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Recent Warming But No Trend in Galactic Cosmic Rays

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There is little evidence for a connection between solar activity (as inferred from trends in galactic cosmic rays) and recent global warming. Since the paper by Friis-Christensen and Lassen (1991), there has been an enhanced controversy about the role of solar activity for earth’s climate. Svensmark (1998) later proposed that changes in the inter-planetary magnetic fields (IMF) resulting from variations on the sun can affect the climate through galactic cosmic rays (GCR) by modulating earth’s cloud cover. Svensmark and others have also argued that recent global warming has been a result of solar activity and reduced cloud cover. Damon and Laut have criticized their hypothesis and argue that the work by both Friis-Christensen and Lassen and Svensmark contain serious flaws. For one thing, it is clear that the GCR does not contain any clear and significant long-term trend (e.g. Fig. 1, but also in papers by Svensmark).

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William M. Connolley

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When I joined RC, I was a climate modeller with the British Antarctic Survey. Now I’m a software engineer for CSR. I’m still interested in communicating the science of climate change, but can no longer do so at a professional level.

I’m also elsewhere: the wikipedia project is developing into a useful resource, and my profile is User:William_M._Connolley. My personal vanity site is at www.wmconnolley.org.uk.

One of the people in the picture is me. Guess which.

ps: all my contributions online are released under the GFDL, unless I explicitly note otherwise.

Stefan Rahmstorf

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A physicist and oceanographer by training, Stefan Rahmstorf has moved from early work in general relativity theory to working on climate issues.

He has done research at the New Zealand Oceanographic Institute, at the Institute of Marine Science in Kiel and since 1996 at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany (in Potsdam near Berlin).

His work focuses on the role of ocean currents in climate change, past and present.

In 1999 Rahmstorf was awarded the $ 1 million Centennial Fellowship Award of the US-based James S. McDonnell foundation.

Since 2000 he teaches physics of the oceans as a professor at Potsdam University.

Rahmstorf is a member of the Academia Europaea and served from 2004-2013 in the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU). He was also one of the lead authors of the 4th Assessment Report of the IPCC. In 2007 he became an Honorary Fellow of the University of Wales and in 2010 a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

More information about his research and publication record can be found here.

All posts by stefan.

Jim Bouldin

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Jim Bouldin is a currently unaffiliated research ecologist, holding a BS in Wildlife Management from Ohio State University and a PhD in Plant Science from UCD. His primary research background/interest relates to forest change in response to human activity over the last ~ 200 years, and associated vegetation analysis methods issues, focusing on North America. Relative to climate topics, He is interested in mathematical/statistical methods in the analysis of tree rings as climatic proxies, and the role of forest vegetation in the carbon cycle and larger climate system.

More detail about his interests and work are here.

Eric Steig

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Eric Steig is an isotope geochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle. His primary research interest is use of ice core records to document climate variability in the past. He also works on the geological history of ice sheets, on ice sheet dynamics, on statistical climate analysis, and on atmospheric chemistry.

He received a BA from Hampshire College at Amherst, MA, and M.S. and PhDs in Geological Sciences at the University of Washington, and was a DOE Global Change Graduate fellow. He was on the research faculty at the University of Colorado and taught at the University of Pennsylvania prior to returning to the University of Washington 2001. He has served on the national steering committees for the Ice Core Working Group, the Paleoenvironmental Arctic Sciences initiative, and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Initiative, all sponsored by the US National Science Foundation. He was a senior editor of the journal Quaternary Research, and director of the Quaternary Research Center. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in international journals.

More information about his research and publication record can be found here.

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Thibault de Garidel

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Dr. de Garidel received his Bachelor’s degree in Earth Sciences from the Université Lyon I, France, completed a Master in the Université Bordeaux I, France and a Ph.D. in Geosciences at CEREGE, Université Paul Cézanne (a.k.a. Aix-Marseille III).

More information about his research and publication record can be found here.

David Archer

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David Archer is a computational ocean chemist at the University of Chicago. He has published research on the carbon cycle of the ocean and the sea floor, at present, in the past, and in the future. Dr. Archer has worked on the ongoing mystery of the low atmospheric CO2 concentration during glacial time 20,000 years ago, and on the fate of fossil fuel CO2 on geologic time scales in the future, and its impact on future ice age cycles, ocean methane hydrate decomposition, and coral reefs. Archer has written a textbook for non-science major undergraduates called “Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast” published by Blackwell, and a popular-level book on the longevity of climate impacts from CO2 release called The Long Thaw: How humans are changing the next 100,000 years of Earth’s climate. More information can be found here.

All posts by david.

Raymond T. Pierrehumbert

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Pierrehumbert Portrait
Raymond Pierrehumbert is the Louis Block Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, having earlier served on the atmospheric science faculties of MIT and Princeton. He is principally interested in the formulation of idealized models which can be brought to bear on fundamental phenomena governing present and past climates of the Earth and other planets. His recent research interests have included water vapor feedback, baroclinic instability, the Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth, the climate of Early Mars, and methane hydrological cycles on Titan. He has been director of the Climate Systems Center, a US National Science Foundation Information Technology Research project aimed at bringing modern software design techniques to the problem of climate simulation. He has also collaborated with David Archer on the University of Chicago’s global warming curriculum.

He received an A.B. degree in Physics from Harvard, was then a Knox Fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University, and completed his PhD on hydrodynamic stability theory at MIT, in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He was a lead author of the IPCC Third Assessment Report, and a co-author of the National Research Council study on abrupt climate change. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

Pierrehumbert is the author of the textbook Principles of Planetary Climate, available from Cambridge University Press.

More information about his research, including a complete publication list, can be found here.

The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment

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In early November 2004 the results of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) were published, a uniquely detailed regional study compiled by 300 scientists over 3 years. The study describes the ongoing climate change in the Arctic and its consequences: rising temperatures, loss of sea ice, unprecedented melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and many impacts on ecosystems, animals and people. The ACIA is the first comprehensively researched, fully referenced, and independently reviewed evaluation of arctic climate change and its impacts for the region and for the world.

Sadly, in recent years we have become accustomed to a ritual in which the publication of each new result on anthropogenic climate change is greeted by a flurry of activity from industry-funded lobby groups, think tanks and PR professionals, who try to discredit the science and confuse the public about global warming.

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