The Dawn of the Cosmic Ray Era?

In other news this past week, the results of the CLOUD experiment at CERN have been released.

New, convincing evidence indicates global warming is caused by cosmic rays and the sun — not humans

The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.

The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

This lends further support to the hypothesis of Henrik Svensmark that Galactic Cosmic Rays play a considerable part in the earth’s climate. Nigel Calder, who co-authored The Chilling Stars with Svensmark, points out the most striking finding.

Nigel Calder is a physicist and science journalist and one-time editor of the New Scientist (on the sad decline of which Leg-iron has just been forcefully writing).

The instant complaint from the CO2-driven global warmists has been that the clusters of molecules in CERN’s cloud chamber aren’t big enough to act as condensation nuclei in the atmosphere, so it proves nothing, rien, nada. They never wanted the CERN research done anyway:

The global warming establishment sprang into action, pressured the Western governments that control CERN, and almost immediately succeeded in suspending CLOUD. It took Mr. Kirkby almost a decade of negotiation with his superiors, and who knows how many compromises and unspoken commitments, to convince the CERN bureaucracy to allow the project to proceed. And years more to create the cloud chamber and convincingly validate the Danes’ groundbreaking theory.

Not only did it take a decade for the CERN cloud chamber project to get under way, but the findings took something like a year to get published in Nature after being submitted in 2010. And now that they are out, they’re not being given much publicity.

Instead, the focus of attention has been on hurricane Irene, which Barack Obama has warned could be an “historic storm” (and which some warmists blame on global warming, natch), and New York’s subway system has been closed down and 370,000 residents are being evacuated from low-lying areas, even though the hurricane has now been downgraded to a Category 1 hurricane (the smallest).

So I will be thinking of Chris Sorochin, who read out my Eat For Victory piece on his New York Stony Brook WUSB 90.1 FM  radio show on Friday (he’d read out another one a couple of weeks earlier), before going home to tape up his windows on Long Island. Irene is currently predicted to pass over Long Island in the next 24 hours. I hope he survives the historic storm, and lives to read out a few more.

P.S. While I’m on the subject of global warming, mathematician and climate sceptic Claes Johnson has a great example of how censorship works. You may need to translate some of the text.