There certainly seems to be a good discussion of this issue in the comments on the first linked post (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/02/what-triggers-ice-ages/index.php?p=405), as well as in the exchange with Nir Shaviv on this thread: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/05/thank-you-for-emitting/#comment-13470.

A key point to consider is that “Changes in the IMF should modulate all GCR …. Therefore, since there is no trend in the best observed GCRs (i.e CLIMAX), that would seem to go against the idea that muon fluxes are also changing.”

The first post is still open, if you care to jump in.

Regards,

Tom

in case if you didn’t notice, the cosmic rays which reach the surface (and the Climax Station) do not affect weather. The ones which are stuck in the atmosphere do.

Different parts of the energy spectrum.

And it is not neutrons which are claimed to affect climate, but charged particles. Neutrons are generated in the Sun’s core – and are not much much influenced by the surface sunspot activity. The charged particles which penetrate the magnetosphere of Earth are accelerated to the sufficient energies by the magnetic fields in the Sun’s corona. Meaning that their flux is very sensitive to solar weather.

Solar neutrons are not deflected by the magnetosphere and heat the atmosphere by bouncing off its atoms (and sometimes ionise the atoms by bouncing a proton away from a nucleus). The charged particles ionise the atoms directly by electric interaction, thus causing droplet and, consequently, cloud formation.

The things which mostly cause cloud formation and the neutrons measured at Climax Stations are DIFFERENT components of “cosmic rays”.

Sorry, at the RealClimate they don’t seem to have a clue about nuclear physics.

I see you are still a seeker after the truth.

However, I don’t think that the excerpt you quote from the linked paper is at all controversial or “new” among climate scientists. See for example this posting from December 2004 at RealClimate.com: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/co2-in-ice-cores/

It is recognized that CO2 has not typically been an initiator in warmings, but as a GHG, it has certainly contributed to their acceleration and continuation.

At issue now is whether the continued ramp up in atmospheric CO2 due to human CO2 emissions, along with other anthropogenic factors such as methane releases, carbon black, ozone and albedo changes, can push the climate in the absence of the solar and extra-solar forcings (the effect of comic rays) that are understood to drive climate changes over the long run (which is the main theme of your linked paper).

On cosmic rays, RealClimate says the following in a February 12 post:

“Whether cosmic rays are correlated with climate or not, they have been regularly measured by the neutron monitor at Climax Station (Colorado) since 1953 and show no long term trend. No trend = no explanation for current changes.”

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/02/what-triggers-ice-ages/index.php?p=405

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/10/taking-cosmic-rays-for-a-spin/

Reghards,

TT

The atmospheric CO2 weight is about 3 trillion tonnes, meaning that fossil fuels only contribute at worst to an annual .1% atmospheric CO2 increase (by weight). A hundred years of the same CO2 increase would result in a total atmospheric CO2 increase of about 11% by weight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Atmospheric_concentration

As for the greenhouse effect, you would probably have to know some chemistry to check its plausibility.

PS: Don’t mention water vapor to the true believers -it drives them nuts. At up to 3% of the atmosphere and being a greenhouse gas, CO2 is insignificant in comparison.

Cheers

Each gallon of gasoline burned generates 20 pounds of CO2 — http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/co2.shtml — which comes to around 25 trillion pounds, or 12 billion tons, annually. That doesn’t quite jive with this assessment — http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.af.limitco2.html — but as that’s no doubt due to the fact that we don’t burn all the oil we use (as much of it goes into products that are later landfilled), the lower figure makes sense.

Now let’s say (even though it’s obviously not the case) that humanity has been pumping that much CO2 into the atmosphere for the past 100 years, running the total up to roughly a trillion tons of CO2 added to the atmosphere by humans over that period of time. This sounds like a lot until you compare it to the size of the atmosphere, which I did by calculating the volume of the earth — 4/3 x pi x the radius (approx. 4000 miles) cubed — and subtracting it from a sphere with a radius 60 miles larger (since that’s where 99% of the atmosphere is contained). That gives us approximately 24 billion square miles of atmosphere, so if you divide a trillion by 24 billion, you get roughly 42 tons of CO2 per cubic mile added to the atmosphere over the course of the past century.

Given that you can put a ton of roof shingles, say, on a single pallet (call it a cubic yard), you could store 42 tons of them in 1134 cubic feet, or five one-hundred-millionths (.00000005), of a cubic mile. Now, people are welcome to believe that dispersing this amount of CO2 throughout each cubic mile of the atmosphere has not only warmed the planet but that continuing to add a hundredth of THAT per cubic mile per year will soon end life as we know it. But for this and other reasons, I for one don’t buy it.

I could have missed something, of course, so I welcome everyone’s comments.