[Comevius]

I don't know why I linked it if you just end up making your very own conclusions.

This paper is part of the CERN CLOUD project (http://cloud.web.cern.ch/), an experiment trying to model our atmosphere to find out how much aerosols affect cloud formation and climate change.

The conclusion so far is that cosmic rays can charge aerosol particles, and produce big enough particles to contribute to cloud forming. This represents less than 10% (several per cent) of the total particle formation from nucleation, a major, but subdominant role. Nucleation (the creation of big enough particles) itself plays a 43% role, the rest is particles already in the atmosphere. So cosmic rays is less than 10% of 43%.

In any case if cosmic ray created aerosols would have such a large effect on clouds, so would other aerosols, such as those from air pollution.

Clouds themselves play a less than 10% role in climate change, so it's like 10% of the 10% (cosmic ray nucleation) of 43% (nucleation), as I said a tiny effect. Clouds also not just trap heat, but reflect sunlight back, cooling the planet.

As Ken Carslaw, one of the authors of the paper suggested: "It’s a tiny effect and previous studies suggest it will not be important". https://cosmosmagazine.com/climate/cosmic-ray-theory-of-glob...

[robotrout]

Even if we were to stipulate his 10% number, that's 4.3% of cloud formation based on cosmic rays. Not insignificant.

Your repeated contention that pollution aerosols are of equal magnitude to cosmic rays contribution requires a large helping of evidence to back it up, given the huge quantity of cosmic rays that impact the troposphere.

[Comevius]

"requires a large helping of evidence to back it up"

Those are available at http://cloud.web.cern.ch/content/publications. The experiments are started back in 2009.

See Wikipedia for a simplified description of the results so far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_experiment

Even if you think that cosmic rays are the bread and butter of cloud formation, the net effect would be global cooling. Clouds reflect more energy back into space than they do back to the ground.

I would also like to mention that this cosmic ray climate change denialism started with the media misreporting Henrik Svensmark's paper. The Daily Express itself said "Winter is coming: Exploding stars could lead to ICE AGE warn scientists" https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/894696/ice-age-weathe.... Most of the media attention was on the sensationalist claim that cosmic rays are causing climate change, from which the various Facebook people extrapolated cosmic rays = global warming. Just so you know, this is the original source of this claim. The paper itself is about aerosol microphysics, but that's not as exciting as "Giant EXPLODING stars FREEZING Earth".

[robotrout]

This is new. Coauthored by a NASA scientist. Check it out, I think you'll be interested. ;-)

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.02692.pdf

    4 Conclusion
    We have shown a strong correlation between solar and 
    tropospheric variability, in that swings from El Ni˜no 
    to La Ni˜na are related to the phase of the solar 
    cycle’s “fiducial clock,” and that that clock does not 
    run from the canonical solar minimum or maximum, but 
    instead resets when all old cycle flux is gone from the 
    solar disk. While the exact mechanism remains to be 
    elucidated, changes in cosmic ray flux appear to the be
    the driver of these ENSO swings.
    
    Finally, in the absence of sensitivity to solar-driven CRF 
    variations in current coupled climate models, we have a year 
    or so to wait to see if this indicator pans out. However,
    should the coming terminator be followed by such an ENSO 
    swing then we must seriously consider the capability of 
    coupled global terrestrial modeling efforts to capture
    “step-function” events, and assess how complex the Sun-Earth 
    connection is, with particular attention to the relationship 
    between incoming cosmic rays and clouds/ precipitation over 
    our oceans.

[Comevius]

This is a great paper actually. It depends directly on the premise that cosmic rays cause drastic changes in cloud microphysics. The proof presented for this is a statistical correlation between termination points of sun activity and ENSO (El Nino, La Nina).

They plan to establish causation by predicting ENSO changes based on solar activity, which is good. Once they do that, they will need to prove that cosmic rays are more important in cloud microphysics than the CERN CLOUD experiments suggests so far.

This is what real science is. Great find.