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To: longnshort who wrote (499)9/2/2011 11:37:09 AM
From: Bread Upon The Water  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 85487
 
Later--got things to get ready for the weekend. At first glance though I don't think you can universalize one instance of government muzzling of scientists and say this is the state of the entire global science industry--and that is probably still going to be my answer after I look it.

It sure lets you dodge my question though. You are saying on the basis of this one incident (that had nothing to do with global warming) you can't trust science and there all the global warming data is fudged? Sounds like a smear job to me.



To: longnshort who wrote (499)9/2/2011 12:47:29 PM
From: Alastair McIntosh  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 85487
 
I'll go with the CERN scientists

Nice to hear. Here's what the CERN scientists said:

CERN's CLOUD is headed by Jasper Kirkby

"People are far too polarized, and in my opinion there are huge, important areas where our understanding is poor at the moment," says Jasper Kirkby, a physicist at CERN. In particular, he says, little controlled research has been done on exactly what effect cosmic rays can have on atmospheric chemistry.

To find out, Kirkby and his team are bringing the atmosphere down to Earth in an experiment called Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets (CLOUD). The team fills a custom-built chamber with ultrapure air and chemicals believed to seed clouds: water vapour, sulphur dioxide, ozone and ammonia. They then bombard the chamber with protons from the same accelerator that feeds the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle smasher. As the synthetic cosmic rays stream in, the group carefully samples the artificial atmosphere to see what effect the rays are having.

Early results seem to indicate that cosmic rays do cause a change. The high-energy protons seemed to enhance the production of nanometre-sized particles from the gaseous atmosphere by more than a factor of ten. But, Kirkby adds, those particles are far too small to serve as seeds for clouds. "At the moment, it actually says nothing about a possible cosmic-ray effect on clouds and climate, but it's a very important first step," he says.

Scientists on both sides of the debate welcome the findings, although they draw differing conclusions. "Of course there are many things to explore, but I think the cosmic-ray/cloud-seeding hypothesis is converging with reality," says Henrik Svensmark, a physicist at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen, who claims a link between climate change and cosmic rays.

nature.com