As climate deniers have scrounged around for arguments against the obvious, one popular avenue has been the Galactic Cosmic Ray theory. Championed by Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark, the theory posits that tiny variations in radiation emitted by the sun, known as cosmic rays, are reducing cloud cover to the extent that they’re what’s actually causing climate change. (Spoiler alert: they aren’t.)
Svensmark and the deniers got a big boost of credibility for the theory (which has been shot down for years) in May of 2016, when a paper based on data from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider suggested that cosmic rays were interacting with particles given off by trees, which could be responsible for some observed warming. This new finding, that trees naturally emit the molecules that, when combined with cosmic rays, could grow into the particles that provide the basis for cloud growth.
While mainstream and “skeptical” coverage tended to focus on the new finding that trees might be emitting climate-changing particles, deniers took it as support for Svensmark’s Galactic Ray theory. Svensmark had suggested this relationship and produced studies showing a correlation between cosmic rays and climate, but was never able to provide the smoking gun: the mechanism by which rays influenced climate. While the CERN study provided a tiny puff of this needed smoke, whether or not it was from the metaphorical cosmic ray gun required further study.
By October, there was a follow-up paper debunking the far-out idea that these tiny cosmic changes were doing more to warm the climate than the massive amounts of greenhouse gases polluting our atmosphere. Of course, that did little to slow down deniers, who continued to hype the CERN experiments. (For a comprehensive, recent rundown of how deniers think about this, see this June ‘17 WUWT guest post with a full synopsis of the discredited theory).
Now, a fresh commentary in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres further grounds the cosmic theory, with an abstract that concludes the effect is too weak “to yield a significant influence on clouds and climate.” So if there is a link between ions from the sun and clouds and climate, it’s far too small to be any match for the greenhouse gases we know all about.
Which means we can now be more CERNtain than ever that the cosmic ray theory badly misses the Svensmark.
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