The revolution in climate science you probably haven’t heard of

In 1801, British astronomer William Herschel noticed that wheat was scarce and prices were high when sunspots were minimal, and conversely wheat was abundant and prices low when sunspots were plentiful. Similar observations to Herschel’s were made in 1871 by British economist William Stanley Jevons — and many others in the preceding and ensuing years. Herschel, Jevons, and the others were on to something the full significance of which wouldn’t be realized until 1997 with the publication of the first of a series of landmark papers — still ongoing — by Henrik Svensmark and his collaborators. Svensmark  had discovered the relation between cosmic rays, the sun’s magnetic field, the earth’s clouds, and the climate change produced by the earth’s changing cloud cover.

Most of the world’s population doesn’t realize that the work of Svensmark and his collaborators has inauguated a revolution in climate science that is as consequential and history-making as the plate tectonics revolution in geology.

The reason most people don’t know that this revolution has taken place is that it contradicts global elites’ preferred but spurious theory that human-caused CO2 is the principal driver of climate change and global warming. Thus you won’t hear about the new climate science in the New York Times or Science — except rarely and dismissively — because it undercuts the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) campaign to convince people that humans cause climate change and catastrophic global warming through their continued use of fossil fuels.

Even most opponents of  the UN-led anti-CO2 movement are ignorant that this scientific revolution has occurred, with the result that their resistance to climate alarmism is weak and apologetic. An example of this was Chevron’s recent testimony at an important hearing in San Francisco, in which Chevron said it accepted the UN’s explanation of climate change. Despite this capitulation, Chevron and the other oil companies were vindicated by a sharp and independent judge, who dismissed the charges against the oil companies. But the “Denialists” — as they are maliciously called — won’t always be so lucky.

 

The climate science developed by Svensmark and his collaborators explains not only 20th century climate shifts but the major and minor shifts in earth’s climate from when it first had oceans and an atmosphere.

The computer models that have been developed in support of the IPCC, by contrast, can’t even plausibly account for 20th century climate data, much less plausibly predict the future.

Science is about parsimony of controlling hypotheses, richness of explanation, and survival of difficult tests. Svensmark’s cosmic ray theory has accomplished all three; the IPCC models, none of these.

The theory, in brief, is this. The main determinant of earth’s climate is its cloud cover, in particular the low clouds (stratocumuli) you typically see when flying over the ocean and looking down.

Water vapor can’t form clouds by itself. “To form a cloud droplet, water vapor needs to condense to aerosols acting as cloud condensation nuclei,” Svensmark and co-authors write in a recent paper. “Cosmic rays are the main producers of ions in earth’s lower atmosphere,” and in sufficient density these drive the condensation process to form the water droplets that become a cloud.

It is the clouds  in the earth’s lower atmosphere that drive the earth’s climate. Their bright upper surfaces reflect sunlight back into space, denying the sun’s heat to the earth below. But no cosmic rays, no cloud formation.

Where do the cosmic rays come from? Our galaxy seethes with them. They are the byproduct of supernovae, which result from the violent explosion of dying stars much heavier than our sun. But so energetic are these cosmic rays — actually more accurately described as torrents of charged particles — that they would destroy life before it even began unless drastically repelled and reduced by the magnetic field created by the sun’s solar wind. Only the most energetic particles, the muons — like electrons, but more massive — make it through the solar magnetic field enveloping planet earth and down to the lower atmosphere. There the muons strike aerosol molecules, ionizing them and starting them on their course to become cloud condensation nuclei and gather water vapor to become clouds.

When the sun’s solar wind weakens (often signaled by few sunspots), the muon density reaching the lower atmosphere increases, clouds multiply, and earth becomes cooler, and perhaps even cold. Conversely, when the solar wind strengthens (which may be signaled by an increase in sunspots), few muons get through to the lower atmosphere, cloud cover becomes scanty, and the earth becomes warmer or even hot.

There is one other important explanatory variable to this theory, a variable that works at long time scales: the changing density of cosmic rays generated  as our planet and solar system wends its way over tens of millions of years through different spiral arms of our galaxy, the Milky Way. The arms, as opposed to the less populated spaces between them, are the nurseries of supernovae. Thus, the density of cosmic rays that make it to earth through the barrier of the sun’s magnetic field varies over long stretches of time.

The varying cosmic ray densities and varying strength of the sun’s magnetic field combine to determine the waxing and waning of the earth’s cloud cover and thus its changing climates and successive geological eras.

The UN’s IPCC and its elites who signed the Paris Climate Accord have no theory to counterpose to that of Svensmark and collaborators, just a kludge of constantly fudged-with models fed questionably-massaged data.

The best introductory exposition to the revolutionary climate theory sketched above is The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change by Henrik Svensmark and the late Nigel Calder (2007).

Armed with the theory we’ve sketched above and, we hope, the far more complete exposition in the Svensmark-Calder book above, the reader should be thoroughly immunized to the planet-warming hysteria of the mainstream press or the scandal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the leading US science organization, having just given a prestigious award to Michael Mann. author of the notorious “hockey stick” graph that suppressed the Medieval Warming period so as to make contemporary warming “by CO2 ” appear more pronounced.

But even in this fossil-fuel-powered age, Svensmark’s theory suggests that it is the sun’s varying magnetism, not human-generated CO2, that mainly drives climate change — by regulating the cosmic rays that seed the climate clouds of the lower atmosphere.

Click here to go to the previous Founders Broadsheet