Cosmic rays, carbon dioxide, and climate

Several recent papers have applied correlation analysis to climate-related time series in the hope of finding evidence for causal relationships. For a critical discussion of correlations between solar variability, cosmic rays, and cloud cover, see Laut [2003]. A prominent new example is a paper by Shaviv and Veizer [2003], which claims that fluctuations in cosmic ray flux reaching the Earth can explain 66% of the temperature variance over the past 520 m.y.,and that the sensitivity of climate to a doubling of CO2 is less than previously estimated.

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