Articles Tagged "CERN"

Piers Corbyn's review of Summer Weather - Hurricane Irene - CERN’s CLOUD Experiment - Latest on Climate Fools Day 26th October



Update: A poor August ends another disappointing summer - Paul Hudson - BBC

In spring, I wrote an article, which you can read HERE summarising the various summer forecasts on offer.

Of all the long range forecasts I read, only Piers Corbyn at Weather Action can claim success with his summer forecast. H/T NM

Updated below with MUST READ comments by Piers Corbyn

Cosmic ray particles don't just cause cloud nucleation, they also shrink the fonts CERN uses on its graphics...CLICK for bigger image

New atomsmasher research into cloud formation.

CERN's 8,000 scientists may not be able to find the hypothetical Higgs boson, but they have made an important contribution to climate physics, prompting climate models to be revised.

The first results from the lab's CLOUD ("Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets") experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth's clouds are formed through nucleation. The paper is entitled Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation.

This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes.

Unsurprisingly, it's a politically sensitive topic, as it provides support for a "heliocentric" rather than "anthropogenic" approach to climate change: the sun plays a large role in modulating the quantity of cosmic rays reaching the upper atmosphere of the Earth.

Updated below with comments by Piers Corbyn

Jasper Kirkby is a superb scientist, but he has been a lousy politician. In 1998, anticipating he'd be leading a path-breaking experiment into the sun's role in global warming, he made the mistake of stating that the sun and cosmic rays "will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth's temperature that we have seen in the last century." Global warming, he theorized, may be part of a natural cycle in the Earth's temperature.

Dr. Kirkby was immediately condemned by climate scientists for minimizing the role of human beings in global warming. Stories in the media disparaged Dr. Kirkby by citing scientists who feared oil-industry lobbyists would use his statements to discredit the greenhouse effect. And the funding approval for Dr. Kirkby's path-breaking experiment -- seemingly a sure thing when he first announced his proposal-- was put on ice.

Dr. Kirkby was stunned, and not just because the experiment he was about to run had support within his scientific institute, and was widely expected to have profound significance. Dr. Kirkby was also stunned because his institute is CERN, and science performed at CERN had never before seemed so vulnerable to whims of government funders.

Jasper Kirkby: Head of the CLOUD Experiment - CERN, Geneva.

This lecture is part of SFU's 2011 global warming seminar series "Global Warming: A Science Perspective".

Regardless of one's perspective the effects of global warming are a quantifiable set of environmental results. That is why the SFU Dean of Science Office invited some of the world's leading scientists to present results of their research in this six-part series of talks.

CERN’s CLOUD experiment is designed to study the formation of clouds and the idea that Cosmic Rays may have an influence. The take-home message from this research is that we just don’t understand clouds in anything other than hand-waving terms. We also understand the effects of aerosols even less. The other things to come out of it are that trace constituencies in the atmosphere seem to have a big effect on cloud formation, and that Cosmic rays also have an effect, a “significant” one according to CERN..

The hypothesis is simple. Solar activity modulates the incidence of Cosmic Rays on Earth, and the Cosmic Rays affect cloud formation by providing more condensation nuclei on which water droplets grow. More clouds mean more reflected sunlight and a cooler earth. It’s an elegant idea though in the real world the effect, if it exists, is bound to be muddied by many other influences.

One can look for correlations in nature and appeal to climate models to prove or disprove the effect. Model based refutations are not impressive given the assumptions built into them. The observational evidence has been argued about for years. Experiments are however a different thing entirely.

Using a chamber to simulate the atmosphere Kirkby et al investigate aerosol nucleation as a function of increasing concentrations of sulphates, ammonia and ionisation. The ionisation source and the stand-in for Cosmic Rays is CERN’s proton synchrotron – the one that feeds its particles into the Large Hadron Collider. Atmospheric air could not be used – it has too many impurities – so the researchers use gas mixtures to recreate it. The chamber, 26 cubic metres of it, its controlled environment and ionisation conditions along with its state-of-the-art instrumentation are clearly the most rigorous test of the Cosmic Ray hypothesis yet devised. However, it must be stressed that the chamber is not the atmosphere.

The CLOUD experiment at CERN and Global Warming



Uploaded by SFUNews on Apr 20, 2011

Jasper Kirkby
Head of the CLOUD Experiment - CERN, Geneva.