It appears more than likely that climate change is controlled by variations
in solar magnetic activity and by periodic changes in ocean circulation.
While there has not been great resistance to Eddy's arguments for a lull in
solar magnetic activity during the Maunder Minimum, one of the main reasons why his ideas caught the imagination is more contentious.
The number of sunspots varies as
solar magnetic activity does — the change in this number, from a minimum of none to a maximum of roughly 250 sunspots or clusters of sunspots and then back to a minimum, is known as the solar cycle, and averages about 11 years long.
Muon densities increase more in higher latitudes at times of
weak solar magnetic activity, which is why volcanic activity in the higher latitudes will be affected more by this process.
The 20th century warming may have been caused by the
increased solar magnetic activity which may reduce low cloud cover, decreasing sulphate aerosols (which reflect sunlight) due to pollution controls and changes to ocean cycles.
In Svensmark's theory, the
high solar magnetic activity over the past 50 years has shielded Earth from cosmic rays and allowed exceptional heating, but now that the sun is more magnetically quiet again, global warming will reverse.
Unlike the great sporadic storms, moderate geomagnetic activity does not exhibit a well defined connection with sunspots or any other indicator
of solar magnetic activity.
The solar magnetic activity band interaction and instabilities that shape quasi-periodic variability.
(b) Observational study of space weather using
the Solar Magnetic Activity Research Telescope (SMART) and the international ground - based solar observation network (CHAIN).
M. Funny how you limit the argument to the period of recent warming, conveniently overlooking the inconvenient truth that
solar magnetic activity has been uniformly high over this period of warming and excluding the well documented climate history over the past centuries where sunspot activity, and cosmic ray activity, match climate history rather well.
This pattern derives from the fact that the cosmic ray flux record, which is inversely proportional to
solar magnetic activity, presents a slight decrease from about 1970 to 2000 (Scafetta 2013c, Fig. 20).
Svensmark claims that, in his model, temperature changes correlate better with cosmic - ray levels and
solar magnetic activity than with other greenhouse factors.