At www.calderup.wordpress.com Nigel Calder has a post on the Nature paper (see yesterday) about the Sun – and he is like a lot of other commenters, critical of the paper. As co-author, with Henrik Svensmark, of the Chilling Stars, he makes the point the author of the paper has never gone along with the Svensmark hypothesis concerning cosmic rays governing low cloud cover, and has refused to focus on ultra-violet light from the Sun, which does vary more than visible light. However, in this new paper she abandons that as well, he says, because a satellite measured an increase in the intensity of visible light between 2004 and 2007 when other activity was in decline.
Meanwhile, NASA say the next year or so promises to have an unparallelled number of space expeditions, with visits to asteroids and comets, orbits of Venus and Mercury, and the launch of a spacecraft to Jupiter (JUNO), and various missions on Mars.