Wall Street Journal op-ed: “Heavenly bodies might be driving long-term weather trends”

The climate wars continue at the nation’s major newspapers, with the Wall Street Journal proposing a new escalation.

The 7 September New York Times editorial “In the Land of Denial: Republicans who dismiss science can offer no leadership on global warming” begins by asserting that the “Republican presidential contenders regard global warming as a hoax or, at best, underplay its importance.” Meanwhile, the 7 September Wall Street Journal carries a long commentary by Anne Jolis, an editorial page writer for the WSJ‘s European edition. She seeks to build controversy over a climate-related CERN experiment that was reported in late August in Nature: “Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation” .

A blurb in Physics World online describes CERN’s CLOUD experiment — Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets — as “designed to recreate processes in the atmosphere” so as to “investigate the possible influence of galactic cosmic rays on Earth’s clouds and climate.” The blurb links to a 7-minute technical interview with the principal investigator, Jasper Kirkby, who says, ‘We’re trying to understand what the connection is between a cosmic ray going through the atmosphere and the creation of so-called aerosol seeds — the seed for a cloud droplet or an ice particle.’ Physics World continues: “The CLOUD experiment recreates ... cloud-forming processes by directing the beamline at CERN’s proton synchrotron into a stainless-steel chamber containing very pure air and selected trace gases.” CERN itself offers a further summary write-up in the fairly technical press release “CERN’s CLOUD experiment provides unprecedented insight into cloud formation” .

Jolis’s piece, however, either incorporates or echoes the arguments of the climate skeptic Nigel Calder, who sees enormous technopolitical implications in the CLOUD experiment and has offered an online posting under the headline “CERN Experiment Confirms Cosmic Rays Can Influence Climate Change” . Calder comes close to asserting that CLOUD has endorsed what he calls “the Danish heresy — Henrik Svensmark’s hypothesis that most of the global warming of the 20th Century can be explained by the reduction in cosmic rays due to livelier solar activity, resulting in less low cloud cover and warmer surface temperatures.”

Calder does charge that “the High Priests of the Inconvenient Truth — in such temples as NASA-GISS, Penn State and the University of East Anglia — always knew that Svensmark’s cosmic ray hypothesis was the principal threat to their sketchy and poorly modelled notions of self-amplifying action of greenhouse gases.” And he charges that Nature, Science, the Times of London, the New York Times, BBC, New Scientist and Scientific American have deliberately suppressed news about this dimension of the global-warming controversy.

Jolis’s WSJ piece appears under the headline “The Other Climate Theory: Al Gore won’t hear it, but heavenly bodies might be driving long-term weather trends” ). She begins by alluding to Gore’s climate views of 21 years ago, then observes that “a few physicists” back then “were theorizing about [a] possible factor in climate change: charged subatomic particles from outer space, or ‘cosmic rays,’ whose atmospheric levels appear to rise and fall with the weakness or strength of solar winds that deflect them from the earth.”

She adds, “These shifts might significantly impact the type and quantity of clouds covering the earth, providing a clue to one of the least-understood but most important questions about climate. Heavenly bodies might be driving long-term weather trends.” And she asserts that the “theory has now moved from the corners of climate skepticism to the center of the physical-science universe: the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN.”

Jolis recounts the CLOUD experiment’s background, including the work of Henrik Svensmark, whom she portrays as a victim of the unscientific suppression of climate contrarianism. She also insinuates that anti-contrarian politics caused long delays in the start of the CLOUD experiment. She stipulates that “while the cosmic-ray theory has been ridiculed from the start by those who subscribe to the anthropogenic-warming theory, both Mr. Kirkby and Mr. Svensmark hold that human activity is contributing to climate change. All they question is its importance relative to other, natural factors.”

She closes with this: “Last month’s findings don’t herald the end of a debate, but the resumption of one. That is, if the politicians purporting to legislate based on science will allow it.”

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.