Anthony Watts, cosmic rays, Hockey Schtick and Dan Pangburn

Deniers are having a really hard time at the moment. With climate change getting more and more obvious, Anthony Watts is referring to nutty and nuttier to keep his fans' attention. Today he started off okay, but ended up referring to a denier called Dan Pangburn via one of Anthony's "anonymous cowards" who goes by the name of the Hockey Schtick.

The newly published paper that Anthony was writing about to start with was by J. Svensmark, M. B. Enghoff, N. J. Shaviv, and H. Svensmark. The last author is the scientist from Denmark who is much beloved by fake sceptics for his cosmic ray hypothesis. (The second last author is an "it's the sun" proponent and global warming denier.) In the new paper, the authors report some work where they say they have found that cloud cover decreases in response to Forbush decrease events.

Another wrong headline at WUWT about CERN and related cloud experiments

It's happened again. Anthony has written another misleading headline (archived here), this time about the cloud experiments at CERN and related research. There were three papers this week from the same group of people, discussing aspects relating to clouds with and without cosmic rays. Anthony's headline was "CERN’s CLOUD experiment results suggests industrial revolution reduced cloud cover, cosmic rays have an impact too". Well, no. The papers didn't say that the industrial revolution reduced cloud cover. I don't know how he got that idea. The papers were about ionisation, and volatile emissions from plants - both from cloud chamber experiments, plus a paper on research conducted at high altitude fairly free of anthropogenic aerosols, looking at new particle formation as a precursor to clouds.

Reducing uncertainty and Jasper Kirkby of CERN's CLOUD

At WUWT, I saw that there is a new TED-Ed video by a particle physicist at CERN. As you probably know, a team at CERN is investigating the details of how clouds form, as part of a project called "CLOUD".

A fair bit of the video is just basic climate science. I have to say, though, that Jasper Kirkby seems prone to self-aggrandisement, big-noting his research and implying that his experiment is going to pin down a precise number for climate sensitivity.

Two denier myths back to back are put down by the IPCC; while richardscourtney shouts in protest

I'm reading the IPCC's AR5 Technical Summary of WG1 at the moment.  I wonder how long it will take deniers to protest these two adjacent snippets from page TS-21.

It won't be "it's the sun"

The recent solar minimum appears to have been unusually low and long-lasting and several projections indicate lower TSI for the forthcoming decades. However, current abilities to project solar irradiance are extremely limited so that there is very low confidence concerning future solar forcing. Nonetheless, there is a high confidence that 21st century solar forcing will be much smaller than the projected increased forcing due to GHGs. {5.2.1, 8.4; FAQ 5.1}

Cosmic ray effect is too weak to influence climate 

Changes in solar activity affect the cosmic ray flux impinging upon the Earth’s atmosphere, which has been hypothesized to affect climate through changes in cloudiness. Cosmic rays enhance aerosol nucleation and thus may affect cloud condensation nuclei production in the free troposphere, but the effect is too weak to have any climatic influence during a solar cycle or over the last century (medium evidence, high agreement). No robust association between changes in cosmic rays and cloudiness has been identified. In the event that such an association exists, it is very unlikely to be due to cosmic ray-induced nucleation of new aerosol particles.

From WUWT

Anthony Watts has let his readers know the draft report is up (archived here).  Being the paranoid conspiracy theorists they are, they've decided "it's not science".  They not only "believe" it's all a giant hoax, they "believe" that on the issue of climate science, all 195 governments are complicit in the hoax and have put aside their multiple differences to fool the world into thinking it's getting warmer.

But 195 governments and all the world's scientists can't fool the astute readers of WUWT.  No way.  They are on top of the biggest and most improbable hoax in the past four billion years (or do they think it's only the last 6,000 years or whatever young earthers believe?).

richardscourtney shouts his deluded Lysenko conspiracy theory to the world of WUWT (punchline excerpts from a very long, very emphatic post archived here):

September 30, 2013 at 9:18 am

...The IPCC does NOT exist to summarise climate science and it does not.

...The IPCC AR5 is pure pseudoscience intended to provide information to justify political actions; i.e.Lysenkoism.

Richard

Is the end in sight? Monckton, the Sun and Cosmic Rays at WUWT

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley says, in a comment on WUWT: "perhaps the end is in sight":

August 13, 2013 at 1:11 am Suppose that the solar influence on global mean surface temperature, setting aside natural internal variability, varies as the time-integral of solar activity over the previous 11-year cycle.

Suppose also that the very small peak-to-trough difference in incoming solar radiance (it’s about 0.15% of total activity) were amplified sevenfold by cosmic-ray displacement, as Svensmark and many others think.

In that event, there could be half a Celsius degree of global cooling by 2020, and possibly more beyond that date, even after allowing for the small warming influence of CO2. The scare will not survive even seven more years without warming. Perhaps the end is in sight.

First his "half a Celsius degree of global cooling by 2020".  You reckon?!

Data Source: NASA plus Monckton

Next his "supposing" about cosmic rays. Galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) originate from outside our solar system.  (In addition there are charged particles that come from within the solar system and the sun.)  GCRs are affected by the solar magnetic field.  The amount reaching earth is inversely correlated with the approximately eleven year solar cycle.  So when the sun is least active, that's when more cosmic rays will reach earth.  For a good short introduction to cosmic rays, you could start with the Neutron Monitor Database website.

For a detailed discussion of cosmic rays and clouds (ie effect on the climate), there is a detailed article by Jeffrey Pierce on realclimate.org.

One of the main notions put forward is that cosmic rays form clouds which reflect incoming solar radiation back out again.  So if there is more cosmic radiation then there is more global cooling.  Thing is, there hasn't been much variation in cosmic radiation in the past 50 years and more as discussed at realclimate.org by Jeff Pierce (above) as well as in an article by Rasmus E. Benestad - with the data presented graphically as follows.  The grey dots represent cosmic rays but multiplied by -1 to emphasise the correlation with the solar cycle (in other words, they are the inverse of what is shown below).

A comparison between time evolution in the global mean temperature (dark red) and different solar indices (bottom) as well as CO2 forcing (green). All the curves here have been standardised, and the solar curves are shown along the bottom. The GCR are shown in grey, and have been multiplied by -1 to emphasise the correlation with the other solar indices.

So there is nothing to suggest that the earth's current climate will be affected to a measurable extent by cosmic rays even if they were shown to play a part in cloud formation.

How would you spot a drop in temperature from "a low-activity sun"?

This next comment is from Dermot O'Logical who has the absurd notion that a drop of one whole degree Celsius would be lost in "natural variability".

August 13, 2013 at 1:26 am  @Kev-in-UK I think any drop in temps from a low-activity sun is not going to show up as a distinct signal – there are so many other factors in play with regards to surface temps.

Let’s suppose there is an actual effect of -1C over 10 years. How would you spot a 0.1C / yr effect amidst the noise of natural variability and be able to assign certainty to the cause being a quiet sun?

Here is what Dermot thinks would not be spotted "amidst the noise of natural variability"!

Data Source: NASA plus Dermot

That's probably as cold as it's been in the entire Holocene.  It wouldn't take much to notice that.