Cosmic Rays and Climate: From Solar Forcing and 20th century climate change to Dark Matter in the Milky Way's disk

Over the past 2 decades, our understanding of how cosmic rays affect the terrestrial cloud cover has evolved from rough empirical evidence to an almost complete physical picture. This link helps us understand many of the past climate variations—from days to Eons, including for example the appearance of ice age epochs on Earth and 20th century global warming. In this talk I will review the evidence including recent breakthroughs in our atmosphere mimicking lab, which pin point the two physical mechanisms increasing linking between atmospheric charge and the formation of cloud condensation nuclei. I will also discuss resent results on how the cosmic ray climate link can be used to determine the amount of Dark Matter at the galactic plane.