Sunday 28 August 2011

I thought "The Science Is Settled"?

...yet someone thinks that:
"it 
is 
clear
 that 
the 
treatment
 of 
aerosol 
formation 
in climate 
models
 will 
need 
to 
be 
substantially revised"
Who is this maverick? Are they an errant blogger, clutching at straws they do not properly understand? Are they a "denier", flatly refusing to believe that the earth is round and that anthropogenic global warming is real?  No, this is CERN, the multinational research agency known for being fairly rigorous in their science.

But surely this is a minor point, a trivial side issue?  No, this is an important aspect of our understanding of climate. More from CERN:
Atmospheric aerosols play an important role in the climate. Aerosols reflect sunlight and produce cloud droplets. Additional aerosols would therefore brighten clouds and extend their lifetime. By current estimates, about half of all cloud droplets begin with the clustering of molecules that are present in the atmosphere only in minute amounts. Some of these embryonic clusters eventually grow large enough to become the seeds for cloud droplets. Trace sulphuric acid and ammonia vapours are thought to be important, and are used in all atmospheric models, but the mechanism and rate by which they form clusters together with water molecules have remained poorly understood until now.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Climate science is not "settled", much of what is officially promulgated about global warming is just opinion, and that the opinions you are fed are not even very solidly based.

14 comments:

  1. To quote from CERN's paper:

    Crucially, however, the CLOUD results show that sulphuric acid, water and ammonia alone – even with the enhancement of cosmic rays - are not sufficient to explain atmospheric observations of aerosol formation. Additional vapours must therefore be involved, and finding out their identity will be the next step for CLOUD.

    What are you trying to say, p?

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  2. I've never met a scientist who isn't sceptical about man made global warming.

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  3. M - The Anthropogenic Global Warming Hypothesis as an attack of the vapours? Tempting...

    Albert - In the interests of full disclosure, how many scientists do you meet, in a typical day? ;-)

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  4. In the interests of full disclosure, how many scientists do you meet, in a typical day?

    As I work in an academic institution, rather a lot. So there!

    You obviously don't know me as well as you think you do!

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  5. This is rather amusing:

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/8730125/Parts-of-Britain-suffer-coldest-summer-for-nearly-two-decades.html

    Unusually cold summers following unusually cold winters. I wonder where global warming is happening. Or is it an effect of global warming that the world gets colder?

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  6. It's not global warming any more, Albert, it's "climate change". Has been ever since the warming trend stopped and climates started regressing to the mean. Do try to keep up...

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  7. Well it's quite hard to keep up with unfalsifiable theses (I should know, I believe a few!).

    So is the global cooling man-made then?

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  8. Rofl, Albert!

    So p is not dissing CERN, but trying to appear discerning. ;-D

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  9. No science is ever settled.
    For centuries it was believed that the sun went round the earth until Galileo proved otherwise.
    The Law of Conservation of Matter also held sway for a long while until Einstein came along and proved that matter could be changed into energy.
    I'm sure there are loads of other examples, so why should Global Warming be the exception?

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  10. Promulgated - what a fabulous word! Worth the read alone!

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  11. No science is ever settled.
    For centuries it was believed that the sun went round the earth until Galileo proved otherwise.


    In which case, it was presumably settled that the sun did not go round the earth. I wonder when the scientific community will apologise to the Catholic Church.

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  12. it was presumably settled that the sun did not go round the earth.

    Well, it was... for a while. Then we realised it was a bit more complex.

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  13. Look! Are the polar ice caps still going to melt and drown us all, as predicted just a few years ago?

    Or does the new fashion for 'climate change' mean the that its an ice coming and we need to pump CFCs into the air to hold off the glaciers?

    What was that terrible film where a couple burned rare library books in a fireplace and that stopped permafrost forming over New York?

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