Actual climate scientists when they are doing scientific research, publish papers in journals.
If you want to have something which is completely sourced with close to definitive information, the 900+ page IPCC report is it, as well as the innumerable review articles on climate change in the primary literature. These agree on aggregate with the views of the people on realclimate, which is not surprising because the authors of most of the articles are themselves scientists who work in the field. In the research literature, they do not rebut in writing such obviously dumb arguments as are currently found in the popular arena, so you don’t always have a “primary source” citation contradicting all such nonsense.
But the web blogs aren’t intended as primary literature, but as explanations to laymen of what the meaning of the results are.
When you go to a cardiologist, do you demand citations justifying his diagnoses? No, but said cardiologists certainly use them when they publish papers on research results to other ones.
Nevertheless, many of the realclimate articles do have citations, and the number of the citations isn’t proportional to their validity, it is the understanding thereof which is, and this requires ultimately a professional’s understanding of the breadth of the field and the limitations of any one article.
In any case, this is a pretty good example of useful physics actually being published in the community, even if it is supposedly “controversial”. And a good example of proper scientific process where ‘controversial big ideas’ (like anthropogenic global warming once was) get thoroughly tested and investigated.
Regarding galactic cosmic rays it is only necessary to quote the most obvious problem for using it as a replacement for greenhouse gases to explain current anomalous warming:
“Svensmark’s failure to comment on the lack of a clear and significant long-term downward GCR trend, and how changes in GCR can explain a global warming without containing such a trend, is one major weakness of his argument that GCR is responsible for recent global warming. This issue is discussed in detail in Benestad (2002). Moreover, the lack of trend in GCR is also consistent with little long-term change in other solar proxies, such as sunspot number and the solar cycle length, since the 1960s, when the most recent warming started.”
This is the most obivous point: there is no observed consistent trend in the solar and extrasolar studies, and there most certainly is in greenhouse gases. And the actual analysis in the field shows that contrary to misrepresentations, scientists have certainly investigated and considered solar influences and similar physics.
You’re trying to look for the ‘real killer’ in the Sun when OJ’s been caught wearing the damn bloody glove.
And asserting a hypothetical solar mechanism does NOT turn off the obvious, and experimentally demonstrated mechanism of GHG.
How could it? How do you turn off known physics? The physical connection from galactic cosmic rays is tenuous (but it may influence cloud formation) and the physical connection from GHGs is primary and obvious.
