See O'Too and Cosmic Ray in the Climate Stakes Cup

Well, it’s nearly time for the great race. No, not small beer events such as the Melbourne Cup, the Grand National, the Kentucky Derby or the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. They only have a piffling few hundred million dollars staked on them. Hundreds of billions will be gambled on the big one, the Climate Stakes. In view of the importance of this event it may be valuable to look at the form and breeding of the various contenders.

Easily the favourite, the contender on which billions have already been staked, is the Chinese Irish entrant See O’Too. See O’Too is by Eyepea See out of Big Computer. The world’s media sings the power of See O’Too, especially in his anthropogenic form, every day. He is credited with the ability to kill the Great Barrier Reef, flood the Sydney Opera House, drown low lying land, melt glaciers, kill polar bears, cause drought, disease, floods and hurricanes and more. Most of the world is so sure that See O’Too will win that many think that the only hope is that he can be nobbled by reducing fossil fuel consumption.

The Earth’s climate has always varied and See O’Too was an entrant in all of those countless thousands of changes. His record in all of those changes is very poor. See O’Too has not even got a place in any of them. He didn’t perform in the Medieval warm period; or the Little Ice age; or the Roman warm period; or the Minoan warm period; or any of the major ice ages; or any of the frequent periods when there was no ice anywhere on earth; or in the (at least two) snowball earth episodes when there was ice at sea level at the equator.

See O’Too did not cause any of those events and in his anthropogenic form could not conceivably have done so until 1900AD at the earliest. The brute fact is that there is no correlation at all between CO2 and climate variations. With that feeble track record it is astonishing that See O’Too remains the firm favourite in the Climate Stakes.

Another runner, a far distant outsider in the betting, is Cosmic Ray. Poor old Cosmic (by Doubting Thomas out of Sceptical Scientist) is regarded by many as being a silly horse, a nag that all Climate Stakes’ experts see as a donkey that is backed only by the ignorant or by those who have been bribed by coal or oil interests.

However, any glance at Cosmic’s record over the last few billion years shows that in every single previous climate change event he has been a consistent place getter, usually the clear winner. The correlation between climate and levels of very fast cosmic rays reaching the earth is excellent.

A scientific report prepared earlier this year for the EPA Office in the US was critical of the science supporting human induced global warming/climate change. In March the report was “choked off” - prevented from going up the chain of command in the government. That action, which has all the appearance of gross political interference in science, prevented the criticisms from being available to the Congress when it voted on the issue. A major 94-page “Comment” on the document was leaked by Alan Carlin from within EPA.

In part the “Comments” deal with the issue of which horse, See O’Too or Cosmic Ray, is the better bet for the Climate Stakes. On page 54 of the document Carlin states:

“Besides the most apparent comparisons between global temperatures and CO2 levels, the CO2 only and the sun/cosmic ray hypotheses imply a number of predictions involving observable evidence. An interesting comparison of the predictions of the CO2 and the sun/cosmic ray hypotheses with available data is:”

See O’Too’s performance is weak to say the least, and in some cases such as the Ordovician temperature data, the stupid creature seems to have shot out of the stalls - backwards.

The fact that there is a strong correlation between temperature/climate variation and fast cosmic rays does not necessarily demonstrate a causal link; (however, where there is no correlation as is the case with CO2 then the chances of a causal link must be minimal or zero). A possible causal link was originally proposed by Henrik Svensmark, notably in The Chilling Stars, a new theory of climate change (Svensmark and Calder), which built on a number of journal articles over the previous decade.