IBD: Five Decades Of Cooling Ahead

Global warming? A Canadian scientist gives us good reason to question the "CO2 causes global warming" mantra. My favourite line is the quote from Groucho Marx: "Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?"

A peer-reviewed study by a respected Canadian physicist blames the interplay of cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons for 20th-century warming. The CFCs are now gone, and so is warming — perhaps for the next 50 years.

[...]

Qing Bin-Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy at Canada's University of Waterloo, is a believer in the value of drawing conclusions from observable data and not from selective data fed into computer models that are based on false assumptions and include "fudge factors."

In a peer-reviewed paper published in the prestigious online journal Physics Reports, Lu, who holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Newcastle, reports that CFCs, the compounds once widely used as refrigerants, and cosmic rays, which are energy particles originating in outer space, are mostly to blame for climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Global Warming? Science And History Say No

Francis T. Manns in todays' Post-Chronicle:

What is Global Warming? Throughout time the Earth's climate has varied. Since the base of the Pleistocene (1.8 M ya) there have been at least 30 glacial - interglacial cycles of 40,000 years to 100,000 years duration with interglacial periods warmer than now between them.

(...) Realistically, the planet is not warming in the dramatic manner the alarmists claim.

The sun heats the earth; cosmic radiation cools it. Do some scientific reading and let Al Gore’s PG rated scare dry up and blow away. He’s simply an irrelevant opportunistic manipulative politician. His only followers are sheep.

There's a link to Dr. Mann's excellent powerpoint presentation Global Warming and Science, also available under Good Stuff in my sidebar at right.

The Great Global Warming Swindle

That's the name of a new documentary to air on the UK's Channel 4:

Channel 4 Thursday 8 March at 9pm

In a polemical and thought-provoking documentary, film-maker Martin Durkin argues that the theory of man-made global warming has become such a powerful political force that other explanations for climate change are not being properly aired.

The film brings together the arguments of leading scientists who disagree with the prevailing consensus that a 'greenhouse effect' of carbon dioxide released by human activity is the cause of rising global temperatures.

Instead the documentary highlights recent research that the effect of the sun's radiation on the atmosphere may be a better explanation for the regular swings of climate from ice ages to warm interglacial periods and back again.

The film argues that the earth's climate is always changing, and that rapid warmings and coolings took place long before the burning of fossil fuels. It argues that the present single-minded focus on reducing carbon emissions not only may have little impact on climate change, it may also have the unintended consequence of stifling development in the third world, prolonging endemic poverty and disease.

The film features an impressive roll-call of experts, including nine professors – experts in climatology, oceanography, meteorology, environmental science, biogeography and paleoclimatology – from such reputable institutions as MIT, NASA, the International Arctic Research Centre, the Institut Pasteur, the Danish National Space Center and the Universities of London, Ottawa, Jerusalem, Winnipeg, Alabama and Virginia.

That roll-call of experts includes Canada's Dr. Tim Ball.

Here's some quotes from the film's director Martin Durkin:

"You can see the problems with the science of global warming, but people just don’t believe you – it’s taken ten years to get this commissioned."

"It is a big story that is going to cause controversy."

"It’s very rare that a film changes history, but I think this is a turning point and in five years the idea that the greenhouse effect is the main reason behind global warming will be seen as total bollocks."

I hope that Durkin is right. I just wish I could get Channel 4 here in Canada.

h/t: Drudge

Is Global Warming caused by greenhouse gases or by the Sun?

Republished from SubmitYourArticle.com and Ezine Articles:

Most scientists believe that the current global warming is caused by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases and that the most important of these gases is Carbon Dioxide or CO2.

They also believe that the Sun's influence for this warming is very small. We now know that the irradiance or "heat transfer" from the Sun to the Earth has varied relative little during recent decades. Therefore the conclusion that most scientists have done is that the resent warming must be man-made, this is because they haven't found any other reasonable explanation.

However what we know over how much a specific increase of CO2 has on global temperature is poor. The reason in that the knowledge of how greenhouse gases affect cloud formation is mostly down to speculations. Cloud formation physics is quite a complicated process to explain with many factors.

So, rather than having a solid theoretical and measured basis for how much man-made greenhouse gases affect the climate, the made estimation is mostly down to deduction.

They argue: We know how much the temperature has increased so therefore we can calculate how much a specific increase in greenhouse gases will increase the global temperature in the future. We have done this through deduction as we already have attributed the known increase to be greenhouse driven.

However scientists who study the Sun have long noted similarities between solar activity and terrestrial weather patterns.

Also the weather changes the last century is not something unique. Given the relative small changes in the observed irradiance "heat emitted from the Sun", those changes in temperature during past centuries are hard to explain if you don't include some other types of influence from the Sun.

It was not until the Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark suggested that cosmic radiation could influence cloud cover that a plausible explains for this apparent correlation was given.

Here is this theory!

When the Sun is very active, as it is now, the solar wind and the solar magnetic field are both strong. This in turn shields the Earth from high energy particles coming from the cosmos, usually from particles which were once created in supernova explosions. This affects low cloud cover formation as the radiation create ions which seeds cloud forming water droplets. During times when there are many high energy particles reaching low altitudes there are more low cloud cover and the Earth cools. When there are few high energy particles penetrating to low altitudes then less clouds form and the Earth warms.

Usually clouds higher up in the atmosphere are almost always ionized from both low and high energy particles because both those types of particles penetrate high altitudes at all time.

The created variations are only in the low altitude cloud cover which is affected by very high energy cosmic particles.

Recently an experiment called SKY (Cloud in Danish) was made by Svensmark which conclusively confirmed this cloud forming mechanism experimentally and that this type of cosmic ionization has an important seed effect on clouds. Links between low cloud cover variations and high energy particles intensity have also now been confirmed by satellite studies.

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Per Strandberg has a Master Degree in Applied Physics & Electronics. He is the webmaster of a unique website which gives visitors comprehensive information, with graphics and key data that deal with current theories on global warming.

http://www.global-warming-and-the-climate.com

Ockham’s Razor takes a slice at global warming

Taking a hard look at the IPCC Report:

If Franciscan friar William of Ockham were alive today, he would reject the IPCC report and instead point to the work of Dr. Henrik Svensmark, who presents hard data showing variations in solar activity control nearly all global warming and cooling.

Ockham argued that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating, or "shaving off", those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. (Hence, Ockham’s Razon, which shaves away the unnecessary assumptions.) As applied to the IPCC Global Warming report, Ockham would shave away pretty much everything between the two covers dealing with anthropomorphic (human caused) sources of global warming. Why? Because Dr. Svensmark’s research does not require models, assumptions and other hand waving. His research shows that the amount of cosmic radiation hitting the atmosphere controls the amount of low level cloud cover (which the IPCC says controls global warming), and the amount of solar radiation controls the amount of cosmic radiation that gets into our atmosphere.

Could it be that the sun warms the globe?

h/t: Amy Ridenour

A new theory of climate change

Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, writes in today's Times Online: An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change

Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The sun’s brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.

He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds.

(...)

The only trouble with Svensmark’s idea — apart from its being politically incorrect — was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.

A new book, The Chilling Stars co-authored by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder is due to be published this month.

h/t: Drudge