At http://thegwpf.org/the-observatory/3779-henrik-svensmark-the-cosmic-rayc… … Henrik Svensmark, co-author of The Chilling Stars, answers some questions posed to him by GWPF. It seems that solar flares send out plasma clouds that shield the earth and cause the cosmic ray influx to go down – within half a day. This affects cloud formation.
A new study says dust in the wind drives climate change – see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/01/forget-co2-new-study-says-dust-in-… which is another bit of dodgy climate science published in Nature (this week) by Spanish and Swiss scientists. They claim that dust and iron fluxes deposited in the Antarctic Ocean over the last 4 million years have been analysed – and it seems to show that the more extreme periods of glaciation coincided with a heavy dusting (including lots of iron). Catastrophists ears might prick up at this point – where have we heard about dust and iron and in what context? For an example, the abstract of the article says there was a sharp increase in dust and iron input into the oceans one and a quarter million years ago – the transition from the Middle to the Late Pleistocene. It also occurred in peaks in cold weather over the Late Pleistocene. Whilst a cosmic dimension is not mentioned we may note that comets are associated with a trail of dust – and iron (at least some of them).
Meanwhile, at www.physorg.com/print234104438.html there is another theory – the twilight zone of the oceans (restricted sunlight) is being touted as a region where deep ocean microbes have found a way of making use of co2 that has been absorbed by the oceans. The paper, in Science (Sept 2nd) radically changes our view about how microbes gain energy and flourish, a spokesman is quoted as saying.
However, the really big story at the moment, which has gone viral on the blogosphere according to http://wattsupwiththat.com is that the Spencer and Braswell paper has got the Team rushing around trying to plug the cracks in AGW hype. The editor of the journal that published their paper, Remote Sensing, has resigned – whether he had pressure exerted on him or not is the subject of all the chit chat.