Re #203

I see McFarlane still wants to waste his time and avoids looking up the measurements of cosmic rays for the past 40 years….I’ll point out one graph of cosmic ray flux here that shows no long term trend over the past 55 years. He still doesn’t seem to get it. Even if cosmic rays could influence climate (which is extremely unlikely anyway), they’re not going to change the climate because they’re not changing themselves. A few fringe scientists don’t change the rules of logic.

A Few Fringe Scientists?

A CERN press release here in 2006 describes the CLOUD experiment.

The goal of this experiment is to investigate the possible influence of galactic cosmic rays on Earth’s clouds and climate. It involves an interdisciplinary team comprising 18 institutes from 9 countries including USA and Russia.
This should answer Chris’s comment on “a few fringe scientists”.

Correlation between Recent Temperature Changes & Cosmic Rays
The cosmic ray fluctuation shown in Chris’s link is virtually identical to that shown in Fig 29 of the ISAC report here. I include a cut-down version of the ISAC diagram here for ease of reference.

It is evident that, by using data identical to that supplied by Chris, ISAC produce a very good correlation between temperatures and cosmic ray fluctuations. However, the ISAC conclusion is the opposite from that suggested by Chris.

Contrary to Chris’s claim that cosmic rays are not changing and therefore cannot cause a climate change; ISAC concludes that small changes in cosmic rays lead to large changes in the Earth’s climate.

Furthermore, ISAC cites many robust statistical correlations and a large number of pertinent references to validate their conclusion. Nevertheless, ISAC also highlights that the physical mechanisms of the solar-activity/cosmic-ray/climate correlation are poorly understood; hence the need for experimental verification, such as those being undertaken out at CLOUD and SKY.

Is this not the way that science works? Postulate a hypothesis. Test it by experiment. Prove it, improve it, or disprove it. Then move on.

Only time will tell if the cosmic-ray hypothesis is valid. It is currently at the test-it-by-experiment stage. Nonetheless, the research is being carried out by many respectable institutions and they are using valid scientific methodology. Consequently, it ill behoves Chris, or anyone else, to label this research as “fantasy land”