Sadly, the Wall Street Journal is pushing this nonsense. They have an online site titled “the other climate theory”, dedicated to gently and cautiously insinuating that this story might well explain the observed changes.

Red Herring Express.

If I toss a penny into the ocean, everybody might die. Why? Because the penny’s copper will leach into ocean water. Fish will take up some of that. People eat fish. Copper poisoning is real. Case proved. Except that the effects at each stage are so attenuated that there’s no way my penny will make a penny’s worth of difference. Same thing with these cosmic rays and climate change. Yes, it’s nice to know that cosmic rays can create particles that might, if they aggregated, serve as cloud nucleation centers. But from there, to climate change, is to make a monsoon out of a raindrop. Anyhow, cosmic ray flux shows no definite trend over the past century.