WWW - CERN and how the Sun affects the clouds and climate

Netcraft uses the domain name system to identify Web sites, identify location, operating system and Web server software they're running, and publishes a monthly report.

Bath (UK) based Netcraft 's first survey in August 1995 showed 18,957 world wide web sites in August 19995 when they started counting - in May 2004 there were 50 Million then some time last month 100 million.

Microsoft's Internet Information Server was launched in February 1996, and by the survey's fifth birthday the server market was largely divided up between Apache and IIS. This month Apache leads with 60.3% market share, with Microsoft at 31.0% and Sun at 1.7%.

Netcraft says the principal growth is in United States, Germany, China, South Korea and Japan.


Graph of growth of world wide web sites from the Netcraft site.

It is of interest that one of CERN's latest projects is called CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets).The goal of the experiment is to investigate the possible influence of galactic cosmic rays on Earth's clouds and climate. This represents the first time a high energy physics accelerator has been used for atmospheric and climate science.which they explain :

Scientific Background:

The roots of the CLOUD experiment can be traced as far back as two centuries, when the British Astronomer Royal, William Herschel, noticed a correlation between sunspots and the price of wheat in England.

This marked the first observation that Earth's climate may be affected by variations of the Sun.

However solar-climate variability has remained a great puzzle since that time, despite an intensive scientific effort. The well-known Little Ice Age around the 17th and 18th centuries - when sunspots all but disappeared for 70 years, the cosmic ray flux increased and the climate cooled - seems to be merely the latest of around a dozen similar events over the last ten thousand years. However there is no established mechanism for the brightness of the Sun to fluctuate on these time scales. The possibility of a direct influence on the climate of galactic cosmic rays (which are modulated by changes of the solar wind) is therefore attracting the interest of scientists. Satellite measurements suggest that the mechanism may involve an influence of cosmic rays on the amount of low cloud cover, which is the focus of the CLOUD experiment.

See also an article in the Sunday Telegraph "The sun is warmer now than for the past 11,400 years" By Christopher Monckton