Foreword

Climate change, variations of solar irradiance and physical state of the circumterrestrial space have significant impact on many kinds of human activity and the natural variability. The history of mankind knows severe examples of the vulnerability of human society of these dependences. The presence of a link between the Sun’s activity, galactic cosmic ray (GCR) flux, effectively modulated by Sun, and the Earth’s climate has been claimed in many works. Consequently, the possible solar contribution to the global warming of the last century is at present actively debated. However, our modern knowledge about the past of the phenomena is quite insufficient since direct instrumental records are rather short. Analysis of high-resolution solar and climatic long-term proxies makes it possible to fill the gaps in our knowledge.

The eBook is written in frame of a multi-disciplinary approach and collects efforts of specialists in different scientific fields, including solar-terrestrial relations, paleoastrophysics, paleoclimatology, dendroclimatology. It describes well the most up-to-date methods of solar paleoastrophysics and paleoclimatology and accumulates a lot of information about solar and climatic variability over time scales from decades to millennia. It contains both detailed survey of experimental results, testifying reality of solar-climatic relationship, and discussion of possible physical mechanisms providing a link between the Sun’s activity and the lower atmosphere. The eBook includes some interesting results not well known outside Russia e.g. published only in Russian or obtained by scientists who work out of the Russian (Soviet) Academy system.

The eBook emphasizes necessity of the complex approach to the problems of solar-terrestrial and solar-climatic relationship. It will be useful for researchers which work in solar-terrestrial physics, climatology, geophysics, astronomy, for post-graduate students and students of older years.