Clouds, the CLOUD experiment and cosmic rays...

...on July 2nd, I posted that "the smoking gun" that shatters the warmists' arguments is getting close to hand. The smoking gun will be wielded by scientists, and the bullets will come from the CLOUD experiment at CERN, and from the ongoing ARGOS sea temperature buoys, quietly bobbing around in their thousands worldwide gathering sea temperature data. Entering the arena on behalf of AGW sceptics is Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark, the author of The Chilling Stars... his theories contradict the IPCC’s theory of anthropogenic global warming, which basically blames last century's rise in average global temperature on human CO2 emissions. As many good scientists outside of the inbred climate change community have noticed, carbon dioxide just isn't up to the job of causing last century's observed global temperature rise. Instead, Svensmark and his colleagues hypothesize that clouds created by cosmic rays, which are in part controlled by the activity of the sun, regulate Earth's climate. Because this contradicts the IPCC's view of global warming, Svensmark's theory has been ignored by the climate alarmists and Svensmark himself vilified...according to Svensmark: “Instead of thinking of clouds as a result of the climate, it’s actually showing that the climate is a result of the clouds, because the clouds take their orders from the stars.” He has released a new paper detailing the most recent results from his continuing study of a possible link between cosmic rays, aerosols, cloud formation, and our climate, which concludes:

• Our results show global-scale evidence of conspicuous influences of solar variability on cloudiness and aerosols. Irrespective of the detailed mechanism, the loss of ions from the air during fine days reduces the cloud liquid water content over the oceans. So marked is the response to relatively small variations in the total ionization, we suspect that a large fraction of Earth’s clouds could be controlled by ionization. Future work should estimate how large a volume of the Earth’s atmosphere is involved in the ion process that leads to the changes...and its importance for the Earth’s radiation budget. From solar activity to cosmic ray ionization to aerosols and liquid-water clouds, a causal chain appears to operate on a global scale....more here....

Note the Eagle Nebula picture above, click to enlarge. More here...