Saturday, December 18, 2010

But Don't Raise The Retirement Age!

We wouldn't want real science so get done now would we? Not when we can spend our lives on drunken vacations instead:

CERN Research Budget Gets Cut: "European particle physics research center CERN located near Geneva, Switzerland has gotten its budget cut by 6% over the next five years. Europe no longer has the money to fund it.

CERN's budget gets the axe as Europe pisses away all its money on climate research.
It was just a question of time. With so much money being pissed away on bogus climate research and save-the-world projects, eventually you run out of funds to pay for real science and research.

How many billions have been poured into researching the non-problem of climate change? The IPCC? Hansen’s GISS surface station folly? Green subsidies? The list is endless."
And I'll bet about a hundred dollars that you were unaware of this:
An experiment designed to investigate the link between solar activity and the climate has its first results in the bag. At the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco today, Joachim Curtius presented data from the first runs of the CLOUD (‘cosmics leaving outdoor droplets’) experiment at CERN – the European particle physics lab outside of Geneva.

The experiment has a long and bumpy history. The idea is to test the theory that cosmic rays spur the formation of particles in the air that nucleate clouds, in turn making skies cloudier and the planet cooler. Researchers have noted a dearth of sunspots (which is linked to more cosmic rays) during the ‘little ice age’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and a peak in sunspots (linked to a drop in cosmic rays) during the late 1980s, when global cloudiness dropped by about 3% (see Nature‘s feature on the project). No one knows how big this effect might be, and the idea that it might account for a big chunk of the warming over the last century is highly controversial.

CLOUD uses a particle beam from CERN as a stand-in for cosmic rays, and fires them through an ultra-clean steel chamber filled with select atmospheric gases, to see if and how particles that could nucleate clouds are formed. Project head Jasper Kirkby proposed the experiment back in 1998. But it had a hard time getting off the ground – perhaps in part because Kirkby received bad press for emphasizing the importance of cosmic rays to climate change (see this story from the National Post). CLOUD finally got going in 2006, and they started work with the full kit in November 2009 (here’s a CERN video update about that).

The results haven’t yet been published, so Curtius declined to discuss the details. But the important thing is that the project is working – they have seen sulphuric acid and water combine to make particles when blasted by the CERN beam, for example, in a way that matches predictions of the most recent models. The data should help the team to quantify how much of an impact the Sun is having on climate within 2-3 years, Curtius says – though there are a lot more pieces of the puzzle to fill in.
You can watch the most recent lecture by Kirkby at CERN here. WTWT -- you will quickly learn you have been soaked in lies by the oligarchical collectivists.