Laura, "some cloud specialists disagree" is a little weak, I think. This paper wasn't peer-reviewed and apparently there are very good reasons why; see e.g. this refutation by a climate scientist who works for the British Antarctic Survey.

wow, breakthrough, amazing, shear genius..sun comes up, heats the atmosphere, burns off the clouds and it gets warmer...never quite looked at it from that point of view...what really is amazing is how some university or government paid global forecast nincompoop will twist this into a conspiracy against mankind and demand big bucks to save the world...this fad will go away once you global warming folks begin to lose face trying to explain the record snowfall we are seeing across the nation...i.e califonia, denver to new york this year...antartica and greenland getting colder, no hurricanes in a supposedly prime year for it just to name a few...the average joe is smarter than you give him credit for...

one more thing i did not mention is,those who have choose to be ignorant to this problem are the ones doing us harm cus instead of acception, they choose not to either for their personal interest etc, this mainly implies to industries.

Based on experience, will the average Joes of the world break out into a blind panic when the effects of warming begin to impact them to the point they can no longer deny it?

Sam, I suggest you read Jared Diamond's book Collapse for some examples of human societies that haven't done so well in responding to abrupt environmental change.

Josh, most of us who are skeptics, are not ignorant, but rather fairly well informed on the issue. I choose not to buy into the theory, not because I work for industry, but because it is foolish to think that man can top nature. The earth and climate are constantly changing and will do so forever. There is nothing
"significant" that us microbes(in relation to the size of the earth) can do to control the weather.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind a little global warming up here in NH. I work with water for a living. It is tough to keep it in a liquid state when it is so cold up here. The temps here have been BELOW average for the past month. Not that it means anything. I am not concerned about global cooling. It's just mother nature reminding us of how insignificant we are when it comes to weather. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go shovel the 1 foot plus of snow we are getting.

steve,
it is my opinion the average joes are the ones that would be the survivors of your great societal collapse due to climate change your doom and gloom comments allude to, because unlike lemmings, they will not allow themselves to be led over the cliff because you told them to...you see, they are the ones that see everyday the inability of weather prediction to get it right 10 days from now...even if they are not learned in global climatic variance and the natural causes of it, they recognize when someone is pulling the wool over their eyes, even if its presented in a dramatic and dire format...they are the guys that evaluate by careful consideration not passion...thank you for your recommendation on the book...perhaps i could suggest to you some basic earth geologic history courses... i would also recommend to you, careful thought about recent societal history in countries such as russia, germany and iraq where the passions of a few destroyed a country...i also think you underestimate this great country's ability to adapt to natural disasters and natural climatic variance due to its industrial and inventive abilities you wish to suppress by controlling co2 production...think of the past worldwide tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes...who is always the first there to help and who has the ability to do that and why...steve, catastrophic global weather events are part of a natural earth and i will not allow save the world guys such as yourself run roughshod over my country prognosticating doom to get a job if i can help it...the earth warms and cools due to cyclic solar variance interacting with a myriad of geological, atmospheric and oceanic variables on time scale of thousands of years...mankind has little effect on global temperature...i'm an average joe and can figure that out...

Steve,
Mann's MBH98 temperature reconstruction was peer reviewed, and glaring errors got by the reviewers. Dr Hwang's stem cell hoax was peer reviewed. Peer Reivew isn't what it once was. Dr Svenmark tried for almost a decade to get major science publications to print and review his work.

What did the NAS call the Peer Review system? A social network?

Laura Hannon wrote: "Svensmark's research shows that cosmic rays produce electrically charged particles in the atmosphere which attract water molecules and eventually lead to the formation of clouds."

While the sentence is technically correct, the word 'eventually' (as opposed to rapidly, or better yet, no adverb qualifier at all) gives the impression of time passing, as in, "We plant seeds that eventually become plants."

Eventually (from Answers.com): "At an unspecified future time: eventually rose to the position of vice president."

It's a relative term, and I would suggest that the word rapidly could have been used also, and the sentence would have been equally correct.

However eventual, cloud formation (especially at the molecular cluster level) happens more far rapidly, and less eventually, than previously imagined, as evinced by one of the most striking and noteworthy findings of the Danish experiment, (see link to SKY in original article) which was directly related to time in terms of actual molecular cluster formation:

Excerpted from the Danish SKY experiment site:

"...When the team first tried the effect of the electric field, they were surprised to find that electrons with a life time of approximately 20 seconds made little difference to the cluster count.

The theoretical explanation, borne out by later trials, is that the electrons made the molecular clusters far more rapidly than anyone had imagined. Previous theories indicated that periods of more than 80 seconds would be needed. Clearing the SKY chamber of electrons took only 1 second, but by then the electrons had done their work...

The Antarctic scientist I mentioned above has taken a look at Svensmark's underlying data and found a monumental boo-boo. Recall that the paper is all about explaining anomalous climate behavior in Antarctica by means of cloud production from cosmic rays (quoting the title and abstract):

"The Antarctic climate anomaly and galactic cosmic rays

"It has been proposed that galactic cosmic rays may influence the Earth's climate by affecting
cloud formation. If changes in cloudiness play a part in climate change, their effect changes sign
in Antarctica. Satellite data from the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) are here used
to calculate the changes in surface temperatures at all latitudes, due to small percentage changes
in cloudiness. The results match the observed contrasts in temperature changes, globally and in
Antarctica. Evidently clouds do not just respond passively to climate changes but take an active
part in the forcing, in accordance with changes in the solar magnetic field that vary the cosmic-ray flux."

It turns out that the Antartic temperature data that Svensmark used for the earlier part of the twentieth century wasn't actually in the Antarctic at all, but from a location (Orcadas) at only 60 degrees south. As noted in the previous link, his analysis has other problems, a bit less spectacular but equally fatal to his results.

Steven, there's no dispute about the principle of the nucleation effect of cosmic rays (which was first discussed about thirty years ago). The issue is what effect it has on the climate. The difficulties of matching cosmic rays to past climate behavior aside, the only direct observational paper on this subject found the effect to be minor in terms of current climate trends (Harrison in PRS, published in 2005 IIRC; that's enough to find it if you want to look).