Throwing in the towel

One of the things that you learn is that no one every gives up in public, but it is pretty easy to see when the game is over, people are thinking about picking up their marbles and leaving town. Stoat points to a new article to be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy showing that Svensmark and others of the solar driven have no clothes, all indicators of solar activity having fallen while the global temperature rises. Pete DeCarlo has the Nature comment on this. What stands out is the towel being thrown into the ring.

On other timescales however, Sun-climate links may remain worthy of study. "Climate change is a cocktail of many effects," says Jasper Kirkby, a physicist at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva Switzerland, who is leading an experiment aimed a simulating the effect of cosmic rays on clouds. "Past climate changes have clearly been associated with solar activity. Even if this is not the case now, it is still important to understand how solar variability affects climate"

UPDATE: The Sloan and Wolfendale paper trashing Marsh and Svensmark, referenced by Tim Lambert is available at the Arxiv. The PRA article is yet to come