If the earth's climate is unstable against a perturbation of 1E-10 W/m^2 from cosmic rays as proposed by?

Question

Svensmark, why do the proponents of that theory discount the effect of a perturbation from CO2 1.5 W/m^2? The flux of cosmic rays is about 1/m^2-s in the 1 GeV range. The Svensmark theory depends on a "butterfly effect" to amplify a small perturbation into climate change. Why won't the perturbation from CO2 that is 10 billion times larger effect climate too? Is this not like claiming that an ant can push a truck, but an elephant can't?

Answer 1

For cosmic rays to be a primary cause to the warming measured over the past 100+ years, there would have to be a change in the level of cosmic rays (evidence please), the theorized effect would have to be true (experimental confirmation please), and it would have to outweigh other contributing factors (in whose imagination did the evidence for greenhouse gas theory go away?).

I think you've just shown that "skeptics" are 10 billion times more likely to accept an unproven and unlikely scenario that could explain natural global warming than they are to accept a likely and well documented one that confirms anthropogenic global warming.

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DENIAL MYTH #11: Cosmic rays (very high energy particles) striking the Earth’s atmosphere is the cause of global heating

http://scholarsandrogues.wordpress.com/2...

"Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be any statistically significant trend in the number of cosmic rays hitting the Earth, and the few experiments performed to date appear to be stricken with error or a failure to address key points."

Answer 2

Here's the problem, the uncertainty in the negative radiative forcing from the various cloud/aerosol direct/indirect effects is high, meaning that things that have small effects on cloud/aerosol properties could have large effects on the radiative forcing (see figure below).  So looking at the net energy flux in this case isn't correct since the cooling is through the formation of particles.  The better explanation for this, as others have stated, is that there has been no change in the GCR flux over the last 50 years, and any effect from changes in GCR will be through clouds/aerosols, which has to be immediate (i.e., there is no plausible physical mechanism whereby you could invoke a decrease in GCR flux in 1910 to an increase in global mean temperature today).  

So an ant can't push a truck, but an ant could short out a relay causing a massive hydraulic jack to turn on, which will move the truck.  But if you can't find a dead ant on the relay, and find the truck moved and there is an elephant standing behind it, bet that the elephant rather than an ant had something to do with the motion.

Answer 3

Indeed it is.  Global warming "skeptics" tend to ignore the magnitude of the various radiative forcings.  For example, they continue to try and blame the Sun, yet the solar forcing is approximately 0.12 W/m^2 as opposed to CO2 at 1.6 W/m^2.  The cosmic ray forcing is miniscule, but theoretically it could potentially have a significant impact on the Earth's albedo.  Problem is that it's all theoretical and virtually all studies have shown that the cosmic ray impact on the Earth's albedo is very small.

http://greenhome.huddler.com/wiki/global...

Really what this boils down to is "skeptics" trying very hard to find an alternative explanation for global warming because they simply don't want CO2 to be responsible, even though it's quite clearly the correct explanation.  The reason I put "skeptics" in quotations is that a true skeptic treats all evidence equally, whereas global warming "skeptics" are only skeptical of evidence which supports the AGW theory, while accepting any evidence which seems to undermine it (i.e. galactic cosmic rays, warming on Mars, etc.) without question.

Answer 4

You could chalk your question up as one more that the people who like to say CO2 isn't causing warming, or isn't a Greenhouse Gas can't answer.  Why indeed?  On the other hand their descriptions of CO2 amount to a new form of matter, so why not?  If you can reinvent the elephant, you ought to be able to reinvent the ant too.

Answer 5

No it isn't