CHURCHVILLE, VA—Regular readers of this column will recall our prediction (July 19th) of a climate debate bombshell in the form of Denmark’s Henrik Svensmarks’ theory on clouds, cosmic rays and the earth’s temperature standing up to intensive laboratory scrutiny. We also predicted that the results would not be welcomed those who have a vested interest in man-made warming.
Well, the verdict is in: More cosmic rays do indeed produce more low, wet clouds that cool our planet—implying that the sun is in charge of our climate, not CO2. The big new experiment, done by the world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory, CERN in Geneva, is now published in Nature.
Almost predictably, the results were greeted by Michael Lepage of New Scientist as confirmation that humans control the earth’s clouds! “Organic vapors, released by organisms such as trees, marine bacteria and livestock, appear to play a far more important role in cloud formation than suspected,” LePage wrote. “‘This was a big surprise,’ says Jasper Kirkby at CERN, whose team made the finding. Since our activities have such a huge impact on the biosphere, this hints at a previously unknown way in which humans can affect the climate.’ he says.”
Wait a minute. Humans only began to raise cattle, build cities, and burn charcoal about 6000 years ago. For eons before that, the planet itself had lots of dust from droughts and winds, sea spray from the oceans, and ammonia emitted as deer and antelope played.
Cosmic rays create the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle, a moderate 2–4 degree kink in earth’s temperatures every 1500 years on average. Svensmark found this cycle correlates with a solar cycle found in the Carbon 14 in trees and Beryllium 10 in ice. Those “cosmic particles” are created when cosmic rays strike our atmosphere. We’ve also found a strong link between the extent of the low, wet clouds and the earth’s temperature.
CERN found the secret—the earth’s trace emissions of ammonia help to stabilize the cloud seed clusters created by the cosmic rays. Thus the world’s biggest particle physics lab confirms cosmic-cloud connections found in earlier experiments by Svensmark and by Denmark’s Aarhus University. .
If humans were putting up that much more pollution than nature did, CERN shows in fact it would currently mean more cooling of the earth, not warming: more “pollution;” more clouds; and a colder earth.
CERN proved that the solar-varied cosmic rays increase the number of “cloud seeds” a thousand fold! Clouds in the real world, however, seem to respond only to larger “cloud seeds,” and this is where the natural ammonia emissions become important. CERN is planning another CLOUD experiment to focus on larger particles but says the global climate models will have to be extensively revised.
The variable that touches off the 1,500-year cycle is crucial, however, and that seems to be external. Over thousands of years, the cycles have shifted abruptly and repeatedly, which doesn’t sound like a Pittsburgh steel plant opening in 1948. The sun remains the only likely trigger.
Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is issuing regulations that would shut down many of our power plants and destroy our coal industry to “save the planet.” In Europe, steel and chemical industries say they’ll take millions of jobs to non-Kyoto countries. President’s Obama’s own jobs council chief, Jeffrey Immelt, is taking GE to China.
Why are we so fixated on blaming humans for a million-year-old process? Why do we insist we’re more powerful than the sun?
Is this the world’s all-time biggest ego trip?
Dennis Avery is a former U.S. State Department senior analyst and co-author with astrophysicist Fred Singer of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years
