I am a Dragon. I emerge from my Egg. Well, we knew that anyway, but there is some more stuff out on it, says the BBC: The Svensmark hypothesis is that when the solar wind is weak, more cosmic rays penetrate to Earth. That creates more charged particles in the atmosphere, which in turn induces more clouds to form, cooling the climate.
The solar folk tend to take this on a long term basis, which is fraught with problems because the cloud obs aren't good over those scales due to inter-satellite calibration etc etc. But Sloan et al. seem to have decided to take Svensmark seriously (which most people don't :-) and look to see if short-term cloud changes correlate to short-term changes in cosmic rays (because the mechanism, if it works at all, should also work on short time scales). The result: they don't, and hence it doesn't.
You can, if you please, discuss this theory over at The Sun but as you'd expect the level of discussion is rather low: apparently it was much warmer 25 kyr ago and much colder 100 kyr ago. Ah well -W]
Comments
My favourite conspiracy site picked up on this story as well. The comment by the editor boils down to: "Yeah right just imagine the sun going out tomorrow and see what kind of influence it has."
Posted by: Who Cares | April 3, 2008 7:26 PM
yeah the raving lunatics on the off topic board for my college basketball fan site are just going nuts over this. When I pointed out that the lede for the story said "changes" as the operative, not the sun isn't causing the warming the earth, they reverted to the meme that that there is no trend (as reported by Drudge).
The stupid are stupid for a reason, they enjoy it. Somewhere along the line I think we need to take a more misanthropic view of our brethren and simply allow the herd to cull itself.
Posted by: onkel bob | April 4, 2008 1:45 AM
I see the global cooling mole's popped upon that current bun site. ;)
Posted by: Adam | April 4, 2008 5:01 AM
Paper is here
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1748-9326/3/2/024001/erl8_2_024001.pdf?request-id=db5f513b-57cf-4f34-9e6d-32507bd34d7c
They are really just refuting S. mechanism CRs -> ionization -> increased LCC(lower cloud cover), leaving it open that there is in fact some link between solar activity and LCC.
Posted by: bigcitylib | April 4, 2008 10:27 AM
I'll just quote one of my Dilbert phrases:
"When did ignorance become a point of view?"
Posted by: yogi-one | April 4, 2008 11:32 AM
It's not only the level of discussion that's low at the Sun! I think the whole tone is lower at that newspaper.
Posted by: Ian | April 4, 2008 1:28 PM
As a member of the Church of Glboal Warming, I agree with your view that the sun can not be the cause of Global Warming. You don't need a degree in Math to be able to understand that.
Posted by: father | April 7, 2008 10:27 PM
father- Godwins law- you lose.
"What You Should Worry About:
"Tell a lie often enough, loud enough, and long enough and people will believe it."
-Adolf Hitler"
Posted by: guthrie | April 8, 2008 5:38 AM
The earth is not the only planet in our system that is warming so it is imposible for the sun to not be in some small part responsible.
Lady from the Great White North
[Nice try, but you want http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_of_recent_climate_change#Warming_on_other_planets.3F -W]
Posted by: Nicole | April 8, 2008 1:25 PM
Shaviv has responded to the Sloan paper online, and Sloan has published a response to Shaviv here:
http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com/2008/04/on-solar-links-sloan-responds-to-shaviv.html#links
Posted by: bigcitylib | April 12, 2008 7:42 PM