CERN Update: 'Bombshell' in the Cosmic Ray Data
In 2007, when Fred Singer and I published Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years, we weren’t terribly concerned with cosmic rays. We knew the natural, moderate warming/cooling cycle was real, from the evidence in ice cores, seabed sediments, fossil pollen and cave stalagmites. The cycle was the big factor that belied the man-made warming hysteria of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
When Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oeschger discovered the 1,500 year cycle in the Greenland ice cores in 1984, they knew immediately that it was solar-powered. They’d seen exactly the same cycle in the carbon 14 molecules in trees, and in the beryllium 10 molecules in ice cores. Both sets of molecules are formed when cosmic rays strike our atmosphere. The cycle had produced a whole series of dramatic, abrupt Medieval-Warming-to-Little-Ice-Age climate changes.
The IPCC, for its part, announced that the sun could not be the forcing factor in any major climate change because the solar irradiation was too small. IPCC did not, however, add up the other solar variations that could amplify the solar irradiation. Nor had the IPCC programmed its famed computer models with the knowledge of the Medieval Warming (950–1200 AD), the Roman Warming (200 BC–600 AD), or the big Holocene Warmings centered on 6,000 and 8,000 BC.
I quoted that mainly to set up who the writer is. He's a scientist, doing fundamental science. Here's his take on why CERN gagged its scientists:
Svensmark noted the gigantic “solar wind” that expands when the sun is active—and thus blocks many of the cosmic rays that would otherwise hit the earth’s atmosphere. When the sun weakens, the solar wind shrinks. Recently, the U.S. Solar Observatory reported a very long period of “quiet sun” and predicted 30 years of cooling.
Last year, Denmark’s University of Aarhus did another experiment with a particle accelerator that fully confirmed the Svensmark hypothesis: cosmic rays help to make more clouds and thus could cool the earth.
The CERN experiment is supposed to be the big test of the Svensmark theory. It’s a tipoff, then, that CERN’s boss, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, has just told the German magazine Die Welt that he has forbidden his researchers to “interpret” the forthcoming test results. In other words, the CERN report will be a stark “just the facts” listing of the findings. Those findings must support Svensmark, or Heuer would never have issued such a stifling order on a major experiment.
In gagging its scientists, CERN is behaving in a way that is fundamentally anti-science.
The idea, by the way, that the solar cycle should not be taken into account when doing any climate research is absurd. The sun is a variable star. If we were looking at it from outside our solar system across a long time span, we would see its variations the way we see variations in distant stars. Those variations are bound to have an impact on the third planet from it. It's unavoidable. But it's also apolitical. And that's why the IPCC and other AGW hangers on stubbornly resist factoring its cycles into any climate change discussion. It's not politically useful, and in fact hurts their cause. Which, based on the way CERN is behaving, isn't really about science.