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About Rasmus Benestad

I am a senior scientist working at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute with a background from physics. My scientific career started with a degree in Physics with Electronics at UMIST in Manchester (UK), cloud micro-physics at New Mexico Tech (USA), and ocean physics at Atmospheric Oceanic and Planetary Physics (AOPP) at Oxford University (UK). Since then, I have also got heavily involved in the field of statistics, thanks to exciting collaborations with several statisticians.

My primary focus at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute has been towards climate change adaptation, empirical-statistical downscaling and anthropogenic climate change, but I have also worked on problems relating to natural climate variations connected to changes in the sun. I have authored two text books on these topics: Solar Activity and Earth's climate (Praxis/Springer) and Empirical-Statistical Downscaling (World Scientific Publishers).

My experience from the climate science community includes several roles: a contributing author on two past IPCC assessment reports, a person of contact (POC) for World Climate Research Programme's (WCRP) CORDEX project, a coordinating lead author on Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme's (AMAP) report Adapting Actions in a Changing Arctic (AACA, 2017), a councilor for the European Meteorological society (EMS), a member of the EMS communication and media committee, and part of the advisory board for Oxford Research Encyclopedia on climate. I also chair the professional network within the Norwegian trade union for engineer and natural scientists Tekna Klima, dealing with a diverse range of climate solutions.

Rasmus E. Benestad

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I am a physicist by training and have affiliations with the Norwegian Meteorological Institute [My views here are personal and may not necessarily represent those of Met Norway]. I have a D.Phil in physics from Atmospheric, Oceanic & Planetary Physics at Oxford University in the United Kingdom.

Recent work involve a good deal of statistics (empirical-statistical downscaling, trend analysis, model validation, extremes and record values), but I have also had some experience with electronics, cloud micro-physics, ocean dynamics/air-sea processes and seasonal forecasting. In addition, I wrote the book ‘Solar Activity and Earth’s Climate’ (2002), published by Praxis-Springer, and together with two colleagues the text book ‘Empirical-Statistical Downscaling’ (2008; World Scientific Publishers). I have also written a number of R-packages for climate analysis posted http://cran.r-project.org.

I was a member of the council of the European Meteorological Society for the period (2004-2006), representing the Nordic countries and the Norwegian Meteorology Society, and have served as a member of CORDEX Task Force on Regional Climate Downscaling.

In my work, I often get questions from media and lay persons about climate change. I believe it is necessary to approach these questions with identifying what we really don’t know and what we are more sure about. I believe that some of Karl Popper ideas about falsification can be useful.

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Recent Warming But No Trend in Galactic Cosmic Rays

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There is little evidence for a connection between solar activity (as inferred from trends in galactic cosmic rays) and recent global warming. Since the paper by Friis-Christensen and Lassen (1991), there has been an enhanced controversy about the role of solar activity for earth’s climate. Svensmark (1998) later proposed that changes in the inter-planetary magnetic fields (IMF) resulting from variations on the sun can affect the climate through galactic cosmic rays (GCR) by modulating earth’s cloud cover. Svensmark and others have also argued that recent global warming has been a result of solar activity and reduced cloud cover. Damon and Laut have criticized their hypothesis and argue that the work by both Friis-Christensen and Lassen and Svensmark contain serious flaws. For one thing, it is clear that the GCR does not contain any clear and significant long-term trend (e.g. Fig. 1, but also in papers by Svensmark).

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Water Vapour Feedback

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Translations: (Français)

Water vapour act as a powerful greenhouse gas absorbing long-wave radiation. If the atmospheric water vapour concentration increases as a result of a global warming, then it is expected that it will enhance the greenhouse effect further. It is well known that the rate of evaporation is affected by the temperature and that higher temperatures increase the (saturated) vapour pressure (the Clausius-Clapeyron equation). This process is known as the water vapour feedback. One important difference between water vapour and other greenhouse gases such as CO2 is that the moisture spends only a short time in the atmosphere before being precipitated out, whereas the life time of CO2 in the atmosphere may be longer than 100 years.