...Of all the unknown factors regarding our weather and climate, the role of clouds and their relationship and interaction with cosmic rays from the sun remains the most significant. While the red/greens and the IPPC state the science is settled, scientists at heart know there is much to learn. What is known for sure however, is that clouds contain water vapour, and water vapour constitutes an essential blanket around the planet and is largely responsible for the now maligned greenhouse effect - an effect which preserves life on earth rendering Earth our climate temperate. Many who doubt greenpeace's grasp of scientific reality have theorised that clouds, water vapour and cosmic rays from the sun constitute an essential and perhaps even a primary driver of our climate, and that CO2 occupies a back seat, rather than a major role in global warming. I've blogged before on this, and reported on the CLOUD experiment underway at CERN - the home of the large HADRON collider. The CLOUD experiment alone has the potential to be the final nail in the AGW coffin. While this report from CLOUD may not constitute that nail, it is possibly the decisive start of the endgame. Ian Sample, the science correspondent for the UK Guardian writes...
...Some climate models may need to be "substantially revised" in the light of new research into the airborne particles that seed clouds.One of the most detailed studies to date of the particles, known as aerosols, has found serious shortcomings in existing descriptions of how they arise in nature. The work suggests that one or more unidentified organic gases – produced either naturally or from human activities – has a significant influence on the Earth's cloud cover. The research, reported in the journal Nature, has implications for certain predictions about climate change because aerosol particles and the clouds they seed have a cooling effect on the Earth by reflecting radiation from the sun.Jasper Kirby head of the CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets) experiment at Cern, the particle physics laboratory near Geneva, studied various gas mixtures of sulphuric acid, water and ammonia – the three gases thought to give rise to aerosol particles at the low altitudes where clouds form...more here...
...and Nigel Calder, writing on WuWT, has this to say... to see it on the broader canvas of the politicized climate science of the early 21st Century, the chief reaction becomes a weary sigh of relief. Although they never said so, the High Priests of the Inconvenient Truth – in such temples as NASA-GISS, Penn State and the University of East Anglia – always knew that Svensmark’s cosmic ray hypothesis was the principal threat to their sketchy and poorly modelled notions of self-amplifying action of greenhouse gases.In telling how the obviously large influences of the Sun in previous centuries and millennia could be explained, and in applying the same mechanism to the 20th warming, Svensmark put the alarmist predictions at risk – and with them the billions of dollars flowing from anxious governments into the global warming enterprise...more here... and from Henrik Svensmark... convincing evidence indicates global warming is caused by cosmic rays and the sun — not humans...The science is now all-but-settled on global warming... but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth...
