SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the tek-tek-tek-tek-tek-tek-tek-tek dept.
Unlike electromagnetic radiation, which consists of massless and accelerated charged particles, galactic cosmic rays (CR) are composed mostly of atomic nuclei and solitary electrons, objects that have mass. Cosmic rays originate via a wide range of processes and sources including supernovae, galactic nuclei, and gamma ray bursts. Researchers have speculated for decades on the possible effects of galactic cosmic rays on the immediate environs of Earth's atmosphere, but until recently, a causal relationship between climate and cosmic rays has been difficult to establish.
A research collaborative has published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that mathematically establishes such a causal link between CR and year-to-year changes in global temperature, but has found no causal relationship between the CR and the warming trend of the 20th century.
http://phys.org/news/2015-03-cosmic-fluctuations-global-temperatures-doesnt.html
[Abstract]: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/02/23/1420291112
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2015, @10:40PM
HUH? How the fuck do they figure that the fluctuations in temperature don't affect climate?
Different temperatures in different areas lead to different air pressures. Different air pressures in different areas lead to different weather systems forming. Different weather systems forming affects the climate.
Correlation implies causation in this case.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 11 2015, @11:55PM
HUH? How the fuck do they figure that the fluctuations in temperature don't affect climate?
Different temperatures in different areas lead to different air pressures. Different air pressures in different areas lead to different weather systems forming. Different weather systems forming affects the climate.
Why would different weather affect climate? It's a different scale. And why would it affect climate in a relevant way?
Now, if cosmic rays happen with a high enough density that the "fluctuations" are omnipresent and substantial permanent perturbation of climate, then that's a different thing.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 11 2015, @11:57PM
It's like how microeconomic forces affect macroeconomic forces, and vice versa. We may separate these systems when we analyze them, but in reality there is just one single system involved.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 17 2015, @09:43PM
It's like how microeconomic forces affect macroeconomic forces, and vice versa. We may separate these systems when we analyze them, but in reality there is just one single system involved.
But we can separate these systems for purposes of analysis. Differences of scale are one of the primary means for breaking up a complex system into more understandable pieces.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday March 12 2015, @12:11AM
They're not saying it doesn't cause some climate change - they're saying it isn't responsible for Global Warming - the effect simply isn't large enough.
Similarly, fluctuations in solar output absolutely do cause global temperature fluctuations, there just haven't been any changes in solar output sufficient to cause the degree of warming we're seeing.
Basically there are *many* natural forces that cause variations in the global climate - and our models are capturing those effects with ever-increasing accuracy, and they do explain virtually all global climate changes until about 50-70 years ago, at which point another forcing factor began to have an increasingly pronounced effect: increasing atmospheric CO2 levels.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Thursday March 12 2015, @12:21AM
Me striking a match in my kitchen causes a localised fluctuation in temperature. It's too small and brief to affect either the weather or the global climate in any measurable way what-so-ever. However, if I had the population of China strike a match every 10 seconds for a few decades, then you're possibly talking climate change.
The research show that the cosmic radiation is more towards the single-match-in-a-kitchen scale rather than the Chinese-Match-Shortage-of-2015 scale. Just because it's called "Cosmic" radiation doesn't mean the scale of it's effect is going to amount to much down here.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Thursday March 12 2015, @01:56AM
HUH? How the fuck do they figure that the fluctuations in temperature don't affect climate?
I think the writeup is just phrased clumsily. What they found is that those fluctuations in temperature cannot account for the warming trend.
"We show specifically that CR cannot explain secular warming, a trend that the consensus attributes to anthropogenic forcing. Nonetheless, the results verify the presence of a nontraditional forcing in the climate system, an effect that represents another interesting piece of the puzzle in our understanding of factors influencing climate variability," they write.