More on that global warming discovery in Denmark...

I earlier blogged about the Danish discovery that cosmic rays and their effects on cloud cover may explain up to 75% of global warming.

The Danish discovery has changed this. Researchers led by the Space Centre's Henrik Svensmark published experimental evidence in the proceedings of the prestigious British Royal Society showing that high-energy cosmic rays do have the ability to ionize molecules in our atmosphere and nucleate clouds. Mr. Svensmark's team managed to reproduce the gases and chemistry of the lower atmosphere inside a chamber of seven cubic metres. Into this simulated atmosphere, they fired a beam of charged particles like the high-energy cosmic radiation that manages to penetrate the Earth's magnetic shielding. Their measurements of the charged particles they created and the rates of nucleation match with those required to have a measurable impact on climate. They provide experimental evidence to support the theory.

The Danes are not the only team to have sought experimental evidence for cosmic ray forcing of the climate. University of Ottawa researcher Jan Veizer and colleague Nir Shaviv use geology and meteorites to show a cosmic ray connection with climate over the past 600-million years. The research team at CERN, the EU's foremost centre for high-energy physics, announced last month that their new CLOUD experiments would test the theory of cloud formation by cosmic rays. NASA is also taking the solar connection more seriously. This past spring, two new satellites were launched to collect data on the link between cloud formation and climate. All this activity signals a recognition that the solar-cosmic ray-cloudiness connection must be taken seriously in climate research.

While these Danish experiments provide new evidence to support the theory of solar-forcing of climate change, the CO2 warming theory remains untested and unverified. Beyond wiggle-matching, no experimental evidence has been produced to show that an increase in CO2 can accelerate the water cycle and increase greenhouse warming with water vapour. In fact, ice core evidence from the past shows that it doesn't.

In the natural sciences, if you can't measure it, you can't prove it.