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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: 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.