A CLOUD covers global warming fanatics

If you've read any of my blogs in the past, you know I'm skeptical of global warming. I wanted to share a recent news item that adds to my skepticism.

It regards the latest revelations from CERN over its landmark CLOUD experiment, whose significance one journalist explains here:

"The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth."

First, a little background on where this article came from and the organization CERN. The research was published this week in the prestigious journal Nature, so this is not the result of some crackpot publication. And the research comes from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centers for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. This is a hugely successful and respected organization. It was CERN 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.

So what happened during the research? In this stainless steel 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. If there are more clouds, the result will be a cooler Earth. Where do these cosmic rays come from? The sun. 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.

The idea that cosmic rays and the sun hold the key to the global warming debate was first proposed by two scientists from the Danish Space Research Institute, at a 1996 scientific conference in the U.K. Within one day, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bert Bolin, denounced the theory, saying, “I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naive and irresponsible.” Note that it was the IPCC that played a role in later incorrect announcements on global warming. Al Gore and his fanatic followers made sure that anyone who disagreed about the politically correct theory of global warming being humanity's fault alone were vilified, marginalized and starved of funding, despite the fact that many of the skeptics had impeccable scientific credentials.

But Jasper Kirkby, a CERN scientist became disenchanted with the standard line of the global warming crowd. He convinced the CERN bureaucracy of the cosmic ray theory’s importance and developed a plan to create a cloud chamber — he called it CLOUD, for “Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets.” Needless to say, the global warming establishment sprang into action, pressured the Western governments that control CERN, and almost immediately succeeded in suspending CLOUD. It took Mr. Kirkby almost a decade of negotiation with his superiors, and who knows how many compromises and unspoken commitments, to convince the CERN bureaucracy to allow the project to proceed. And years more to create the cloud chamber and convincingly validate the Danes’ groundbreaking theory.

So, despite the fact that Al Gore implied that anyone who opposed his version of global warming was a racist, the verdict is still out. Again, I caution everyone to investigate and think this thing through before we ruin ourselves economically by following the harsh mandates the global warming crowd has set up for us.