by Rex Trulove

Created on: October 28, 2007

To me, this is a no-brainer. ALL of our climate comes from the sun. It warms the earth, it causes winds and waves, and it makes life on Earth possible.

The downside is that the sun has cycles, just like everything else, and most of those we aren't even aware of yet. Many may cover such a long time that we may never know about them. Some of them we do know about, though.

We know that sunspots operate on an 11 year cycle, between times of very high sunspot activity to times of very low sunspot activity. Sunspots are caused by areas of extremely intense magnetic activity on the surface of the sun. This is something else we know, and it makes sense, because every 22 years, the sun's north and south poles switch places.

How do sunspots have an impact on our climate, and what does this have to do with it? Well, first we don't currently have an idea how sunspots affect climate, but we do know that they do. In the last few hundred years, we know of a number of times when the normal rhythm of sunspot activity was suspended, for some reason. Each of these times, when for many years there were virtually no sunspots, the climate on Earth became much colder, earning the name of "mini-ice ages".

The best known of these times was a time in the 17th century. For many decades, there were no sunspots. Corresponding almost exactly with this time, global temperatures became so cold that the Thames river in London would freeze over so hard in the winter, that people would hold festivals and would skate on it's surface. At the time, a person could walk from New Jersey to Manhattan, on the ice! The temperatures dropped all over the world. As I said, we still don't know why.

What we do know is that there have been other minimums of sun spot activity, and every single time it has happened, the global temperature has dropped. It is very hard not to see that there is a connection here.

More recently, sun spot activity has been higher than in the past. Has this caused the few tenths of a degree increase in global temperatures in the past hundred years? We don't know, but it is at least a good possibility. If lack of sun spots causes a global cooling, and increase in sun spots, logically, would increase global temperatures.

Perhaps when we know the actual mechanism that causes the cooling and warming, we will be in a better position to say for certainty what will happen in any given solar activity. But one thing we can be certain of right now, even without that information, is that the sun plays a bigger role in our climate than anything else, including man.

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