Cosmic Rays & Global Warming

Did anyone see the documentary on global warming last night?

DAMN,!, I wanted to see that and I forgot about it !
What did you think of their arguments, is it a convincing argument or more head in the clouds stuff?

I still have to watch it! Il tell ya later!

Give it a go onto YouTube or something like that for the rest of us!

There is a good discussion of the issue on RealClimate:

www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2...ew-clothes/#more-412

Short Summary: very hard to see any variation in the Global Cosmic
Ray (GCR) flux to explain global warming, which is happening. GCR may
be influencing cloud formation by 'seeding' clouds.

Its a case of be careful, people are actively seeking to
muddy the waters by looking at something else to blame global warming on,
and solar is the prime candidate, saying 'its just a periodic warming'.
The IPCC is fairly hard on this: no.

There is a book to accompany this documentary:
"The Chilling Stars,A new theory of climate change"
By Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder.
My dad bought it after watching the documentary! Well not straight after the documentary!

I managed to see a recording of this yesterday and if the program is right, then CO2 has nothing to to do with global warming!

Basically the argument is that the suns activity is affecting the climate in that when the sun is more active, its solar wind is stronger as its magnetic field and this deflects cosmic rays, big deal you say, well, the less comic rays there are, the less clouds will be in our atmosphere (they say the cosmic rays can seed the atmosphere for cloud formation) , when this happens the planet heats up as there is less cloud cover.

They found a direct correlation between the suns activity and global temperatures and a corrolation with CO2, but not the relationship you might think, the CO2 figures FOLLOW the temperature change, not precede it, in other words, the temperature changes before the CO2 levels change. Looking back in the past using ice cores they found a lag of approx 800 years. Al Gores film showed a graph illustrating this relationship also but without the time lag. They say that when the climate heats up, CO2 is released from the oceans, hence the lag as this takes time.

Over the last 100 years, they can plot solar activity and temperature changes very accurately, I don't remember what exactly they meant by solar activity, between 1950 and 1975, the temperatures actually fell and solar activity matched it, CO2 levels didn't.
Before 1975, scientists were worried about an on coming ice age !!
BTW, these guys are not sponsored by the oil/coal/gas industry, they say that the whole environmental thing has been hijacked.

I'm not fully decided but it was definitely an eye opener for me, they put across a very convincing argument.
We could have fixed the CO2 problem, but there is absolutely nothing we can do about the Sun.
The most scary thing about this is that George W might have been right !