Место издания:NOVA SCIENCE PUBLISHERS, INC New York, NY, USA
Первая страница:451
Последняя страница:468
Аннотация:In 2012 the scientific community celebrated memorable date – 100 years from the cosmic ray discovery by Austrian scientist Victor Hess. Cosmic rays occupy important place in astrophysical investigations, in nuclear physics research, solar-terrestrial relationships, and atmosphere physics. In this article the questions of solar activity, cosmic ray modulation and global climate changes are discussed. All these questions are tightly related with each other. The analysis of the solar activity where we take the sunspot number Rz (international values) as solar activity parameter in the past and present shows that new long-term solar activity minimum has started like Dalton’s one in the past. It is well known that cosmic ray fluxes observed at the Earth’s orbit depend on solar activity level which is described by sunspot number Rz. In the current 24th solar activity cycle with its low value of Rz the cosmic ray fluxes recorded near the Earth are higher in comparison with the fluxes observed during the previous solar cycles. As the solar activity is expected to be low in the subsequent (2–3) solar cycles, the cosmic ray fluxes will exceed ones observed earlier in the previous solar cycles.
The separate part of this article is devoted to the discussion of the physical mechanism responsible for the global warming process. It is shown that solar activity and cosmic ray flux changes cannot explain the observed increase of the global temperature of air near the Earth’s surface. The cosmic dust entering into the Earth’s atmosphere from the zodiacal dust cloud in space could be responsible for the climate changes.