This is an interesting lecture that I found. Now, if you are a global warmingista, how do you explain this? Here we have climates changing, and temperatures changing, without the evil influence of mankind. The more I see, the more disgusted I get with the global warmingistas and their political corruption of science! This is all about Al Gore and the IPCC’s power grab. Remember him? He is the guy who uses 20 times more electricity than the typical American family. Do you think that a $2000/month electric bill is normal? Personally, I think that my average electric bill of $250 is too high, but obviously it is extremely reasonable, since it is much less than Al’s, and he is the poster child for global warming and saving the earth.
Anyway, this lecture is from CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). Specifically, it is from the CERN Colloquium, which was held on June 4, 2009. It is presented by Jasper Kirkby, of CERN. It may be a bit too technical for non-scientists, but it brings up some very interesting data, as well as ideas on what might really be the reason for climate change. After all, it has been a lot cooler in the past, and it has also been warmer. Also, CO2 levels have been higher in the past. As I showed in an earlier post, the relationship that Al Gore tried to show between CO2 and temperature with the Vostok ice cores is a complete lie, since that data clearly shows that CO2 increases after temperature increases. Thus, CO2 has never been the primary driver for temperature.
To make things a little easier to follow, I have also included the lecture notes on this talk from CERN. It contains a lot of the information in the video, but with much more information. Also, it can be viewed and/or printed, for your convenience.
There are several especially interesting portions of this lecture. The first occurs at about the 7 minute mark. At this time, the graph on page 7 of the lecture notes is discussed. It turns out that very accurate records of the number of sun spots has been kept since the early 1600’s, shortly after the invention of the telescope. This graph shows the number of sun spots between 1600 and 2000. The graph also shows the time periods of the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age. Both of these time periods were recognized, by historical records, as very cold periods of time. Clearly, there is a correlation between sun spot activity and the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age. Furthermore, although not gone into during this talk, the sun is in a very low (unusually low) period of activity at the present time; early 2010. And, we are seeing worldwide cold weather and snow events, some of which have not been seen for decades.
Another interesting portion of the lecture is in the 10 to 14 minute time period. Here, the correlation between GCR (Galactic Cosmic Rays) and temperature is shown over various time periods ranging back as far as 2000 years. A clear correlation can be seen between GCRs and temperature, especially in the Austrian speleotherm data. However, there is no clear correlation between temperature and CO2. The graph on page 9 of the lecture notes shows the relationships between solar and GCRs values and temperature over a 700 year period from Siberia. This shows very good correlation between solar and GCRs variability and temperature, until the last 125 or so years, where the temperature does increase more than the previous data would suggest. This might be due to other forces, such as CO2. But, clearly, there is still a correspondence between temperature and solar/GCRs data, even during that period. If CO2 is causing the additional warming, that would be interesting to know, but it clearly shows that CO2 is not the dominant controller of global temperature.
At about the 24:40 point in the video, the data on page 15 of the lecture notes is discussed. This, again, shows excellent correlation between GCRs and temperature, and this goes back over 500 million years. This graph very clearly shows a correlation between GCRs and temperature. The graph also show CO2, and you can clearly see that there is no clear correlation between temperature and CO2. What is noteworthy in this graph is that we are currently in a cold period, called an “icehouse”, but we seem to be entering another warm period. Additionally, this graph indicates that global temperatures, on a geologic time scale, have tended to be much warmer than they are today. The cold periods are clearly short lived phenomenon. The peaks in GCRs, and the delayed, but corresponding global “icehouse” periods, occur about every 140 to 150 million years. This time period corresponds to the time it takes the solar system to travel from one spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy to another arm of that galaxy. The solar system is not locked in position in the galaxy. Rather, it orbits the galaxy, moving from one arm to another arm about every 140 million years.
At about the 37 minute point, the data on page 22 of the lecture notes is discussed. Several things are significant in looking at the graph of surface temperature from 1978 to the present. The most obvious thing to notice is that the red data (corresponding to ground based thermometers) is consistently higher (and some times significantly higher) than the satellite determined data. Given the extreme difficulty of accurately measuring air temperature with a thermometer, and given the fact that we know that many measurement sites are corrupted by nearby sources of heat, and given that we know that some of the techniques used by the global warmingistas to “adjust” temperature data are poor at best, and completely fraudulent at worst, I think we have to learn to concentrate on the satellite data, since it is global in scope, and not affected by the measurement and siting errors so common with ground-based thermometer measurements. (If you think measuring temperature on the ground with a simple thermometer is simple, try an experiment I propose in another article.)
Another critical fact that the global warmingistas do not want you to know is the total failure of their models compared to actual data. This is shown in the graphs on the right hand side of the page. The top graph depicts what the temperature should be as a function of altitude and latitude given a particular concentration of CO2. The bottom graph shows the actual, measured data. Even a child could tell that these graphs are not even close. Thus, the models that the global warmingistas depend upon to predict future temperatures do not even work with today’s situation! And, of course, as mentioned earlier, the models all predict a dramatic rise in temperature over the last 10 years, but we have not seen that. This is what Phil Jones referred to as a “travesty” in one of the leaked CRU documents.
A very interesting point was brought up in the lecture at about the 41 minute mark. This was a reference to a 2005 paper by William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. Unfortunately, the paper did not pass peer review, so it was not published. Jasper Kirkby made a somewhat sarcastic comment about how he could not imagine why it would not pass peer review; “must have offended the sense of scientific orthodoxy..” Remember, this talk was put together in June of 2009. Although many of us knew that the global warmingista cabal was actively preventing the publication of excellent papers if they did not support the man-made global warming mantra. Of course, I suspect he knew the reason, and that was the reason for the comment. Now, thanks to Climategate, and the release of the CRU e-mails and files, the whole world knows the most likely reason this paper did not receive peer review and publication. It was almost certainly blocked, but it’s data and conclusions are extremely valuable, and may offer a realistic clue to a significant cause of climate change, which is not CO2. A very interesting follow-up to this article, by the original authors, but with data extended to 2009, is at this location. The critical graph from the follow-up article is shown below. It is the same graph as shown on page 24 of the lecture notes (labeled “Sunspot Magnetic Field (G)), but this graph extends the time scale out to 2009, and shows that the trend described in their 2005 paper is continuing. The main point of this paper is that the sun may be entering another very quiet period, with few or no sun spots, which would be similar to the Maunder Minimum. If this is true, and if GCRs may, in fact, be one of the major modulators of global climate, we may be in for a very cold decade or two. This could be devastating to many people in the world. Cold periods have always been harder on humans than warm periods for reasons ranging from simply freezing to crop failures and shorter growing seasons.
In fact, in his recent book, “Chill”, author and scientist Peter Taylor predicts a coming “ice age”. Sun spot activities may be the clue. A better understanding of clouds and the effect of clouds on global climate is critical. Clouds are not accurately modeled in the Global Climate Models used by the IPCC and similar groups. The understanding of the function of cosmic rays in the formation of clouds is vital if we are to ever have a chance of actually understanding climate change, let alone predict it.
I am currently reading several very new technical papers relating to this concept that cosmic rays may be one of the most significant drivers of climate change, and I will write about those papers once I have had a chance to digest them and to try to produce information that can be understood by non-scientists.
In a final note, the initial results from the CLOUD experiment were announced in late August, 2011, about 1-1/2 year after I wrote this article, and they validate the theory that cosmic rays play an important role in cloud formation. You can see this new article here.
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