Thursday
Apr102014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Fleshing out the cosmoclimatogy hypothesis
Apr 10, 2014 Climate: solar A new paper in Environmental Research Letters fleshes out Henrik Svensmark's cosmoclimatology hypothesis, by which the suns influence on galactic cosmic rays affects cloud formation on Earth. The paper attempts a theoretical quantification of changes in the numbers of cloud condensation nuclei that might be caused by changes in the cosmic ray flux:
The impact of solar variations on particle formation and cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), a critical step for one of the possible solar indirect climate forcing pathways, is studied here with a global aerosol model optimized for simulating detailed particle formation and growth processes. The effect of temperature change in enhancing the solar cycle CCN signal is investigated for the first time. Our global simulations indicate that a decrease in ionization rate associated with galactic cosmic ray flux change from solar minimum to solar maximum reduces annual mean nucleation rates, number concentration of condensation nuclei larger than 10 nm (CN10), and number concentrations of CCN at water supersaturation ratio of 0.8% (CCN0.8) and 0.2% (CCN0.2) in the lower troposphere by 6.8%, 1.36%, 0.74%, and 0.43%, respectively. The inclusion of 0.2C temperature increase enhances the CCN solar cycle signals by around 50%. The annual mean solar cycle CCN signals have large spatial and seasonal variations: (1) stronger in the lower troposphere where warm clouds are formed, (2) about 50% larger in the northern hemisphere than in the southern hemisphere, and (3) about a factor of two larger during the corresponding hemispheric summer seasons. The effect of solar cycle perturbation on CCN0.2 based on present study is generally higher than those reported in several previous studies, up to around one order of magnitude.
The wider variation of changes in CCNs that the authors find makes the cosmoclimatology hypothesis more plausible since the effect on clouds would be expected to be proportionately larger too.
Reader Comments (34)
It seems to be as much model-based as studies we don't like. Worth keeping tabs on though.
(As an aside I always have a problem with CCNs, probably due to ignorance. It never seems to me that clouds have any problem forming. Are there really loads of water molecules desperate to be clouds and thwarted by the lack of CCNs. Are there also places where there are excess CCNs and no water? What about all those bio CCNs that were recently discovered, amides was it? What part do they play?)
(deleted. too stupid to be funny)
This is like other aspects of climate science, yes there's a mechanism but what is the level of influence that it has?
Its incredibly difficult given the chaotic nature of the climate system to determine the level of causation in any mechanism including radiative qualities of CO2. My suspicion is that all forms of determinism are doomed to failure as chaos makes a mockery of any predictive quality.
Where I live (43S) wetter periods regularly coincide with the low of the solar cycle the last 100 years, if that's any use to anyone. The rest of the cycle is a lottery.
It is of use to me, since I'm a farmer.
rhoda
There's nowt wrong with modelling. The problems arise when you think that models are reality.
I'm pleased to see this report but it's only of academic interest unfortunately, at least in the present climate (no, that's not meant to be funny!).
We are still reluctant to grasp the facts:
a. climate change is no longer anything to do with science;
b. (C)AGW, whatever it might have been, is now only a lever to implement the UN's Agenda 21 and other initiatives aimed at "re-distributing" the planet's wealth rather than increasing it — i.e. impoverishing the wealthy while doing nothing effective to aid the poor;
c. those who hold the levers of power have no need to pay any attention to any scientific hypothesis whether it supports or undermines the current climate paradigm.
I'm sure Svensmark's hypothesis is well worth pursuing but the decision makers are not listening and do not care one way or the other.
From the Ecclesiastical Uncle, an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.
So I, a mere ignoramus, understand that we have yet another model, albeit one that is focused on a narrow aspect of climate science rather than the simulation of the whole. And that skepticism is evidently in order notwithstanding its attempt to detail a phenomenon of significance to the skeptic cause but not to the warmists'.
But could one of the cognoscenti here tell me if this model could be massaged into a form compatible with one or more of the global forecast models that are routinely much scorned in this blog?
Because if the answer is yes, would it not be appropriate to challenge the authors of these models (Would they include the Met Office and Richard Best?) to incorporate the new cloud formation (?) parameter into their models to see if these models then gave results that better mirrored what Is actually happening?
I can't help thinking Svensmark lost the initiative when he accepted ESA funding to go to the lab - he then finds the mechanism, but then has to feed it into atmospheric models that, if he was right in the first place,contain a number of erroneous assumptions - possible about radiative transfer in the atmospheric coloumn. Better, in my view, would have been to persevere with simple but exhaustive analysis of real-world cloud data and the flux of cosmic rays. For some reason, things went quiet on that front when his original papers showing strong correlation were challenged for apparently changing the mode of analysis for the second solar cycle under study (23)....to my knowledge, he did not respond in the science literature, only on the Danish Space Agency website - and thereafter disappeared into a (well-funded) laboratory where whatever the results, they would be open to even further challenge as not representative of the real atmsophere. If anyone knows of detailed statistical treatment of cloud cover, esp low cloud, and cosmic ray flux up to the present day - please do send me a link (peter.taylor...at...ethos-uk.com).
http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-26957039
All quiet on the CERN front; nothing new yet from Jasper Kirkby and his team working on the solar link to condensation particle fromation. I am waiting in anticipation for his next paper.
Yes. This is only theory.
It's theory which could explain an already observed empirical relationship — which when this discovery was published was dismissed by the cabal with cries of "but there's no mechanism which could account for that!"
Here is the mechanism.
Mike J
True or not, you don't help dispel the notion of skeptics as conspiracy theorists. But it's more like taking advantage of the CO2 emissions issue in order to further their long-standing agenda. And to back that notion up here are a couple of links:
http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/voices/michael-shellenberger-and-ted-nordhaus/its-not-about-the-climate
"Climate skeptics are right, Klein cheerily concludes: the Left is using climate change to advance policies they have long wanted. "In short," says Klein, "climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/programmes/analysis/transcripts/25_01_10.txt
Townshend: "They didn’t just want to prevent climate change. They wanted to somehow change people, or at very least for people to know that they had to change."
Porritt: "The root problem is the model of economic growth that drives a particular pattern of economic activity that creates the emissions that lead to the climate impacts. And I think you have to go further upstream, if you like, in looking to the root problem in climate change; and going further upstream means going to the heart of the growth economy that we have today.
This is why practically no effort/money is going into CO2 scrubbers, despite several good (& realtively cheap) ideas. It just doesn't limit growth & consumerism enough!
You have to throw out all pretense of governmental "climate policy" before you can effectively do anything else (including especially, good science to replace the bad). The voters themselves have to force our governments to STOP, either by voting them out or by nonviolent but determined mass civil disobedience of new, clearly tyrannical and nation-damaging laws.
And even then, you are going to find that the voices you are listening to today on the science are not those with the answers to bringing back good science. Anyone concerned with the possibility of a runaway "global climate"--a.k.a. global warming--is going to eventually come up against the simple truth: That the world is NOT balanced on the razor's edge of "climate forcings", but utterly stable (even though it contains a wide variety of REGIONAL CLIMATES--tropics vs. poles, most notably--and transient natural phenomena of great destructive power). The Venus/Earth atmospheric temperatures comparison makes this utterly obvious, to any competent scientist if not to the confused layperson faced with a plethora of duelling theorists.
Svensmark is just another academic with a pet idea that neglects that fundamental fact, of a stable world (and the atmosphere itself--totally irrespective of its detailed makeup--is what makes it stable, overall).
You have to throw out all pretense of governmental "climate policy" before you can effectively do anything else (including especially, good science to replace the bad). The voters themselves have to force our governments to STOP, either by voting them out or by nonviolent but determined mass civil disobedience of new, clearly tyrannical and nation-damaging laws.
And even then, you are going to find that the voices you are listening to today on the science are not those with the answers to bringing back good science. Anyone concerned with the possibility of a runaway "global climate"--a.k.a. global warming--is going to eventually come up against the simple truth: That the world is NOT balanced on the razor's edge of "climate forcings", but utterly stable (even though it contains a wide variety of REGIONAL CLIMATES--tropics vs. poles, most notably--and transient natural phenomena of great destructive power). The Venus/Earth atmospheric temperatures comparison makes this utterly obvious, to any competent scientist if not to the confused layperson faced with a plethora of duelling theorists.
Svensmark is just another academic with a pet idea that neglects that fundamental fact, of a stable world (and the atmosphere itself--totally irrespective of its detailed makeup--is what makes it stable, overall).
Mike Jackson
Very succinctly put
JamesG
Yes, I wasn't arguing conspiracy. As you say that simply opens the door for the likes of idiots like Lewandowsky.
What there is is a very convenient conjunction of interest and to suggest that what I call the Neo-Luddites, along with their friends like Strong and Wirth and others with a socio-political objective, haven't made maximum use of the AGW paradigm (and quite possibly have engaged in a certain amount of "joint enterprise") is to ignore some obvious signs.
The quotes about ensuring that there is "never another USA" or 'we'll be doing the right thing even if global warming turns out to be rubbish' (I paraphrase!) or Edenhoeffer's "Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection" are there for all to read.
It's going to take a lot more than a development in what may well be a minor aspect of climate to derail this particular train.
Genghis
Thank you.
As Willis would say, does this pass your basic smell test?
The opening paragraph of that paper suggests an amplification factor of 3 is required for TSI to replicate past temperatures (eg little ice age) as if that was somehow a problem. Yet the manmade CO2 warming theorists ritually add an amplification factor of 3 from as yet unproven positive feedbacks. The solar warming theory at least has the virtue of actual evidence of polar amplifications that took the planet into and out of various ice ages as well as being able to predict a little ice age whilst the CO2 alternative cannot produce any cooling at all unless a massive carbon sink is postulated to appear suddenly out of nowhere.
More data, less model would be helpful. Clouds are important thermoregulators, but there are simpler and more direct means to get negative feedback closer to homeostasis. Lindzen adaptive iris is one that also explains the lack of a models troposphere hotspot.
I admit confusion, on a couple of grounds. Perhaps someone familiar with this field of science can help.
1. Previous study shows that large rivers (Parana, e.g.) in S America have much greater water flow during the peak of the solar cycle: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2008/oct/29/solar-activity-could-dictate-river-flow
The authors attribute the increased water flow to increased precipitation. This seems to go against the notion that at the peak of the solar cycle, there would be less CNN, less rainfall. Yes, it is just one area of the world, but doesn't seem to fit theory, which apparently is global, tho less strong in the S hemisphere.
2. If I understand correctly, higher temps increase the amplitude of the CNN effects from the solar cycle. That would seem to mean fewer CNN, everything else equal, if global temps were marginally higher at a solar peak, or more CNN if temps were lower at a solar trough. IF the world is slowly warming, with long pauses and lower climate sensitivity than the models currently show, wouldn't that still mean that at the peak of a normal solar cycle, we would have marginally fewer CNN and thus marginally fewer clouds?
Don't flame me if I've misunderstood, please just explain where I've gone wrong.
Nigel Calder's book, "The Chilling Stars" gives a very useful overview of the hypothesis.
He has a blog but is not very up to date, www.calderup.wordpress.com
Nir Shaviv and Jan Veizer's work show the very probable effect over millions of years.
Found this video to be very informative:
http://climateclips.com/archives/271
Originally read about this at Tallblokes site.
Surely this is old research as all the folks at the IPCC know everything about climate science is settled science, therefore this must be already allowed for by this UN organization
"Climate scientists contributing to IPCC reports do not claim that climate science is 'settled science'."
You said it Zed
jamspid
I think "the debate is over" is the current phrase du jour! Subtle difference. Too subtle for the Truro Troll but then most things are.
Jack Cowper:
Thanks for the link. There are some commenters on this blog (and over at WUWT recently) who get howled down by other sceptics for questioning the *popular* CO2-centric radiation budget explanation of climate. That succinct clip supports the idea that changes within the boundaries of our atmosphere have negligible effect whereas changes without are where the influences lie. Perhaps there needs to be a new identifier: the Sceptical Sceptic.
"(C)AGW, whatever it might have been, is now only a lever to implement the UN's Agenda 21 and other initiatives aimed at "re-distributing" the planet's wealth"
Apr 10, 2014 at 11:08 AM | Mike Jackson
What utter paranoid conspiracy lunacy.
But remember kids, you all swear blind that deniers aren't more likely than real people to be swivel-eyed paranoid conspiracy theorists. After all, you all insist it....
tom0mason
No they don't - which is why IPCC authors use phrases like 'high confidence' and 'low confidence'. If "everything was settled" then it would all be 'certain'!
The potential for solar influences on climate to help with near-term forecasting is very interesting, see for example this paper by some Met Office colleagues of mine.
The ideas that (a) scientists claim "the science is settled" and (b) solar influences are ignored by climate researchers are both strawmen.
So in fact all climate scientists agree with sceptics about the science not being settled and about the unknown degree of solar influence, as well as the low bound of the range of CS and the pauseness of the pause. Soon we won't remember what we were sceptical about.
(Nothing much is happening, and we can adapt. My null, now supported by the whole of climate science?)
Richard Betts
I am glad that you have rebuffed my sarcastic assertion. It is rarely done, and when it is it is only on blogs such as these.
The history of this is interesting, Al Gore declared that "the science is settled" in his testimony to Congress about global warming. Since then many news outlets, pundits, and politicians have reused variations on this phrase.
I have never heard or read from a news agency, paper, or broadcaster having to retract this phrase, certainly I have never seen a scientist in this field ever ask for it to be retracted when used in such reports. Thus the general public tends to get the wrong idea about climate science as the settled science.
All science is about seeking truth (or should be), and demonstrating through experiment the truth that has been found, this naturally leads rewrites of the known scientific information, often only subtly. It is man's ability to imaginative see and accurately define these subtleties in nature that leads to scientific progress.
There may be something very subtle happening with how the sun could modulate our climate, such as -
"...effect of solar cycle perturbation on CCN0.2 based on present study is generally higher than those reported in several previous studies.."
Certainly the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is a very slight amount and yet we are to believe that through a subtle mechanism it dramatically alters out climate, may be to destuction.
We will know when both ideas have been throughly investigated.
Richard Betts, from your link;
would appear to be denying Svensmark's hypothesis. It is also a misrepresentation of the original topic which was global climate, not regional weather and therefore, as you accuse others, a strawman.
ssat
I disagree. The Ineson paper I mentioned is relevant because it includes solar influences in a global climate model and looks across a wide region (Canada to Europe), and the paper by Yu & Luo (the original topic) presents maps and also zonal means (means across a latitude) - there are no figures of global means.
And if important things like the UV variation make that kind of difference to global temps, all your models are not right, just as they are not right in terms of ocean takeup if that is the cause of the pause. It's no use saying the pause is caused by some phenomenon which isn't modelled and simultaneously claim your model predicted a pause in any meaningful way. Ergo, you can't use GCM output for anything useful beyond making better models.
Richard Betts
And I too disagree. You would appear to be confusing your subject with the subject which is that aCO2 is/isn't the root of all evil.
Or you are moving toward the *isn't* position in which case we would all be interested in hearing that.
Last year a paper appeared in the Herald of The Russian Academy of Sciences,2013,Volume 83, no.3 pp275-285,"The Role of Solar Activity in Global Warming " by S.V.Avakyan.
The abstract reads: " The author associates the recently observed climate warming and carbon dioxide concentration growth in the lower atmospheric layers with variations of solar-geomagnetic activity in global cloud formation and the significant decrease in the role of forests in carbon dioxide accumulation in the process of photosynthesis .The contribution of the greenhouse effect of carbon-containing gases to global warming turns out to be insignificant."