Have solar cycles significantly affected earth's recent climate?

The intensity of the Sun is one of many input parameters used in climate models. None of the models used by the IPCC are able to successfully reproduce recent global temperature changes as a function of solar activity without also factoring in human greenhouse emissions. Some skeptics have suggested that this may be because of unknown complex feedbacks in Earth's climate.

Implications to Other Questions

Is global warming caused primarily by humans?

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Agree

Experts In Science

B.P. Radhakrishna Geologist, President of the Geological Society of India

Agree

The causes of these changes are cosmogenic...

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23 Aug 2007 Source

Jasper Kirkby Particle Physicist

Mostly Agree

[Sun and cosmic rays] will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth's temperature that we have seen in the last century.

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23 Feb 2007 Source

Khabibullo Abdusamatov Astronomer

Mostly Agree

By the mid-21st century the planet will face another Little Ice Age, similar to the Maunder Minimum, because the amount of solar radiation hitting the Earth has been constantly decreasing since the 1990s and will reach its minimum approximately in 2041.

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01 Aug 2007 Source

Disagree

Experts In Science

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Scientific Body formed by U.N.

Mostly Disagree

The TAR [Third Assessment Report] states that the changes in solar irradiance are not the major cause of the temperature changes in the second half of the 20th century unless those changes can induce unknown large feedbacks in the climate system.

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01 Jan 2008 Source

Encyclopedia

Wikipedia World's Largest Encyclopedia

Disagree

There has been no increase of solar brightness over the last 1,000 years. Solar cycles led to a negligible increase in brightness over the last 30 years, but this effect is too small to contribute significantly to global warming. The combined effect of natural climate forcing, solar variation and changes in volcanic activity, probably had a warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950 but a cooling effect since.

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27 Apr 2009 Source

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