Uh oh. A new(ish) theory of global warming is making the rounds in a new book by Henrik Svenmark. Could he be a new Galileo in the Climate Vatican? Apparently cosmic rays may be a much more severe contributor to atmospheric warming than carbon dioxide. Back to the drawingboard for the alarmists:
"The implications of this theory are quite startling. For one thing, it almost completely elimates increases and decreases of carbon dioxide and other so called green house gasses (GHG) from the equation of climate change, a matter of some concern to those who use fears of anthropomorphic global warming to advance their political agendas. Indeed, when Svensmark first proposed his theory in the mid 1990s, it was called "dangerous" because, if correct, it would undermine the vast public funding currently available to the many scientists who feed off of global warming fears. Unfortunately for them, Svensmark’s theories have since been experimentally vindicated, something that cannot be said for the "models" that GHG advocates use to prop up their increasingly discredited arguments."
The whole problem with the theory that cosmic rays (or lack thereof) are driving global warming is that cosmic radiation has shown no trend over the last 50 years (http://ulysses.sr.unh.edu/NeutronMonitor/Misc/neutron2.html). This has led the Max Planck Institute to conclude that cosmic ray flux and temperature followed each other up to 1970 but there has been no correlation between temperature and cosmic ray flux since 1970 (http://www.mps.mpg.de/dokumente/publikationen/solanki/r47.pdf). So even if cosmic rays are linked to cloud formation, all they’ll find is the cloud formation 50 years ago is similar to now and has little to no impact on the last 30 years of long term global warming.