"Every time you offer the excellent Browning letter I have to chuckle at those Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) nincompoops trying to predict temps 100 years out…

"If the scandals and suspect computer modeling weren't bad enough, this might be a (the?) final nail.."

David Fuller's view Yes, but it is big business, subsidized by governments.

Thanks for the recent column by James Delingpole of The Telegraph (UK) (linked above) which I had not previously seen. Warning to readers: it is certain to delight some of you while infuriating others; such is the contentiousness of this issue. Here is a portion on the research from CERN which certainly interested me, quoting Lawrence Solomon:


The research, published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature, comes from über-prestigious CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world's largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth's atmosphere.

In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done - demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth's atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun's magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth's atmosphere (the stronger the sun's magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

James Delingpole adds before quoting Solomon again:

So if it's so great, why aren't we hearing more about it? Well, possibly because the Director General of CERN Rolf-Dieter Heuer would prefer it that way. Here's how he poured cold water on the results in an interview with Die Welt Online:

I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them. That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.

Delingpole also mentions and quotes Nigel Calder:

Nigel Calder, who has been following the CLOUD experiment for some time, was the first to smell a rat. He notes:

CERN has joined a long line of lesser institutions obliged to remain politically correct about the man-made global warming hypothesis. It's OK to enter "the highly political arena of the climate change debate" provided your results endorse man-made warming, but not if they support Svensmark's heresy that the Sun alters the climate by influencing the cosmic ray influx and cloud formation.

While at the Hay on Wye Festival last May, Rolf-Dieter Heuer from CERN was the most interesting and impressive speaker I listened to, attracting a huge audience, over 20 percent of which had scientific backgrounds, according to his estimate based on a show of hands.

A scientist himself, Heuer is now in a much more political role as Director General of CERN. Consequently, he was keen to discuss their many projects, but was inevitably questioned on global warming. He did not mention the experiments involving the chamber precisely recreating the earth's atmosphere, although presumably that project was underway at the time. However, he did position himself with the majority of scientists claiming that mankind's CO2 emissions were a significant problem.

I have no scientific background but it seems inevitable to me that mankind's activities would have some influence on our climate. The question is how much influence? It also seems logical to me that since no life would exist on earth without the sun, that it should also remain the overwhelming influence in determining our climate.

I expect a backlash in the UK and Continental Europe as households and businesses face soaring energy bills to subsidise green projects of dubious efficiency.