Category Archives: It’s the Sun!

Confirmation of Solar forcing of the semi-annual variation of length-of-day

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“Confirmation of Solar forcing of the semi-annual variation of length-of-day“. December 23rd gave us Anthony Watts’ first Christmas Guest, and Paul Vaughn (M.Sc.) served up a delightful slice of Dunning-Kruger pudding. There’s nothing a denialist likes more than a new and obscure correlation to (briefly) divert the conversation… Causation is for sissies.

Paul wants to show that Earth’s Length of Day is influenced by cosmic rays, which slightly affect atmospheric density. Hence, using the power of wishful thinking, all Global Warming is natural and will reverse itself. Eventually. Paul gives us lots of cluttered stock promoter-style charts, spreading a tiny proportional change over a full chart range. You’d think an analytical genius like, perhaps, Steve McIntyre would call him to task on it wouldn’t you?

Yes, atmospheric and oceanic angular momentum impacts Length of Day. Trivially. This influence, measured as being on the order of one millisecond out of 86,400,000 over a period of months, is significant? Try again. Cue the ignorant arguments about magnetic fields in the comments.

Something to be thankful for! At last: Cosmic rays linked to rapid mid-latitude cloud changes

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“Something to be thankful for! At last: Cosmic rays linked to rapid mid-latitude cloud changes“. Anthony Watts has once again found a natural cause for Global Warming (which isn’t happening). Now it’s cosmic rays! Anthony finds the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics paper Cosmic rays linked to rapid mid-latitude cloud changes “compelling”, especially when combined with denialist Jo Nova’s amateur illustrations (apparently the solar magnetic field absorbs cosmic rays).

The theory, which Henrik Svensmark has been relentlessly but unsuccessfully promoting for years, is that the sun’s magnetic field deflects Galactic Cosmic Rays, which seed cloud formation as they pass through the atmosphere. Hence a weaker solar magnetic field will trigger cooling by increased Earth’s albedo.

Do you think Anthony realized that the effects observed in the paper are only on the order of several days in duration? Naw. Or that Anthony noticed the authors’ admission that this effect is swamped by the anthropogenic impact? Naw.

Anthony’s quote-mining is always fun to watch. He highlights this sentence in the paper’s abstract: “These results provide perhaps the most compelling evidence presented thus far of a GCR-climate relationship.” but conveniently ignores the one immediately in front of it: “However, the results of the GCM experiment are found to be somewhat limited by the ability of the model to successfully reproduce observed cloud cover.”

Update: Here’s Jo Nova’s entertaining cosmological depict of the theory (purple annotation mine):

Jo Nova's concept of Cosmic Rays being eaten by... space dragons?