From 1962 to 1966, Nigel Calder edited the scientific journal New Scientist. Subsequently he became well-respected as a science journalist with many books and articles to his name. Forty years on he joined forces with Henrik Svensmark and wrote The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change (Icon Books, ISBN 1-84046-815-7).

The book launch earlier this year was coordinated with publication of Dr. Svensmark’s peer-reviewed article entitled ‘Cosmoclimatology: a new theory emerges' which appeared in the February 2007 issue of Astronomy & Geophysics, (Vol. 48, Issue 1, pages. 1.18-1.24). The article represented the culmination of ten years of work at the Danish National Space Center correlating satellite records of low-altitude clouds with variations in cosmic rays.

Experiments in the basement of the Danish National Space Center showed that electrons are set free when cosmic rays pass through air. These free electrons then act as catalysts in the assembly of nuclei onto which water vapour condenses to make clouds.

But dust particles from air-borne pollution and ash from erupting volcanoes play a similar role. It was a key mechanism in Carl Sagan’s Nuclear Winter Scenario that has been quietly forgotten. Cloud science is at an early stage and the best cloud scientists sit with their backs to the window. They plan to turn their chairs around if their computer models ever look like simulating what goes on outside their windows.

Cosmic ray intensities change because of a number of factors…the Sun’s own activity such as solar flares, the variations in the Sun’s magnetic field which is crucial in shielding planets in our solar system from cosmic rays coming from elsewhere in the galaxy, and changes in the properties of the local interstellar medium (LISM).

According to Professor D.E. Shemansky of the Department of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering at the University of Southern California, ‘the dominant role of neutral hydrogen in the formation of the termination shock in the collision of the solar wind with the LISM has only recently been recognized by the particles and fields research community. ‘Indeed he claims that ‘…the NASA Space Physics Division has shown a persistent pernicious bias against work on the effects of the neutral gas in the LISM in the United States, from the time of the formation of the division.’ Strong words but suggestive that Henrik Svensmark might just be onto something.

Cosmic rays intensity varies on both short and long timescales and with it the concentration of radioactive carbon-14 and other unusual atoms created by these cosmic rays…thereby providing a record of shifting cosmic-ray intensities. And this record shows repeated alternations between cold and warm periods during the past 12 000 years.

Nir Shaviv of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Ján Veizer of the Ruhr University and the University of Ottawa linked these changes to the journey of the Sun and the Earth through the Milky Way galaxy. They blame the icehouse episodes on encounters with bright spiral arms, where cosmic rays are most intense. More frequent chilling events, every 34 million years or so, occur whenever the solar system passes through the mid-plane of the Galaxy. In Snowball Earth episodes around 700 and 2300 million years ago, even the equator was icy. At those times the birth-rate of stars in the galaxy was unusually high, which would have also meant a large number of exploding stars and intense cosmic rays.

According to Svensmark, whenever the Sun was feeble, cosmic-ray intensities were high and cold conditions ensued. The most recent occurrence was in the Little Ice Age that climaxed 300 years ago. During the past 500 million years the Earth has passed through four ‘hothouse’ episodes, free of ice and with high sea levels, and four ‘icehouse’ episodes like the one we live in now, with ice-sheets, glaciers and relatively low sea levels. The theory of cosmic rays and clouds would also seem to explain why the Earth did not freeze solid when it was very young. The Sun was much fainter but also more vigorous in repelling cosmic rays, so the Earth would not have had much cloud cover.

But the Cosmoclimatology Hypothesis may also have a contribution to make to discussions of the fossil record. While calculating the changing influx since life began about 3.8 billion years ago, Dr Svensmark discovered a surprising connection between cosmic-ray intensities and a variability of the productivity of life. The biggest fluctuations in productivity coincided with high star formation rates and cool periods in the Earth’s climate. Conversely, during a billion years when star formation was slow, cosmic rays were less intense and the Earth’s climate was warmer, the biosphere was almost unchanging in its productivity.

In any properly conducted scientific endeavour these ideas of Shemansky, Svensmark and Calder would be treated seriously. They would be formed into an hypothesis, predictions would be made, experiments designed to test them and attempts made to replicate results with a view to disproving or modifying the hypothesis. This is the scientific method one of the most powerful tools ever invented by mankind.

Its purpose…articulated by Sir Francis Bacon…is to advance knowledge by the deployment of a collective enterprise that pushes back the boundaries of ignorance, prejudice and superstition. This has never been easy…in part because it is too easy to cherry-pick the data. New Scientist indicates the scope of the problem in this diagram from an article published on 16th May 2007 in Issue 2604 (page 34-42) entitled ‘The Seven Biggest Myths about Climate Change’.

In the Age of the Gentleman Scientist real attempts were made to uphold The Baconian Oath. Minds were open, royal societies were free and open. Scientific careers advanced on merit more than patronage. But this is no longer the case. Nowadays rhetoric is deployed to discredit ideas and assassinate character at the behest of the political agendas of shadowy forces that are only ever seen as through a glass darkly. New Scientist it seems is among their public spokesmen. Here is New Scientist in its published critique of the Cosmoclimatology Hypothesis that the ionisation of air by cosmic rays imparts an electric charge to aerosols that encourages them to clump together; the clumps become large enough to trigger the condensation of water, and hence clouds form.

‘As yet there is no convincing evidence that such clumping occurs. Experiments under way at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva should settle the issue, but will not reveal if it matters in the real world: the atmosphere already has plenty of cloud condensation nuclei, so it is not clear why cosmic rays should have any great effect on cloud formation.’

This is unlikely to be the whole truth and would doubtless be challenged by Dr Svensmark. But the journal continues in the best Alistair Campbell manner with a piece of classic spin.

‘A series of attempts by Svensmark to show an effect have come unstuck. Most recently, he has claimed there is a correlation between low-altitude cloud cover and cosmic rays. Yet a correlation does not prove cause and effect. What's more, the correlation holds up after 1995 only if data is "corrected", and others in the field say this correction is not justified. "It's dubious manipulation of data in order to suit his hypothesis," says Joanna Haigh, an atmospheric physicist at Imperial College London. A few independent studies by other groups hint at a very tiny effect on clouds, but most have found no effect.’ This is disingenuous.

Every scientist’s data is ‘manipulated’. Peer review is one technique that is deployed to address the potential problem. It is not always so easy to separate out scientific fact from scientific fraud. The deliberate suppression of data providing evidence of a medieval warming period went too far…and a Senate Committee rightly rapped IPCC on the knuckles for being party to the planting of false evidence in the public domain. Every temperature-time series needs massaging. There is very little data in very few fields of scientific endeavour that do not need adjusting for operant conditions or to ensure a better fit to other data. The whole point of statistical techniques is to do precisely that. Any set of data can be forced to fit any mathematical equation. And so to New Scientist’s final point.

‘Even if changes in cosmic ray intensity do turn out to influence cloud cover and temperature, they cannot explain the rapid warming of the past few decades. Direct measurements going back 50 years show a periodic variation in intensity, but no downward trend coinciding with the recent warming. Indirect measurements of cosmic rays, based on the abundance of certain isotopes, suggest that their intensity fell between 1900 and 1950. While there can be a lag between a big change in a climate ‘forcing’ and its full effect on temperature, most warming should occur within a few years and taper off within decades. This is not the pattern we see.’

This again is disingenuous. At the heart of the scientific debate about global warming is the Lambda Factor that converts Heat-Energy Forcings into Temperature Changes. There is no scientific consensus about its value. Accountants always make sure they include a line in their spreadsheets called ‘adjustment’. Lambda is the climate modeller’s adjustment. Here is what I posted to my climate blog on 11th November 2006 about the ‘Battle of the Lambdas’ in a piece entitled Climate Thermodynamics.

‘The Stefan-Boltzman Law is to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein’s equation E=mc2 is to astrophysics. Boltzman relates energy to the square of the speed of light but by reference to temperature rather than mass. It was derived experimentally 100-years ago by a Slovenian professor and proved by his Austrian student. Buried in the small print of IPCC’s third assessment report is the bizarre statement that its climate models had found lambda to be 0.5C per watt of Forcing. Lambda from the Boltzman Equation is half this…based on Experiments with Nature not Manipulations with Computers.

Lambda Inflation is in fashion because the bigger the value of lambda the bigger the temperature increase you can predict from any particular set of Forcings Data. James Hansen who invented Global Warming in his evidence to Senate Hearings in the middle of a Washington Heatwave offers lambdas of 0.67, 0.75 or 1.0. John Houghton who chaired the IPCC working group trumps this with 0.8 while IPCC’s computer models now use 1.0. But The Stern Report deserves an Oscar for its implied lambda of 1.9…between six and eight times the Boltzman lambda.

Multiply by Boltzman’s lambda and temperature rise this century is in line with observation at 0.44 to 0.6C. Stern’s lambda gives nonsense. The Hadley Centre had the same problem so they now have one lambda to predict with and another…lambda divided by three…to match actual 20th Century temperatures.’

In his article Svensmark writes that the ‘multidisciplinary nature of Cosmoclimatology is both a challenge and an opportunity for many lines of inquiry. Even the search for alien life is affected because it should now take into account of the need for the right magnetic environment if life is to originate and survive on the planets of other stars.’ We can take this thought further. Our sun is at the heart of every religion…including Christianity…and it is becoming increasingly clear that something is going on. We need to find out and understand what this is.

With new data from all over the universe pouring into the antennae of the Hubble Telescope and with NASA’s planetary missions collecting an incredibly rich archive of data and images from within our own solar system we should be on the brink of a golden age of science. Analysing and understanding the true implications of this treasure trove is much too important to be left to the small-minded.

The warring of bureaucrats and the political shenanigans of public relations firms with scant regard for truth and cavalier attitude to scientific integrity and the scientific method will lead us to disaster. Their way is to deploy rhetoric, disinformation, character assassination and dodgy dossiers in pursuit of strange hidden political agendas. Science is increasingly threatened with enclosure by shadowy forces with little interest in the fate of their fellow man and great ignorance of the consequences of their arrogant disregard for the web of life created on this planet.

This creeping enclosure this stealthy clearance of the commons must be stopped. Our way, the right way, the only sane humane ecological way must be the way of truth and not authority. The fruits of science are our common wealth; part of the heritage our generation passes on to our children. It is not just another commons to be bought and sold at the whim of the rich, the powerful and the ignorant.

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