Cosmic rays set climate change on Earth, expert says - Scientist challenges greenhouse-gas theory

He knows challenging the accepted climate-change theory may lead to a nasty fight.

It's a politically and economically loaded topic. Yet, he is speaking out about his published research. "Look, maybe I'm wrong," he said. "But I'm saying, at least let's look at this and discuss it.

"Every one of these things (parts of his theory) has its problems. But so does every other model" of how Earth's climate behaves.

Veizer says high-energy rays from distant parts of space are smashing into our atmosphere in ways that make our planet go through warm and cool cycles.

Cosmic rays are hitting us all the time -- a well-known fact. What's new is that researchers are asking what cosmic rays do to our world and its weather.

- Last year, the British science journal Proceedings of the Royal Society published a theory that cosmic rays "unambiguously" form clouds and affect our climate.

- Florida Tech and the University of Florida are jointly investigating whether cosmic rays are the trigger that makes a charged thundercloud let rip with lightning.

- In 2003, scientists from NASA and the University of Kansas suggested that cosmic rays "influence cloud formation, can affect climate and harm live organisms directly via increase of radiation dose," an effect they claim to trace over millions of years of fossil history.

Veizer has published his theory in Geoscience Canada, the journal of the Geological Association of Canada. The article is called Celestial Climate Driver: A Perspective from Four Billion Years of the Carbon Cycle.

In his paper, he concludes: "Empirical observations on all time scales point to celestial phenomena as the principal driver of climate, with greenhouse gases acting only as potential amplifiers."

The idea is that cosmic rays hit gas molecules in the atmosphere and form the nucleus of what becomes a water vapour droplet. These in turn form clouds, reflecting some of the sun's energy back to space and cooling the Earth.

When there are more cosmic rays the Earth is colder. When there are fewer cosmic rays the Earth is warmer.

Most rays come from younger stars, which are clustered at some regions in the galaxy through which our solar system has passed its 4.5-billion-year history.

Our own sun deflects some of these rays away, but the sun's activity grows stronger and weaker. All of these factors can change the number of cosmic rays that hit us.

The Earth's magnetic field also blocks some cosmic rays. Scientists can reconstruct records of that field for the past 200,000 years, and he argues there's an extremely close match between cold times in our climate and times when the magnetic field allowed more cosmic rays to hit us.

Even in recent times he argues that other cosmic factors can affect our climate as plausibly as carbon dioxide, or more so. The warming of Earth in the past 100 years -- about 0.6 degrees Celsius -- matches a time of the sun's growing intensity, he says.

Questioning the fundamentals of climate change -- the theory that man-made gases such as carbon dioxide are building up and warming our climate -- is a fast way to start a nasty, personal fight in the science world.

The recently retired professor still holds a research chair and supervises grad students and postdoctoral fellows. A native of Bratislava, Veizer left because Russian troops entered Czechoslovakia in 1968. He's been building up honours ever since in the field of geochemistry -- learning about Earth's past by the chemistry preserved in rocks and sediments.

The Royal Society of Canada called him "one of the most creative, innovative and productive geoscientists of our times," and added: "He has generated entirely new concepts that have proven key in our understanding the geochemical history of Earth."

He won the 1992 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, worth $2.2 million Cdn, representing the German government's highest prize for research in any field. The prize ended up financing his research.

The judges said he "has in front of his eyes the overall picture of the Earth during its entire 4.5 billion years of evolution," and he is "one of the most creative ... geologists of his time."

I prefer to think that it's caused by precession of the poles and wobble of the earth on it's axis...........

Hmm that that has a 27,000 yr period, unfortunately it does not fit the data.

Now the 100kyr wobble in earths orbital plain with respect to the solar system mean plane is a different matter:

http://newton.ex.ac.uk/aip/physnews.252.html#1

INTERPLANETARY DUST PARTICLES (IDPs) are deposited on the Earth at the rate of about 10,000 tons per year. Does this have any effect on climate? Scientists at Caltech have found that ancient samples of helium-3 (coming mostly from IDPs) in oceanic sediments exhibit a 100,000-year periodicity. The researchers assert that their data, taken along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, support a recently enunciated idea that Earth's orbital inclination varies with a 100-kyr period; this notion in turn had been broached as an explanation for a similar periodicity in the succession of ice ages. (K.A. Farley and D.B. Patterson, Nature, 7 December 1995.)
Farley & Patterson 1998, http://www.elsevier.com/gej-ng/10/20/36/33/37/32/abstract.html
Farley http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~farley/
Farley http://www.elsevier.nl/gej-ng/10/18/23/54/21/49/abstract.html

http://www.publicaffairs.noaa.gov/pr96/dec96/noaa96-78.html

ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE DURING LAST GLACIAL PERIOD COULD BE TIED TO DUST-INDUCED REGIONAL WARMING

Preliminary new evidence suggests that periodic increases in atmospheric dust concentrations during the glacial periods of the last 100,000 years may have resulted in significant regional warming, and that this warming may have triggered the abrupt climatic changes observed in paleoclimate records, according to a scientist at the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Current scientific thinking is that the dust concentrations contributed to global cooling.

Spectrum of 100-kyr glacial cycle: Orbital inclination, not eccentricity
Richard A. Muller^* and Gordon J. MacDonald

Origin of the 100 kyr Glacial Cycle
by Richard A. Muller

Figure 2. Spectral fingerprints in the vicinity of the 100 kyr peak: (a) for data from Site 607; (b) for data of the SPECMAP stack; (c) for a model with linear response to eccentricity, calculated from the results of Quinn et al. (ref 6); (d) for the nonlinear ice-sheet model of Imbrie and Imbrie (ref 22); and (e) for a model with linear response to the inclination of the Earth's orbit (measured with respect to the invariable plane). All calculations are for the period 0-600 ka. The 100 kyr peak in the data in (a) and (b) do not fit the fingerprints from the theories (c) and (d), but are a good match to the prediction from inclination in (e). return to beginning

Far more important to our present analysis, however, is the fact that the predicted 100 kyr "eccentricity line" is actually split into 95 and 125 kyr components, in serious conflict with the single narrow line seen in the climate data. The splitting of this peak into a doublet is well known theoretically (see, e.g., ref 5), but in comparisons with data the two peaks in the eccentricity were merged into a single broad peak by the poor resolution of the Blackman-Tukey algorithm (as was done, for example, in ref 8). The single narrow peak in the climate data was likewise broadened, and it appeared to match the broad eccentricity feature.
***
Figure 3. Variations of the inclination vector of the Earth's orbit. The inclination i is the angle between this vector and the vector of the reference frame; Omega is the azimuthal angle = the angle of the ascending node (in astronomical jargon).. In (A), (B), and (C) the measurements are made with respect to the zodiacal (or ecliptic) frame, i.e. the frame of the current orbit of the Earth. In (D), (E), and (F) the motion has been trasformed to the invariable frame, i.e. the frame of the total angular momentum of the solar system. Note that the primary period of oscillation in the zodiacal frame (A) is 70 kyr, but in the invariable plane (D) it is 100 kyr.

Ice Ages & Astronomical Causes
Brief Introduction to the History of Climate
by Richard A. Muller

Origin of the 100 kyr Glacial Cycle

Figure 1-1 Global warming

Figure 1-2 Climate of the last 2400 years

Figure 1-3 Climate of the last 12,000 years

Figure 1-4 Climate of the last 100,000 years

Figure 1-5 Climate for the last 420 kyr, from Vostok ice

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