Climate explained: Sunspots do affect our weather, a bit, but not as much as other things
- Written by Robert McLachlan, Professor in Applied Mathematics, Massey University
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Are we headed for a period with lower Solar activity, i.e. sunspots? How long will it last? What happens to our world when global warming and the end of this period converge?
When climate change comes up in conversation, the question of a possible link with the Sun is often raised.
The Sun is a highly active and complicated body. Its behaviour does change over time and this can affect our climate. But these impacts are much smaller than those caused by our burning of fossil fuels and, crucially, they do not build up over time.
The main change in the Sun is an 11-year Solar cycle of high and low activity, which initially revealed itself in a count of sunspots.
One decade of solar activity in one hour.Sunspots have been observed continuously since 1609, although their cyclical variation was not noticed until much later. At the peak of the cycle, about 0.1% more Solar energy reaches the Earth, which can increase global average temperatures by 0.05-0.1℃.
This is small, but it can be detected in the climate record.
It’s smaller than other known sources of temperature variation, such as volcanoes (for example, the large eruption of Mt Pinatubo, in the Philippines in 1991, cooled Earth by up to 0.4℃ for several years) and the El Niño Southern Oscillation, which causes variations of up to 0.4℃.
Read more:
Climate explained: how volcanoes influence climate and how their emissions compare to what we produce
And it’s small compared to human-induced global warming, which has been accumulating at 0.2℃ per decade since 1980.
Although each 11-year Solar cycle is different, and the processes underlying them are not fully understood, overall the cycle has been stable for hundreds of millions of years.
A little ice age
A famous period of low Solar activity, known as the Maunder Minimum, ran from 1645 to 1715. It happened at a similar time as the Little Ice Age in Europe.
But the fall in Solar activity was too small to account for the temperature drop, which has since been attributed to volcanic eruptions.
Solar activity picked up during the 20th century, reaching a peak in the cycle that ran from 1954 to 1964, before falling away to a very weak cycle in 2009-19.
Bear in mind, though, that the climatic difference between a strong and a weak cycle is small.
Forecasting the Solar cycle
Because changes in Solar activity are important to spacecraft and to radio communications, there is a Solar Cycle Prediction Panel who meet to pool the available evidence.
Experts there are currently predicting the next cycle, which will run to 2030, will be similar to the last one. Beyond that, they’re not saying.
If activity picks up again, and its peak happened to coincide with a strong El Niño, we could see a boost in temperatures of 0.3℃ for a year or two. That would be similar to what happened during the El Niño of 2016, which featured record air and sea temperatures, wildfires, rainfall events and bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef.
The extreme weather events of that year provided a glimpse into the future. They gave examples of what even average years will look like after another decade of steadily worsening global warming.
A journey to the Sun
Solar physics is an active area of research. Apart from its importance to us, the Sun is a playground for the high-energy physics of plasmas governed by powerful magnetic, nuclear and fluid-dynamical forces.
The Solar cycle is driven by a dynamo coupling kinetic, magnetic and electrical energy.
Read more:
Explainer: how does our sun shine?
That’s pretty hard to study in the lab, so research proceeds by a combination of observation, mathematical analysis and computer simulation.
Two spacecraft are currently directly observing the Sun: NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (which will eventually approach to just 5% of the Earth-Sun distance), and ESA’s Solar Orbiter, which is en route to observe the Sun’s poles.
Hopefully one day we will have a better picture of the processes involved in sunspots and the Solar cycle.
Exploring the 11-year Solar cycle.Authors: Robert McLachlan, Professor in Applied Mathematics, Massey University
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