Wall Street Journal sustains “CLOUD experiment” skirmish in the climate wars
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0260
As reported here earlier , the 7 September Wall Street Journal carried a commentary seeking to build controversy over a climate-related CERN experiment. If letters to the editor from former high-level federal science officials are a sign of success, the commentary is succeeding. The 14 September WSJ carries five letters in response, including one from William Happer, the Princeton physicist who served as director of energy research at the Department of Energy from 1990 to 1993, and one from Raymond L. Orbach, director of DOE’s Office of Science 2002-09 and undersecretary for science 2006-09.
As Physics World put it , CERN’s CLOUD experiment—Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets—was “designed to recreate processes in the atmosphere” so as to “investigate the possible influence of galactic cosmic rays on Earth’s clouds and climate.” Opponents of the climate consensus argue that if cosmic rays are affecting climate, the possible human-caused effects could well be smaller than claimed.
Happer is of course known as a leader of the American Physical Society opponents of APS’s position on climate change. His WSJ letter calls the 7 September commentary “a welcome message of realism” in that it discusses research that “support[s] extensive observational evidence that cosmic rays reaching the earth’s surface have a large influence on climate.” Happer writes, “Even if we could hold CO2 levels fixed, the climate would continue to change because of other influences. In a time of serious world problems, wasteful expenditures justified by nonproblems like CO2 make no sense.”
Orbach’s letter asserts that it’s crucial to recognize that the “issue for climate change is not whether cosmic rays influence clouds” but “whether cosmic-ray intensities have changed during the years when global atmospheric temperatures have changed.” He offers a link to evidence available online and reports: “They have not.”
It seems likely that the third letter’s author, Roger W. Cohen, is the Roger Cohen who joined with Happer and others in opposition to the APS climate position. Cohen charges that adherents of the climate consensus “have never been seriously interested in pursuing natural causes of climate change.” He describes an unpublicized “debate among skeptics” about underlying natural, not anthropogenic, causes.
The fourth letter, from John P. Miller, PhD, of Portola Valley, Calif., questions the climate consensus and ends with this:
Politicians who believe that the more government can control what we do in our daily lives, the better those daily lives will be, see man-made global warming as the ultimate tool for such control. Thus, they are more than happy to fund scientists who support that viewpoint. Let’s see how robust the funding for the CERN CLOUD experiment is going forward.
The fifth letter, from Chuck Wilkerson of El Segundo, Calif., cites a book about climate and cosmic rays and ends with this:
It is long past time for the EPA’s management to follow the strong recommendation of its own National Center for Environmental Economics scientists who, in a very comprehensive internal report to management (March 2009), were highly critical of claims regarding the worth of the IPCC climate models. Their urgent, but ignored, plea was for the EPA to undertake its own independent assessment of whether or not human activity influences climate.
The Wall Street Journal continued the discussion this week by publishing criticism of Orbach’s skepticism about the effects of cosmic rays criticized in a letter from Donald K. Forbes of Virginia Scientists & Engineers for Energy & Environment , founded by the climate-consensus disbeliever Fred Singer.
Citing NASA satellite observations, volcanic eruptions and ocean oscillations, Forbes contests Orbach’s contention that “global atmospheric temperatures have been increasing since 1980 and continue to increase to this day.” Forbes then declares that 31-year period “insufficient for anyone, including Mr. Orbach, to dismiss the potential of variation in cosmic ray intensity to influence clouds, and thus global atmospheric temperature.” He continues:
The Svensmark hypothesis on the relationship of solar activity, cosmic rays and clouds is predicated on a charted relationship between solar variations and earth’s temperature since 1860. The changes in solar activity that alter cosmic ray intensity significantly may not have occurred within the period of Mr. Orbach’s conclusion.
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 published in ‘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.