I should say that it is Sir John Mason former Director-General of the Meteorological Office who laughs at Svensmark's correct explanation of global warming.

Sir John has 12 honorary doctorates. He wrote a book about clouds but he doesn't know how clouds are made.

Please read #30 and watch the video.

4 September 1998

World experts in aerosol science will meet at the 5th International Aerosol Conference from 12 to 18 September 1998. In recent years, there has been much concern about the environmental impacts of aerosol particles. Aerosol, arising from a variety of natural and manmade sources, has been implicated in the process of global warming, and in the elevation of respiratory ill-health incidence in urban areas, due to population exposure to air pollution.

These issues will be highlighted in a number of conference sessions throughout the week, and notably, by some of the plenary speakers. The plenary lecture which officially opens the conference, "The Role of Aerosol in Cloud Physics", will be given by Sir John Mason, FRS, formerly Head of the Meteorological Office, currently a visiting professor at Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, and an expert on cloud physics and climate change.

Video on cosmic rays and their detection. About the Fly's eye and HiRes cosmic ray detectors. From the University of Utah

On live TV during the COP15 Climate 09 debate on DR1, Henrik Svensmark was hit by a heart attack and his pacemaker kicked in.
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He was immediately rushed to the hospital, and according to the latest reports his condition is steady now. Henrik Svensmark (born 1958) is a physicist at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen who studies the effects of cosmic rays on cloud formation. His work presents hypotheses about solar activity as an indirect cause of global warming;
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his research has suggested a possible link through the interaction of the solar wind and cosmic rays. His conclusions have been controversial as the prevailing scientific opinion on climate change considers solar activity unlikely to be a major contributor to recent warming, though it is thought to be the primary driver of many earlier changes in climate.
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In 1997, Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen popularised a theory that linked galactic cosmic rays and global climate change mediated primarily by variations in the intensity of the solar wind, which they have termed cosmoclimatology.
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Svensmark's research downplays the significance to which atmospheric CO2 has affected recent global warming.

The 41 year old Henrik Svensmark made an awkward spasm/shudder and burst out a strange noise, sounding like a cough. The other participants in the debate looked baffled and he mumbled: "It's my heart," and fell to the ground and the pacemaker kicked in once more and you could hear him scream.

Bjrøn Lomborg yelled "call an ambulance, call an ambulance" and the host and the other participants came over to help the man. The show was put on hold for 10 minutes and the viewers were informed that Svensmark has a pacemaker, and it went on because his heart rate had slowed down. He was immediately rushed to the hospital and is according to the latest reports his condition is steady now.

Gene Parker was educated at Michigan State University and California Institute of Technology. He spent four years at the University of Utah and since 1955 has been at the University of Chicago, where he has held positions in the physics department, the astronomy and astrophysics department, and the Enrico Fermi Institute. He is probably the leading authority on the solar wind and the effects of magnetic fields in the heliosphere. His work has greatly increased understanding of the solar corona, the solar wind, the magnetic fields of both earth and sun, and their complex electromagnetic interactions. He has seen spacecraft go out into the heliosphere and confirm theoretical models he developed before the space age, when observations of comet tails provided nearly all the data available. His books, especially Cosmical Magnetic Fields, have educated generations of investigators. His most recent book includes the effects of magnetic fields of planets, stars, and galaxies on X-ray emissions.

Professor Emeritus, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the College; Enrico Fermi Institute

Eigil Friis-Christensen became Director of DSRI in November 1997. The change of directorship was associated with an expressed wish by the Ministry of Research and Information Technology to extend the scientific scope of DSRI with solar system physics. His background for this position is the leadership of the Solar-Terrestrial Physics Division at the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) since 1991 and his appointment as Project Scientist of the first Danish Satellite, to be launched in 1998. He was leading the Danish research and instrument teams and established an International Science team consisting of more than 50 research groups from 14 countries. In 1994 he was appointed adjunct Professor in Geophysics at the University of Copenhagen.

As Head of the Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Branch of the Division of Geophysics, DMI, 1989-1991 he followed up his initial experimental work based on the establishment of the Greenland Magnetometer Array in 1972. This facility is internationally renown and regarded as one of the most valuable scientific tools for magnetosphere research. His scientific career includes original work regarding fundamental solar wind-magnetosphere coupling processes and their ionospheric "footprints". Already early in his career Eigil Friis-Christensen was fascinated by the interdisciplinary aspects of solar-terrestrial relationships, and in particular the possible effects in the lower atmosphere (weather and climate) of solar activity variations.

The 2009 Petrus Perigrinus Medal is awarded to Eigil Friis-Christensen for his fundamental contributions to our knowledge of the Earth's magnetic field from space and his innovative leadership in geomagnetism.

Eigil Friis-Christensen established a reputation showing an innovative and productive scientific career including original work and a broad range of interests. He made early and seminal contributions to geomagnetism, including the fundamental solar wind-magnetosphere coupling processes and their ionospheric “footprints”.

Although a physicist by nature and training, he took a keen interest in advancing measurement techniques and achieving high quality observations from ground and space. Heading the Geomagnetism and Ionosphere Physics Branch in DMI, he followed up on his initial experimental work based on the establishment of the Greenland Magnetometer Array in 1972, the first magnetometer chain poleward of the auroral oval. This facility is now internationally regarded as a most valuable scientific tool for research of the ionosphere and the magnetosphere. This early work led Eigil Friis-Christensen to a career-long interest in the Earth's magnetic field and his leadership in these efforts caused his appointment (1993) as Project Scientist of the first Danish Satellite, Ørsted: launched in 1999 and still operating. He lead the Danish teams and established an International Science team consisting of more than 50 research groups from 14 countries to take advantage of the most accurate observations of the Earth’s magnetic field since the MAGSAT mission of 1979-1980.

Of all the scientists who are labelled "deniers" because they don't support the orthodoxy of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, none comes in for more vilification than Eigil Friis-Christensen. For understandable reasons.

Dr. Friis-Christensen questions the very premise that man-made activities explain most of the global warming that we see, and through his work he has convinced much of an entire scientific discipline to explore his line of inquiry. With his 1991 paper in Science, showing a startling correlation between global warming and the activities of the sun, Dr. Friis-Christensen unleashed a wave of related research by solar scientists seeking to learn the mechanisms through which solar activity may influence climate on Earth. Thanks largely to his early efforts, and ongoing efforts, too, a growing proportion of the world's solar scientists no longer place man at the centre of the climate-change universe.
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"My interest dates back to an extreme solar storm that occurred in August, 1972," he explains. "I was in Greenland, on my first assignment in my new job as geophysicist at the Danish Meteorological Institute, setting up a chain of magnetometer stations on the west coast."

Dr. Friis-Christensen remembers lying in his tent and "watching the ink pens of my recorder going so wild that they nearly tore the paper chart apart -- we had no digital recording at that time -- and I wondered whether such big events could also have an influence in the lower atmosphere, on weather and climate.

Upon the IPCC's creation, with its mandate to investigate the causes of climate change, Dr. Friis-Christensen was hopeful of advances in solving one of the scientific passions of his life. To participate in the IPCC's quest for answers, he travelled to its January, 1992, meeting in Guangzhou, China, as part of the Danish delegation. By then, he had succeeded Dr. Lassen to become head of the institute's geophysics division.

But to his astonishment, and despite the recent publication of his Science article, the IPCC refused to consider the sun's influence on Earth's climate as a topic worthy of investigation. The scientists at the IPCC had decided that man-made causes and man-made causes alone deserved their attention. But ignoring the potential role of the sun didn't make it go away, especially since Dr. Friis-Christensen and other solar scientists refused to abandon their research.

Then the attacks on Dr. Friis-Christensen's credibility began.

How much of this litany in the Guardian demonstrates actual errors by Dr. Friis-Christensen? In truth, none of it. Virtually all of the criticisms of Dr. Friis- Christensen, published and republished willy-nilly, stem from a lone advisor to the Danish government's Ministry of the Energy with scant research credentials -- he even admits that the government hired him largely for his communications skill.

There is no arithmetic error in Dr. Friis-Christensen's studies.

Do the epithets work? With the uninformed, they work a great deal. With the vast majority of his peers, the attacks more represent irritants, noise that obfuscates the political debate but not what counts -- the science. Because of his scientific rigour, Dr. Friis-Christensen has won a citation from the Journal of Geophysical Research of the American Geophysical Union for "Excellence in refereeing" and he is sought after by the world's leading agencies, who have elevated him to the top ranks of his profession.

A key aspect of the sun’s effect on climate is the indirect effect on the flux of Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR) into the atmosphere. GCR is an ionizing radiation that supports low cloud formation. As the sun’s output increases the solar wind shields the atmosphere from GCR flux. Consequently the increased solar irradiance is accompanied by reduced low cloud cover, amplifying the climatic effect. Likewise when solar output declines, increased GCR flux enters the atmosphere, increasing low cloudiness and adding to the cooling effect associated with the diminished solar energy.

The conjectured mechanism connecting GCR flux to cloud formation received experimental confirmation in the recent laboratory experiments of Svensmark (Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series A, October 2006), in which he demonstrated exactly how cosmic rays could make water droplet clouds.

Palle Bago and Butler showed in 2002 (Intl J Climat.) how the low clouds in all global regions changed with the 11 year cycle in inverse relation to the solar activity. Changes of 1 to 2% in low cloudiness could have a significant effect on temperatures through changes in albedo.
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Recently, Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen published a reply to Lockwood and Fröhlich - The persistent role of the Sun in climate forcing, rebutting Mike Lockwood's Recent oppositely directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature. In it, they correlated tropospheric temperature with cosmic rays. The figure below features two graphs. The first graph compares tropospheric temperature (blue) to cosmic rays (red). The second graph removes El Nino, volcanoes and a linear warming trend of 0.14°C per decade.

Summary:

Though the sun’s brightness or irradiance changes only slightly with the solar cycles, the indirect effects of enhanced solar activity including warming of the atmosphere in low and mid latitudes by ozone reactions due to increased ultraviolet radiation, in higher latitudes by geomagnetic activity and generally by increased radiative forcing due to less clouds caused by cosmic ray reduction may greatly magnify the total solar effect on temperatures. The sun appears to be the primary driver right up to the current time

List of staff at the Norwegian Space Centre

Brekke, Pål
Senior Adviser, Space Science Coordination
Dept.: Space and Earth Sciences

Racah Institute of Physics
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Jerusalem, 91904
Israel

Counter to claims by anthopogenic global warming enthusiasts, there is ample evidence to support the idea that cosmic rays do indeed affect climate (evidence will soon be summarized on this site).

Thus, it is no surprise that we find in our GSA Today paper (External PDF, local PDF or HTML) that Cosmic Ray Flux variations appear to be the largest driver of climate change over geological time scales. However, one of the secondary conclusions we reach in the paper is that CO2 had only a secondary climate role over geological time scales, and that Earth's sensitivity to changes in the radiation budget is not as large as most of the climate community believes (which ranges between 1.5 to 4.5°C temperature increase following a doubling of the atmospheric CO2). This of course, has various interesting ramifications, which is why our work attracted many assaults.

Two such assaults appeared in the scientific media, and as such should be addressed. Here we bring the unabridged rebuttal addressing each and every point raised.

Before continuing, note that once the climatic effect of cosmic rays is included in different empirical sensitivity analyses based on different time scales as the analysis described in our GSA Today article, consistent sensitivities are then obtained. The consistent sensitivity range is between 1 to 1.5°C per CO2 doubling. That is, empirical analyses on different time scales corroborates our GSA Today results regarding the climate sensitivity.

Manuscript submitted February 24, 2003;
accepted April 24, 2003.

Most of the world's scientists share the belief that there is a correlation between the rise in temperature and the rise in the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases derived from the burning of fossil fuels, from power stations that use petroleum or coal, from auto emissions, factory smokestacks and more.

Shaviv refuses to get worked up: "The hysteria surrounding the concept of 'global warming' will fade over the years," he says. "People will see that the apocalyptic forecasts are not coming true. Today there is no fingerprint attesting that carbon dioxide emission causes a rise in temperature.

Persona non grata At first, Shaviv didn't quite grasp the magnitude of his discovery. "I had no idea that this would lead me to get involved in the greenhouse effect," he says. "All I set out to do was to seriously answer a colleague's question. When I wanted to publish the article I ran into closed doors. I sent the article to Nature and was told - It's nice, but you need to find a stronger basis. After a while, I came to feel like people were always looking for another excuse not to publish the article."

The article was finally published in Physical Review Letters. Not long after its publication, Shaviv came across an article by a Canadian geologist named Jan Veizer, who had made geochemical measurements in order to reconstruct the earth's temperature over the past 550 million years. "One of his aims was to see how the temperature was affected by the amount of carbon dioxide," says Shaviv, "and he found that there was no relation between them. For example, 450 million years ago, it was much colder than it is today, but the amount of carbon dioxide was much, much higher. When he wanted to publish the article, he found it difficult. He was told that his findings couldn't be accurate. That carbon dioxide is known to have a big effect on temperature, so his measurements had to be wrong."

Veizer's geochemical findings fit Shaviv's hypothesis about Ice Ages like a glove. Shaviv hastened to write to him. "He was stunned," Shaviv recalls. "A week later, we met in Toronto at his hotel and we compared my reconstruction of cosmic rays with his temperature reconstruction. We saw that most of the changes on the geological time scales were explained by cosmic rays.

A very readable book that makes strong case for effects of cosmic rays on cloud formation and hence on climate change. Because the basic theory is that fluctuations in the sun's magnetic field affect cosmic ray intensity on earth, there is considerable material on astronomy (cosmic rays, supernovas etc.) which provides the background needed to understand the discussion. In essence, more solar magnetic storms strengthen the sun's magnetic field which divert cosmic rays from earth. Cosmic rate create ions that provide nuclei for cloud formation. More nuclei mean more low clouds and more reflective clouds which in turn cool the earth, (except over Anartica and other ice covered areas, since snow and ice actually reflect even more sunlight than clouds).
The author (a Danish scientists who did much of the key work in this area) has been able to produce the effect in the laboratory and has documented the statistical relationship with low level clouds and surface temperatures. Many climate episodes over millions of years appear to be explained by cosmic ray effects. The theory also explains how differing number of sun spots come to affect year to year climate change on earth.
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The later makes this a key book for those interested in the global warming debates, especially since so much of the research is recent. This makes it a must read since the evidence is not yet in most other popular discussions of climate change.

The theory presented in this book sounds a bit suspect when one first hears it. So the explanation for climate change is cosmic rays from outer space, give me a break.
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But the climate on planet Earth has been changing for roundly 4 billion years, within quite wide limits. There have been periods when most of the land surface was covered by ice caps, periods when even the polar areas were semi-tropical, and just about every state in between. There must be something big driving the system, the theories based on manmade carbon emissions (a recent phenomenon) do not seem to have much to offer, and the cosmic ray theory starts sounding better when it is broken down step by step.
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Is the cosmic ray theory true? I am hardly qualified to make such a judgment, but it does seem that the authors have set forth their evidence in a convincing fashion. There is no apparent reason to believe that the scientists participating this line of inquiry (collectively there are quite a few of them) have any ulterior motive, by the way, such as being "in the pay of the oil companies." Indeed, the authors go out of their way to say that they are not interested in promoting a bonfire of fossil fuels just because the importance of CO2 in the recent warming trend may have been exaggerated.
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Let the testing of the cosmic rays, manmade carbon emissions, and other theories continue, with the objective of arriving at a clearer understanding of what kind of climate change we can expect for this planet and why.
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The debate is called scientific inquiry, and that is a good thing.

Richard Turco is one of a growing number of scientists and citizens who are concerned about the widespread misuse and degradation of our environment--locally, regionally, and globally. He has attempted to establish at through his affiliations with the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, and the Institute of the Environment--a program that addresses a wide range of environmental issues, from urban air pollution to stratospheric ozone depletion, to the influence of aerosols on climate. He believes that research and teaching in this field are closely connected and equally important. Turco's work focuses on the application of numerical models to analyze field and laboratory observations, thereby achieving a clearer understanding of complex natural and anthropogenically influenced phenomena. While his specific research projects vary with time, a recent profile is provided in the following pages.

Given the difficulties of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the idea of a simple large-scale technological solution to climate change can seem very appealing.

"Global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions appears to be happening even faster than we expected," Turco said. "Carbon dioxide emissions are continuing to grow despite all of the warnings about climate change, despite all of the data showing such change is occurring and despite all of the efforts to control carbon emissions. The emissions are rising, in part, because China and India are using increasingly more energy and because fossil fuels still represent the cheapest source of energy.

"If we continue down this path, the climate is likely to change dramatically — major ice sheets could melt, sea levels could rise, it may evolve into a climate catastrophe. So it is tempting to seek an alternative response to climate change in case we can't get emissions under control. The result is that more and more geoengineering proposals are surfacing. Some of the people developing such proposals know what they're talking about; many don't."

Distinguished University Professor (Emeritus)

PhD (1968), Slovak Academy of Sciences
PhD (1971), Australian National University

Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa
140 Louis Pasteur
Ottawa, Canada K1N 6N5

Dr. Jan Veizer is a “Distinguished University Professor” of Geology at the University of Ottawa (Emeritus since April 2004) where he held the NSERC/Noranda/CIAR Research Chair in Earth Systems, and, from 1992 to 2004, concurrently served as the Director of the “Earth System Evolution Program” of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIAR). He recently retired also from the Chair of Sedimentary and Isotope Geology at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany. He has drawn on the principles of geology, chemistry, physics, mathematics and biology to paint a picture of the Earth as a dynamic, “living” entity. This complex and innovative framework may afford us a glimpse of the future of our planet and help us to understand the impact mankind has had.

hen CIAR’s Earth System Evolution Program Director and Noranda Fellow Jan Veizer published a recent scientific article in Nature magazine, he could not have anticipated the media reactions his work would receive.
Dr.Veizer’s article, which appeared in the December 7, 2000 edition of Nature, was titled “Evidence for decoupling of atmospheric CO2 and global climate during the Phanerozoic eon” and described the development of new databases for understanding the temperature of seawater and climate change over the last 550 million years. Based upon these new databases, Dr.Veizer was able to postulate in his article that CO2 was not the main driver of climate cycles on geological time scales.

On December 7, 2000, the front-page headline of the Toronto Star announced: “Climate change theory stuns scientists.” The next day, a Calgary Herald headline further sensationalized Dr. Veizer’s research by
stating: “Scientist deflates greenhouse theory.” Rather than celebrating his research achievement, Dr.Veizer found himself struggling to explain the true meaning behind his years of research.What he ultimately found is that front-page headlines do not always capture the full scope of scientific findings.
“What most people don’t understand,” says Dr.Veizer, “is that there is a natural greenhouse effect of 33°C, without which the Earth would be a frozen wasteland.About two-thirds or more of this temperature enhance-
ment is due to water vapour, not CO2. And how much of the superimposed 0.6°C temperature rise over the last century can be attributed solely to the 70 ppm (or 30 %) CO2 rise believed to be of anthropogenic origin is an open question.The situation is very complex.We are not saying
that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas. It is. But so is water vapour. How much each contributes to the greenhouse, let alone to climate change is something that we have yet to figure out.”

Ironically, says Dr.Veizer, among the people who have had the strongest reaction to his study are those with an environmental agenda, which he strongly supports. “The environmental agenda, in the sense of pollution abatement,
has great merits on its own regardless of whether or not CO2 is a climate driver,” he argues. “Even if CO2 has a minimal effect on climate, the fact remains that emission of collateral phases (sulfur, particulates) still results
in pollution, much of it due to our wasteful treatment of energy.”

This has a new dimension now that Global Warming is a political issue.
Things become politically incorrect, and in the United States at least, we've had instances of good solid research on global warming being refused for publication because somebody has made up his mind that that isn't the way it is and you can't publish.
I think this is not only unfortunate for the author it's unfortunate for the country and the world as a whole, because this is a problem we had better get straight so we know what to do.

The following figure shows the global temperature change from 1978 to 2006 for the lower troposphere from satellite data [http://climate.uah.edu/25yearbig.jpg]. The red contour lines are the year 2000 magnetic field intensity contours (5000 nT contours) shown previously. The areas of greatest warming are where the magnetic field is at its greatest intensity in the northern polar region, whereas the area of greatest cooling is where the magnetic field is at its greatest intensity in the southern polar region.
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The Earth’s magnetic field interacts with the Sun’s magnetic field. The interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) is a part of the Sun's magnetic field that is carried into interplanetary space by the solar wind.
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A 2005 study (Georgieva, Bianchi and Kirov: “Once Again About Global Warming and Solar Activity”, Mem. Societa Astronomica Italiana, Vol 76, 2005 [

http://sait.oat.ts.astro.it/MSAIt760405/PDF/2005MmSAI..76..969G.pdf
]) states: “We show that the index commonly used for quantifying long-term changes in solar activity, the sunspot number, accounts for only one part of solar activity and using this index leads to the underestimation of the role of solar activity in the global warming in the recent decades.

A more suitable index is the geomagnetic activity which reflects all solar activity, and it is highly correlated to global temperature variations in the whole period for which we have data.”

(PhysOrg.com) -- Based on studies of old volcanic basalt, scientists know that the Earth’s magnetic field reverses at irregular intervals, ranging from tens of thousands to millions of years. Volcanic basalt rock contains magnetite, and when the rock cools, its magnetic properties are frozen, recording the Earth's magnetic field of the time. With this data, scientists estimate that the last magnetic field reversal occurred about 780,000 years ago.

THE SUN CAUSES REVERSALS OF EARTH'S MAGNETIC FIELDS

The Sun's visible photosphere provides the illusion of a solar "surface" that separates the Earth from the Sun.

In fact, Earth moves through the outer layer of the Sun - the heliosphere - and is gravitationally, electrically and magnetically connected to it.

Solar cycles are actually cycles of deep-seated magnetic fields that periodically poke through the solar "surface" as sunspots, solar storms and violent solar eruptions.

The Standard Solar Model of a Hydrogen-Filled Sun fails to explain solar cycles, as well as many other experimental observations:

http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/04/quiet-sun-shouldn%E2%80%99t-baf...
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/

Reversals of Earth's magnetic fields are probably caused by the same deep-seated magnetic fields that produce cycles of solar magnetic storms: The dense, energetic object at the core of our iron-rich Sun.

With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
http://www.omatumr.com/

It is safe to say that the Sun and the Earth are intimately connected in many different ways.

That was one of the main points of a paper on climate changes, "EARTH'S HEAT SOURCE - THE SUN", that was published in Energy & Environment, vol. 20 (2009) pp.131-144.

With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
http://www.omatumr.com