Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Global Warming Update

While Al Gore claims all scientists (except the 'deniers') support him, the only scientist mentioned by name in "An Inconvenient Truth" is James Hansen of NASA. However, Hansen's Former NASA Supervisor Declares Himself a Skeptic - Says Hansen ‘Embarrassed NASA’, ‘Was Never Muzzled’, & Models ‘Useless.’

For more on James Hansen, see "Is it warm here or is it just NASA?" as well as the posts here, here, here, and here.

ALSO, scientists have found that weather events in the upper atmosphere (stratosphere) are related to fluctuations in the cosmic rays which reach the Earth:

What did surprise the scientists, however, were the intermittent and sudden increases observed in the levels of muons during the winter months. These jumps in the data occurred over just a few days. On investigation, they found these changes coincided with very sudden increases in the temperature of the stratosphere (by up to 40 oC in places!). Looking more closely at supporting meteorological data, they realised they were observing a major weather event, known as a Sudden Stratospheric Warming. On average, these occur every other year and are notoriously unpredictable. This study has shown, for the first time, that cosmic-ray data can be used effectively to identify these events.
How much of Earth's weather that can be explained by astrophysical events remains to be discovered.

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