Do clouds disappear? (4)

Climate Change – News and Comments

Falsification tests of climate hypotheses

Warmer days and cooler nights when cosmic rays are scarce

Here’s a reminder of a climatic footnote to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC, ten years ago this weekend. With civilian aircraft grounded for three days, and without the contrails that usually criss-cross the skies of the USA, the difference between daytime and night-time temperatures at the surface increased. (See the Travis reference below.) Apparently like many other clouds (not all) the contrails reduce sunshine during the day and blanket the loss of heat at night. Take away those man-made clouds and the days become a little warmer and the nights a little cooler. In the jargon: the diurnal temperature range (DTR) increases.

(((Remark added 11 September. With comments coming in that cast doubt on that contrail story, I’ll repeat part of what I said in reply to Dahuang below. It doesn’t really matter what the reason was, for the post-9/11 increase in DTR, as long as everyone accepts that a loss of cloud was involved.)))

An echo of that mini-climatic event comes with the news that the DTR in Europe increases when there’s a big reduction in cosmic rays arriving at the Earth. With the implication that the skies are less cloudy at such times, it’s strong evidence in favour of Henrik Svensmark’s hypothesis that cosmic rays help to make clouds. The report comes from Aleksandar Dragić and his colleagues at the Institute of Physics in Belgrade. I’m grateful to Bengt Andersson for drawing their paper to my attention. It was published on 31 August and the full text is available here http://www.astrophys-space-sci-trans.net/7/315/2011/astra-7-315-2011.pdf  It’s typical of the pathetic state of science reporting that I still seem to have the story to myself ten days later.

More than a year ago I began a succession of posts on whether or not observations in the real world support or falsify the Svensmark hypothesis. The most explanatory was the first – see https://calderup.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/do-clouds-disappear/

The focus was on the “natural experiments” in which big puffs of gas from the Sun block some of the cosmic rays coming from the Galaxy towards the Earth. The resulting falls in cosmic ray influx, called Forbush decreases, last for a few days. The game is to look for observable reductions in cloudiness in the aftermath of these events. The results are most clearly favourable to the Svensmark hypothesis for the Forbush decreases with the largest percentage reductions in cosmic rays. Scientists keen to falsify the hypothesis have only to mix in some of the weaker events for the untidiness of the world’s weather to “hide the decline”.

The Serbs avoid that blunder by picking out the strongest Forbush decreases. And by using the simple, reliable and long-provided weather-station measurements of temperature by night and day, they avoid technical, interpretive and data-availability problems that surround more direct observations of clouds and their detailed properties. The temperatures come from 184 stations scattered all across Europe (actually, so I notice, from Greenland to Siberia). A compilation by the Mount Washington Observatory that spans four decades, from 1954 to 1995, supplies the catalogue of Forbush decreases.

The prime results are seen here in Dragić et al.‘s Figure 5. The graphs show the increase in the diurnal temperature range averaged across the continent in the days following the onset of cosmic ray decreases (day 0 on the horizontal scales). The upper panel is the result for 22 Forbush events in the range 7−10%, with a peak at roughly +0.35 ^oC in the diurnal temperature range. The lower panel is for 13 events greater than 10%. The peak goes to +0.6 ^oC and the influence lasts longer. It’s very satisfactory for the Svensmark hypothesis that the effect increases like this, with greater reductions in the cosmic rays. The results become hard (impossible?) to explain by any mechanism except an influence of cosmic rays on cloud formation.

To be candid, these results are much better than I’d have expected for observations from a densely populated continent with complex weather patterns, where air pollution and effects of vegetation confuse the picture of available cloud condensation nuclei. Svensmark’s team has emphasised the observable effects over the oceans. Now the approach taken by the Belgrade team opens the door to similar investigations in other continents. Let a march around the world’s land masses begin!

References

USA: diurnal temperatures post-9/11

D.J. Travis, A. Carleton and R.G. Lauritsen, “Contrails reduce daily temperature range”, Nature 418, 601, 2002

Europe: diurnal temperatures after Forbush decreases

A. Dragić, I. Aničin, R. Banjanac, V. Udovičić, D. Joković´, D. Maletić and J. Puzović, “Forbush decreases – clouds relation in the neutron monitor era”, Astrophysics and Space Sciences Transactions, 7, 315–318, 2011.

Do clouds disappear? 3

Falsification tests of climate hypotheses

Cosmic rays and clouds at various latitudes

An exchange with Prof. Terry Sloan of Lancaster University

I’m promoting to the start of a new post a comment on an earlier post that came from Terry Sloan, together with my reply and his comment on my reply. I’ve included a graph that he sent in an e-mail because it wouldn’t upload into the Comments section.

After that, the discussion continues here with further remarks from me.

Sloan is one of the severest critics of the Svensmark hypothesis that cosmic rays influence the Earth’s low clouds. The earlier post, entitled “Do clouds disappear when cosmic rays get weaker?”, was concerned chiefly with whether or not sudden changes called Forbush decreases have observable effects on cloud cover. You can see that post in full here: https://calderup.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/do-clouds-disappear/

But the present interaction with Sloan mainly concerns a different question, about the influence of the Earth’s magnetic field. To help readers to get quickly up to speed, here’s the most relevant extract from my original post:

Do clouds disappear? 2

Added 12 June 2010: There is now a thoughtful reply from Eimear Dunne.

Climate Change – News and Comments, and an echo of a Falsification Test

Wake up! Models don’t trump observations

The most important article since I launched this blog on 1 May may be Do clouds disappear when cosmic rays get weaker? — see here https://calderup.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/do-clouds-disappear/

It tells of unremitting attempts to falsify the Svensmark hypothesis by claiming that there’s no important effect on global cloud cover when eruptions from the Sun briefly cut the influx of cosmic rays, in “Forbush decreases”. The centrepiece is a summary of results published last year by Svensmark, Bondo and Svensmark. They show very plainly, in observations of the real world, that Forbush decreases have big impacts both on aerosols (chemical specks that grow into cloud condensation nuclei) and on low-level clouds.

That earlier post continues with the efforts in 2009-10 by Wolfendale and Arnold and their collaborators, who try to deny the Svensmark group’s result, by using relatively weak Forbush decreases. Svensmark can explain exactly how the impacts in those cases are masked by quasi-random meteorological noise, like tigers hidden in a jungle’s undergrowth.

Real-world results by Svensmark, Bondo & Svensmark (2009) for the remarkable loss of fine aerosols from the atmosphere (black curve) following five strong Forbush decreases in cosmic rays (red curve). Each aerosol datum point is the daily mean from about 40 AERONET stations world-wide, using stations with more than 20 measurements a day.

New nonsense comes in an abstract posted on the CERN website. It’s for a paper by researchers at Leeds, to be presented at a meeting about aerosols in Helsinki in three months’ time.

At issue are the Svensmark team’s results on aerosols (see right).  These show fine aerosols disappearing from the sky, because the shortage of cosmic rays lessens the chemical production of the  clusters of sulphuric acid and water molecules that seed the aerosols.

According to the people in Leeds, that can’t be right because they have a computer model that contradicts it.

The GLOMAP model was developed by Ken Carslaw, and the unlucky person named as lead author is a graduate student, Eimear Dunne.

An open letter to the lead author

Do clouds disappear?

Falsification tests of climate theories

Do clouds disappear when cosmic rays get weaker?

or “Don’t you worry, my dear, we’ve seen no tigers”

“The Sun makes fantastic natural experiments” Henrik Svensmark says, “that allow us to test our ideas about its effects on the Earth’s climate.” Most dramatic are the events called Forbush decreases. Ejections of gas from the Sun, carrying magnetic fields, can suddenly cut the influx of cosmic rays coming to the Earth from exploded stars.

According to the Svensmark hypothesis, cosmic rays seed the formation of low clouds, so there should be a reduction in the Earth’s low cloud cover in the aftermath of a Forbush decrease. During the past few years there have been repeated attempts to declare the hypothesis falsified, when various teams failed to find the expected decrease in the low cloud cover.

One morning in April 2008, I woke up to find that since midnight the BBC had spread all around the world the news that British physicists had more or less destroyed the Svensmark hypothesis. Violating a basic principle of objective reporting, the broadcasts went out before Svensmark himself had a chance to comment.

By lunchtime he and I had done our best to limit the damage – and the deception of the public – in brief radio and TV interviews. A remark from Svensmark went belatedly onto the BBC website, that the critic it quoted had “simply failed to understand how cosmic rays work on clouds”.

Two years later, critics still don’t understand it. But they go on telling the tale that Forbush decreases have no important effect on clouds, and the media go on echoing them. When Svensmark and his colleagues published in August 2009 a report that showed very clear effects, and explained why others had failed to see them, the BBC and almost everyone else ignored it. But not the scientific critics, who returned to the fray in December 2009 and February 2010.

Sequence

The Svensmark hypothesis

Sequence of discoveries

The connection between cosmic rays and the cloud cover observed by satellites was announced at a space science meeting in 1996 and published in the following year (Henrik Svensmark & Eigil Friis-Christensen 1997). The report’s title called the discovery the “missing link” because it solved a big puzzle for climate researchers, as to how the Sun could exert an impact on climate that empirically exceeded by a wide margin the effect of variations in solar brightness measured by satellites.