According to some physicists and other scientists, our solar system spins around the center of the galaxy and every time we hit an arm, radiation increases which modulates aerosol particles or something like that, creating more clouds, clouding over the planet and preventing sunlight from warming the Earth.
Putting astronomical calculations over geological records of ice ages, it seems to match up eerily well.
Does cosmic radiation drive long term climate change and major ice ages?
No. That theory doesn’t make any sense. The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with two major stellar arms. The arms rotate around the galactic core – they’re not stationary, and our solar system is in one of the arms.
The Earth’s climate cycles and ice ages are triggered by the Milankovitch Cycles, which are caused by the tilts and wobbles around the Earth’s axis as it rotates around the Sun. These orbital cycles are amplified by other factors like the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
yes…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovich_cycle
No the output levels of our sun do. The sun is a variable output star that vary its output by several percent when it shifts modes from quiescent like it has ben for the last 3 years since it shifted modes. The output level of the sun is visible by its activity of sunspots. When it has 110 or more sunspots on a daily average the planets of the solar system warm up. When the sun has less than 80 sunspots on a daily average the planets cool down eventually into ice ages. Recently for the last 3 years the sun spot average has been less than 30 a month and so the planets that depend on the sun for warmth are cooling down into ice age conditions. And until the sun returns to 110 or more sunspot average we will continue to cool down until the planet reaches a temperature level that is equivalent to the suns output level which is currently less than during the Maunder solar minimum the coldest part of the little ice age.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sunspot_Numbers.png
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/12/another-parallel-with-the-maunder-minimum/
http://www.stsci.edu/stsci/meetings/lisa3/beckmanj.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
http://www.deadfishwrapper.com/fish_wrapper_wont_publish_global_cooling_study
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTlhOTNiOWFlMmMzNmJkOWM3ZTk5NWJkNTU2Nzk5NWI=
http://www.dakotavoice.com/2009/06/nasa-study-shows-sun-responsible-for-planet-warming/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volumetric_heat_capacity
http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/natural-cycle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491_(book)
Yes and much more so than the increases in CO2 which tend to follow warming by 800 years.
We don’t know. There are reasons to believe this is so, but it’s one of those things that people are still trying to figure out.
Some scientists believe that the reason that sunspots have such an effect on the earth is that when there are a lot of sunspots it shields us from much cosmic radiation, preventing cloud formation, allowing the earth to warm.
no. it does however make me hot!
I think you are muddling up three separate things; Milankovich cycles (real and predictable effects), variations in solar output (effect probably small compared with changing greenhouse effects, although the Maunder minimum – Little Ice Age may be an exception), and the effect of solar activity correlating with sunspots on cosmic ray seeding of high cloud (effect is now regarded as small)
The National Academies Press has released a book (free online) discussing the climate for the past 2000 years, and how well we know it:
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11676
That’s
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.
php?record_id=11676
There is a good discussion of all these things in Houghton, Global Warming, fourth edition 2009, Cambridge University press; Houghton himself of course is former professor of atmospheric physics at Oxford.
We are in an arm of the Milky Way, and our orbit around the center of the galaxy is estimated at 225 million years. The other stars and objects in the galaxy are "orbiting" at about the same relative speed and direction, so our solar system won’t periodically pass through another arm. It is possible that we are more exposed to a source of cosmic radiation at intervals, that Earth may pass through a stream of radiation, but extra-solar cosmic radiation has such a minor effect on Earth’s climate that it is unlikely that it can be shown to drive climate long-term.