B-Rock
Zombie Denier Myth 5 - Its cosmic rays what are doing it to us!
Answer - no its not.
Evidence - Kriova and Solanki 2003 and in pictures:
Lockwood 2007 concluded "the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability, whichever of the mechanism is invoked and no matter how much the solar variation is amplified."
Thanks for highlighting that there are other scientists that have differing views on the causes of climate change. I thought their own summary on the link you posted was pretty interesting.
The current understanding of climate change in the industrial age is that it is predominantly caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases, with relatively small natural contributions due to solar irradiance and volcanoes.
Always good to acknowledge the mainstream consensus so the reader knows what follows is left field....
However, palaeoclimatic reconstructions show that the climate has frequently varied on 100-year time scales during the Holocene (last 10 kyr) by amounts comparable to the present warming - and yet the mechanism or mechanisms are not understood.
Can I assume you are never going to bring up the subject of innacurate models again? It would be unfair to criticize some models and not others....right? Unless you are qualified to describe why a particular model is inaccurate, in which case you wouldn't be wasting your time on a discussion forum for ex-JW's.
Some of these reconstructions show clear associations with solar variability, which is recorded in the light radio-isotope archives that measure past variations of cosmic ray intensity.
And therefore some of them don't - although the authors don't define 'some' in this summary, if it had been a majority I'm sure they would have noted that.
However, despite the increasing evidence of its importance, solar-climate variability is likely to remain controversial until a physical mechanism is established.
We don't know how this works and most of our peers think we are barking up the wrong tree.
Estimated changes of solar irradiance on these time scales appear to be too small to account for the climate observations.
Even if we knew how it works it doesn't seem to be sufficiently impactful to explain the indisputable facts.
This raises the question of whether cosmic rays may directly affect the climate, providing an effective indirect solar forcing mechanism. Indeed recent satellite observations - although disputed - suggest that cosmic rays may affect clouds. This talk presents an overview of the palaeoclimatic evidence for solar/cosmic ray forcing of the climate, and reviews the possible physical mechanisms. These will be investigated in the CLOUD experiment which begins to take data at the CERN PS later this year.
More questions than answers here it seems.....but that's good - thats how we make progress right? If the cosmic ray explanation establishes itself as mainstream accepted theory due to good science then I'll be happy to accept that.
In the meantime perhaps you can explain to me why rising CO2 levels are not warming the atmosphere as predicted by GHG theory if the cosmic ray postulation is accurate?
