Paul Krugman, Mad Scientist

Roger Simon takes “economist” Paul Krugman to task, not so much for his support of Jon Huntsman as the person the GOP needs on their Presidential ticket, but for his claiming to know anything about Science;

Tedious New York Times reactionary (sorry for the redundancy) Paul Krugman is rooting for Jon Huntsman in the Republican derby in Krugman’s new column, “Republicans Against Science”:

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

Krugman’s all hopped up about those yahoos Rick Perry and Mitt Romney not being on board with anthropogenic global warming. What dunces. Krugman, after all, is an economist and we all know that is the most empirical of sciences — as opposed to the methods of those parvenus at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) who just came out with a new study of cosmic rays and clouds, which is turning climate science upside down:

CERN’s 8,000 scientists may not be able to find the hypothetical Higgs boson, but they have made an important contribution to climate physics, prompting climate models to be revised.

The first results from the lab’s CLOUD (“Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets”) experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth’s clouds are formed through nucleation. The paper is entitled Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation.

This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes.

Unsurprisingly, it’s a politically sensitive topic, as it provides support for a “heliocentric” rather than “anthropogenic” approach to climate change: the sun plays a large role in modulating the quantity of cosmic rays reaching the upper atmosphere of the Earth.

Oops. I guess Krugman hasn’t been keeping up with the latest issues of Nature.