Cosmic Rays and Climate Change

[Sunsettommy]

CO2 Science

Volume 12, Number 47: 25 November 2009

EXCERPT:

In a front-page article in the American Geophysical Union's weekly news journal EOS, Ram et al. (2009) discuss what they describe as the "prolonged debate in the scientific community as to whether or not changes in solar activity significantly affect earth's climate," a subject that was first broached by Ney (1959), who long ago suggested that the solar-modulated terrestrial cosmic ray flux (CRF) "must be considered as possibly affecting climate," which is also suggested by the more recent work of Bond et al. (2001), who demonstrated, in Ram et al.'s words, "strong correlations between variations in carbon-14 and beryllium-10 accumulation rates [which are CRF proxies] with ice-rafted glacial debris in the North Atlantic," and which "also correlate with worldwide climate changes reported by others," citing the work of Eddy (1977), Stuiver et al. (1995) and Neff et al. (2001).

MORE HERE WITH REFERENCES
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This is an example of how little we still know about the way climate operates on the planets surface.

[JohnWho]

(11-26-2009 11:44 AM)Sunsettommy Wrote:  ... "prolonged debate in the scientific community as to whether or not changes in solar activity significantly affect earth's climate,"...

I suppose the keyword here is "significantly", since the primary heat source for the planet is solar. It would seem quite logical then, that any change in solar activity must have some affect.