CAGW), since it is obvious to sensible people that IF CO2 truly drives temperature, it is an insignificant driver (climate sensitivity to CO2 is very low; “feedbacks” are negative) and minor increased warmth and increased atmospheric CO2 are both beneficial to humanity AND the environment.
In summary, the “climate skeptics” are trouncing the warming alarmists in the “mainstream CAGW debate”.
Back to the crucial scientific question – is the current increase in atmospheric CO2 largely natural or manmade?
Please see this 15fps AIRS data animation of global CO2 at
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003562/carbonDioxideSequence2002_2008_at15fps.mp4
It is difficult to see the impact of humanity in this impressive display of nature’s power.
All I can see is the bountiful impact of Spring, dominated by the Northern Hemisphere with its larger land mass, and some possible ocean sources and sinks.
I’m pretty sure all the data is there to figure this out, and I suspect some already have – perhaps Jan Veizer and colleagues.
An alarmist recants? “‘Gaia’ scientist James Lovelock: I was ‘alarmist’ about climate change”
Global warmists distinctly cooling?
http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/23/11144098-gaia-scientist-james-lovelock-i-was-alarmist-about-climate-change
[Moderator’s Note: This is really the wrong thread for this. You missed this posting. -REP]
Mike Weatherford says:
April 24, 2012 at 6:59 pm
I think the truth of this paper is not so much in what it says, as in what it infers: that there are far more variables affecting climate the most of the “climate scientists” are willing to admit, and we’re not at the point (yet, anyway) where we can truthfully say we know all the ways our climate are affected…..
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That is probably the truest statement made about “Climate Science”
Given the state of climate models “chaotic systems are not in any sense intrinsically random or unpredictable. They merely possess extreme sensitivity to ignorance” seems to be a key phrase.
Willis,
I mentioned some ago that our climate is controlled by outside influences and what we see is weather on Earth. You nearly bit my head off. In time we will find that our climate is modulated by very simple and robust processes, and elegantly profound. This paper is a start to a revolution in our understanding of much that has been missing and may even impact on the standard model, for it too needs a kick in the pants. Regards.
Entertaining and interesting. I won’t pretend to have the capacity or credibility to critique this in a serious way, but…
It does have the feel of “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”
Richard says:
April 24, 2012 at 8:22 pm
An alarmist recants? “‘Gaia’ scientist James Lovelock: I was ‘alarmist’ about climate change”
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See WUWT: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/23/breaking-james-lovelock-back-down-on-climate-alarm/
Correlation almost always implies causation, it just doesn’t usually imply a particular simple causal model
Indeed, but in this case, with galactic scales, I would be astonished if there were a third phenomena causing the correlation.
In this case, if the correlation is real (not due to chance), then it is proof of causation.
Allan Macrae,
All your points about CAGW having lost the scientific debate are solid. However, the problem is that the propaganda war has already been won by Greens! This was driven home to me when Danielle Smith lost the Alberta election with the tipping point being when she was heckled and booed by a left wing audience on national television. Up until that point she had been handily leading in the poles. Her crime: to say that “the science is not settled” even if she supports energy savings, polution reduction and emissions reductions. The national media had a field day and spent the final days prior to voting with muck-racking articles helping to paint a rational leader as a radical “wacko”. Alison Redford, a socialist human rights lawyer, leading a spendthrift “conservative” party pounced on the issue and the Wildrose party lost their 10% points lead in a matter of days.
The popular reaction this week against Danielle Smith was similar to the reaction of climate scientists against Henrik Svenmark a decade ago. The war is clearly lost. Like harmless CFC’s, it is inevitable that draconian legislation against CO2 is on the way. There are too much politics, media and self interest groups driving the agenda to stop things now.
So says Willis:
Not here: http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/archeosm/en/fr-cosqu1.htm
Very exciting and everything but don’t pander us a la SKS with freehand renderings to explain the highly technical paper. Confess I havn’t read it yet (I will) but real data on supernovae back a half a billion years has got to be a bit sketchy. Explain to me one more time how GCR’s affect sea level? How GCR’s affect ocean floor spreading rates? Lots of ocean is great for biodiversity of marine genera but it pretty much sucks for land critters. In both the Permian and the late Cretaceous extinctions marine genera took the biggerst hit.
The Cretaceous extinction, despite really impressive iridium aerosols, had no ice age. The Permian extinction began much earlier than the GCR’s posited with mid latitude glaciation in the late Carboniferous.
Leif Svalgaard says:
April 24, 2012 at 6:02 pm
Thanks, Leif. That helps. 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?
Further issues. Here’s Svensmarks Figure 2a:
The first thing I noticed was that the most recent 8 million years are very short on open clusters. Svensmark says:
OK, fine, that could be, dust hiding a number of new clusters … but that leads to a new problem.
IF there are actually a bunch more very young open clusters, but they’re just hidden, then the blue line of the decay of open clusters is way wrong. For example, the blue line gives a value of 9 open clusters for the period 8-16 million years ago, but there are 24 open clusters of that age. It also has pushed the blue line below a bunch of the data in the previous years. And that mismatch is due to the lack of recent clusters … but Svensmark says that the lack of recent clusters is an artifact, they’re there, but just hidden.
In other words, if the Svensmark decay formula is true and accurate, then the most recent 8 million years should have MORE open clusters than the period 8-16 million years ago …
And if that’s the case, then the blue line is no longer accurate. If we fit the exponential decay line to everything but the most recent 8 million years and use that to calculate how many recent open clusters we should see, we get something like this:
And that, of course, changes the recent shape of Svensmark’s Fig. 2b and 2c quite a bit for the most recent period … which throws a big loop into his analysis.
That’s the problem I have with this kind of analysis. There are too many tunable parameters. For example, for the decay curve we have two tunable parameters … and there are more parameters hidden in the choices of the datasets and the form of the chosen equations.
Final problem. Figure 21. I commented above on this one. It shows the estimate of the supernovas versus the CO2.
First, note that the appearance of a good fit in recent years depends entirely on the misfit of the Svensmark decay formula for the recent period as discussed above. Without that, all of the recent CO2 data wouldn’t fit the supernova data for beans.
Next, I digitized all of the paleosol CO2 data (solid circles), because it covered the entire period, and I compared it to the Svensmark supernova data. The results are shown below:
As you can see, the fit is very poor, with an R^2 of a paltry 0.17 … not only that, but a) in the left half of the graph, CO2 goes from floor to ceiling regardless of supernovas, and b) in the right half, it depends on only five data points.
Overall? I fear we’re back in the “too many tunable parameters” universe. Svensmark may be right … but I fear he’s a long, long ways from establishing that.
w.
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
Under the “here are the main results:” I got an ad for combustion toilets. There must be some kind of advanced AI that picks these ads.
I’m just an average joe and most of the readers on this site are much “smarter” than I. But for anyone to postulate with any measure of certainty about events (be they evolution, supernova, the big bang, etc.) that may or may not have occurred millions of years ago, is just ludicrous in my mind. There are so many things that happened even just thousands of years ago that we don’t know much about that it always amazes me when scientists begin to hypothesize about events that occurred millions or even billions of years ago. I guess there’s nothing wrong with hypothesis but when I readers begin to suggest this may be some grand theory or that Svensmark be considered for a Nobel prize, I just roll my eyes. I love just about everything posted on this site but not quite sure why this post deserved a sticky.
Legatus says:
There are only two options (that I know of ) for major changes in the climate due to cosmic rays, changes of the sun, or changes outside the sun.
Leif Svalgaard says:
There is a third option: that cosmic rays have nothing to do with climate. [not on a time scale that matters for society].
That is why I specified for major changes in the climate due to cosmic rays, it was to leave open the possibility of major changes (or lack thereof) due to factors other than comsic rays, and to specify that I was talking only about major changes (extinction level events, that sort of thing) and only due to cosmic rays (which they may or may not be related to, and may or may not be related to climactically, such as if the rays had some other effect, or if some other cause is associated time wise with the rays).
However…
The actual, expeimental evidence still shows that cosmic rays do appear to create cloud nuclea in the labratory (two different experiments have shown this now, I believe). The question then is, does that still hold true out here were we live, where thare are many other factors in play cloud formation wise.
There is also evidence for not one, but two Grand Minimums of the sun sometime during said LIA. This is not ceertain evidence, but it is hightly suggestive.
There is also some evidence that actual out here in the real world cosmic rays effect the amount of cloud cover, although it is less certain. This paper may or may not be one of those. I would be more certain if there was some way to actually show what the intensity of cosmic radiation was back then (and more recently). There are some proxies that may show that, say, during past times, cooling may be associated with increased cosmic rays, or with lower solar activity (not nessissarily the same thing).
We know that there was a little ice age, and that worldwide it was somewhat cooler. It appeared that in at least some places, that did matter to society. We cannot say for certain what caused either it, or the preceeding Medieval Warm Period, which we also know did indeed exist. Since we do not know what caused these, we also cannot therefore say what did not cause these. Since the above Svenmark cosmic ray theory has at least the above experimental evidence, we must therefore say that it is possibly true. Not certainly true, but possibly true, and some evidence for it beats no evidence. There does not appear to be any other explainations running around for the LIA and MWP, so for now, the Svenmark theory is pretty much the only game in town, at least the only one with any amount of actual experimental evidence. It will have to do untill something better comes along.
What we need is simple. We need to spend one hundred million billion gazillion dollars and make a giant comsic ray generator, send it out into space, beam those suckers at the earth, and see what happens. Simple! Send money, I’ll get right on it! Oh, and we will also need a giant cosmic ray shield, we don’t want nature to interfere with our experiment. And then, if cosmic rays actually effect climate, we will then be in complete (or as complete as is possible) control of our climate. CO2 worries will be over.