Cosmic rays sank the Titanic

Climate Change: News and Comments

Full steam ahead for the real story of 20th Century warming

Although It seems a strange thing to celebrate, the Titanic Festival in Belfast, where the ship was built, will very soon mark the 100th anniversary of the liner’s foundering on 15 April 1912 after hitting a south-wandering iceberg, with the loss of a multitude of passengers and crew.

Comparing the £100-million Titanic complex newly built in Belfast with the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the travel writer Simon Calder has commented, “There is a great shipbuilding heritage, it is a divided city, but the Guggenheim is great on the outside but rubbish on the inside – unlike the Titanic building.”

What’s more, James Cameron’s movie “Titanic” has been remastered in 3D for the centenary.

Time then for me to dig out some slides that I’ve used off and on in lectures since 1999 as an illustration of Henrik Svensmark’s cosmic rays in action, controlling our climate. But first, just to show that I’m not being kooky, here’s a graph from a 2000 paper by E. N. Lawrence of the UK Meteorological Office. “The Titanic disaster – a meteorologist’s perspective” related iceberg abundance at low latitudes to a scarcity of sunspots.

by E.N. Lawrence

And Steven Goddard recalls a much older article, from the Chicago Tribune in 1923, that also linked icebergs with sunspots http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/07/28/1923-article-linked-icebergs-with-sunspots/

The notion that the Sun is dimmer when there are few sunspots goes right back to William Herschel at the beginning of the 19th Century. The trouble is that the variations in solar brightness, as measured by satellites, are too small to explain the strong influence of the Sun on climate as recorded over thousands of years, and continuing into the 21st Century. That’s where Svensmark’s discovery of 16 years ago comes in, with the amplifier. Cosmic rays coming from the Galaxy are more intense when there are fewer sunspots and they increase the global cloud cover, so cooling the world.

Some preliminary comments before showing my own slides about cosmic rays and the fate of Titanic. Of course the disaster also involved several elements of shameful seamanship, but the fact remains that large icebergs abounded much further south than usual in the spring of 1912. Secondly, I prepared the slides so long ago that I can’t recall the data sources. If challenged, I expect I could dig them out, and I do remember that the picture is from the Illustrated London News.

There was no direct recording of cosmic ray variations in those days. Indeed. Victor Hess was busy discovering them at that very time. So we have to make do with the geomagnetic activity index (called aa in the second slide) as an inverse indicator of cosmic ray influx, and with the counts of beryllium-10 and carbon-14, which are made by cosmic rays. Otherwise the slides should speak for themselves.

by Nigel Calder

by Nigel Calder

The theme music of Cameron’s film “Titanic” is entitled “Full Steam Ahead”. Although the ship came to an abrupt halt, the same has not happened to Svensmark’s theory. As plenty of other posts on this blog will show you, its bow wave keeps sweeping aside the attempts to falsify it. And fresh energy builds up more and more speed as all the pieces of the hypothesis fall into place, from quantum chemistry to the shape of the Milky Way Galaxy.

It’s a truly titanic idea, threatening disaster for the multitude who ignore the natural drivers of climate change, and shame for the misguided folk on the bridge who peer at computer screens instead of looking out of the window.

References

Simon Calder quoted: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/business/business-news/titanic-site-to-exceed-all-expectations-says-expert-16114943.html#ixzz1nb8gmfMP

E.N. Lawrence, Weather (Roy. Met. Soc.), Vol. 55, March 2000.

See also this from NOAA http://www.oar.noaa.gov/spotlite/archive/spot_sunclimate.html

The long pause in warming confirmed

Climate Change – News and Comments

Nice research, curious rhetoric

Just dis-embargoed at noon PST (8 pm BST) on 20 October are a press release and associated papers from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) project. A team led by Richard A. Muller has been asking whether the histories of land surface temperatures from the likes of NOAA, NASA and the Hadley Centre are to be trusted. Clever statistics glean and process raw data from 39,000 weather stations world wide – more than five times as many as used by other analysts.

The short answer is that the other histories are broadly validated, as seen in this graph from one of the new papers.

If your eye can trace the black line of the BEST study, based on a random selection of weather stations, you’ll see that the average temperatures of the land correspond quite well with the other series.

What’s very odd is the rhetoric of the press release. It begins:

Global warming is real, according to a major study released today. Despite issues raised by climate change skeptics, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study finds reliable evidence of a rise in the average world land temperature of approximately 1°C since the mid-1950s.

Global warming real? Not recently, folks. The black curve in the graph confirms what experts have known for years, that warming stopped in the mid-1990s, when the Sun was switching from a manic to a depressive phase.

Elsewhere the press release first begs the question by calling the past 50 years “the period during which the human effect on temperatures is discernible” and then contradicts this by saying, “What Berkeley Earth has not done is make an independent assessment of how much of the observed warming is due to human actions, Richard Muller acknowledged.”

Let me say there is interesting stuff in the material released today, particularly in the paper on Decadal Variations, tracing links with El Niño and other regional temperature oscillations” — a subject I may return to when I have more time.

It hasn’t escaped my attention that BEST is today gunning mainly for Anthony Watts and his Surface Stations project in the USA, but he’s well capable of answering for himself. See wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/20/the-berkeley-earth-surface-temperature-project-puts-pr-before-peer-review/

Added 21 October: See this rather uneasy comment from Judith Curry, a member of the Berkeley teamhttp://judithcurry.com/2011/10/20/berkeley-surface-temperatures-released/

And later: New Scientist quotes me saying something similar to what’s above – followed of course by the usual grossly biased and poorly informed attempt at a put-down http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21074-sceptical-climate-scientists-concede-earth-has-warmed.html

References

The BEST home page, with downloadable press release and papers, is here www.BerkeleyEarth.org

The graph shown above is Fig. 1 in “Decadal Variations in the Global Atmospheric Land Temperatures,” Richard A. Muller et al., unpublished

Silly season for melting ice

Climate Change: News and Comments

The Silly Season Again for Melting Ice

At this time of year, while the Arctic sea ice dwindles under the midnight sun and the wind pushes it around, silly stories are needed to fill the pages of summer newspapers. So it’s party time for the global warming alarmists and their editorial cronies. For example, Nature magazine today laments:

“Arctic melting: The Arctic has set another record for losing sea ice. Last month saw the lowest extent of sea ice in the Arctic for any June since satellite records started in 1979.”

[Note added 25 July: The day after I posted this, CNSNews reported Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) as saying,  “Instead of waiting until 2030 or whenever it was to have an ice-free Arctic, we’re going to have one in five or 10 years.”]

It’s a replay of the polar stories of 2007, mentioned in a 2008 talk on the Tradecraft of Propaganda that I posted earlier: https://calderup.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/tradecraft-of-propaganda/

Here’s the relevant extract from that talk: Last year [2007] you were told – shock, horror! — that Arctic sea ice was at its lowest extent since satellite measurements began. How that news was trumpeted on television and radio and in all the newspapers! What went completely unreported was that simultaneously, at the other end of the world, Antarctic sea ice was at a record high. Although the big freeze in Antarctica was again plainly announced in a press release from the US weather bureau, NOAA, not a single newspaper in North America or Europe carried this news unfavourable to the global warming brigade.

Let’s check what’s going on this year, around the southern end of the Earth’s axis.