Climate Models - Not Even Wrong

Watts Up With That has the news the sceptic community has been waiting for. The CERN experiments done by Svensmark et. al. [Update: actually they were done by Kirkby but they validate the Svensmark hypothesis] show that clouds are significantly affected by cosmic rays.

...it appears that a non-visible light irradiance effect on Earth’s cloud seeds has been confirmed. The way it is posited to work is that the effect of cosmic rays (modulated by the sun’s magnetic variations which either allow more or deflect more cosmic rays) creates cloud condensation nuclei in the Earth’s atmosphere. With more condensation nuclei, more clouds form and vice-versa. Clouds have significant effects on TSI at the surface.

Even the IPCC has admitted this in their latest (2007) report:

“Cloud feedbacks are the primary source of inter-model differences in equilibrium climate sensitivity, with low cloud being the largest contributor”.

If a significant effect has been left out of the models that means in the general sense that they are not even wrong. All the sensitivities used to come up with the current results will have to be adjusted to account for the new cloud factor. Effects once attributed to something else will have to be attributed to clouds. And estimates of future solar activity will have to be added to climate models. And we are not doing such a good job of predicting solar activity. The current decline in solar magnetism was unpredicted. So what does that tell us about the future of the climate? That it is very hard to predict.

CERN Experiment Confirms Cosmic Rays Influence Climate Change.

by Nigel Calder

Long-anticipated results of the CLOUD experiment at CERN in Geneva appear in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Nature (25 August). The Director General of CERN stirred controversy last month, by saying that the CLOUD team’s report should be politically correct about climate change (see my 17 July post below). The implication was that they should on no account endorse the Danish heresy – Henrik Svensmark’s hypothesis that most of the global warming of the 20th Century can be explained by the reduction in cosmic rays due to livelier solar activity, resulting in less low cloud cover and warmer surface temperatures.

There are a a LOT of careers and vast sums of money involved in the "CO2 is going to kill us all eventually" idea. They will not go quietly. In the history of science they never have.

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." - Max Planck

Cross Posted at Classical Values