What has more effect on the Earth's temperature: Man or the Sun? Something to get your teeth into on Christmas Day

The 'warmists' would have us believe that it is man who is to blame but somehow I think that 870,000 mile diameter luminous ball of plasma at the centre just 93 million miles away may just have a larger influence. It seems that I am not alone...

NASA write:

'What are the primary forcings of the Earth system?

The Sun is the primary forcing of Earth’s climate system. Sunlight warms our world. Sunlight drives atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns. Sunlight powers the process of photosynthesis that plants need to grow. Sunlight causes convection which carries warmth and water vapor up into the sky where clouds form and bring rain. In short, the Sun drives almost every aspect of our world’s climate system and makes possible life as we know it.

Earth’s orbit around and orientation toward the Sun change over spans of many thousands of years. In turn, these changing “orbital mechanics” force climate to change because they change where and how much sunlight reaches Earth. Thus, changing Earth’s exposure to sunlight forces climate to change. According to scientists’ models of Earth’s orbit and orientation toward the Sun indicate that our world should be just beginning to enter a new period of cooling — perhaps the next ice age.

However, a new force for change has arisen: humans. After the industrial revolution, humans introduced increasing amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and changed the surface of the landscape to an extent great enough to influence climate on local and global scales. By driving up carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere (by about 30 percent), humans have increased its capacity to trap warmth near the surface.

Other important forcings of Earth’s climate system include such “variables” as clouds, airborne particulate matter, and surface brightness. Each of these varying features of Earth’s environment has the capacity to exceed the warming influence of greenhouse gases and cause our world to cool. For example, increased cloudiness would give more shade to the surface while reflecting more sunlight back to space. Increased airborne particles (or “aerosols”) would scatter and reflect more sunlight back to space, thereby cooling the surface. Major volcanic eruptions (such as that of Mt. Pinatubo in 1992) can inject so much aerosol into the atmosphere that, as it spreads around the globe, it reduces sunlight and cause Earth to cool. Likewise, increasing the surface area of highly reflective surface types, such as ice sheets, reflects greater amounts of sunlight back to space and causes Earth to cool.

Scientists are using NASA satellites to monitor all of the aforementioned forcings of Earth’s climate system to better understand how they are changing over time, and how any changes in them affect climate.'

Meanwhile Boris Johnson in The Telegraph sings the praises of a climatologist who has managed to predict the UK's weather rather more accurately than the Met Office and on a much smaller budget. His secret?

'He studies the Sun.

He looks at the flow of particles from the Sun, and how they interact with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream, and he looks at how the Moon and other factors influence those streaming particles.

He takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time – and he makes a prophecy. '

Piers Corbyn, for that is the scientist's name also

'believes that the last three winters could be the harbinger of a mini ice age that could be upon us by 2035, and that it could start to be colder than at any time in the last 200 years. He goes on to speculate that a genuine ice age might then settle in, since an ice age is now cyclically overdue.'

Boris is still a believer in the 'warmist' agenda but he does allow himself to wonder:

'The question is whether anthropogenic global warming is the exclusive or dominant fact that determines our climate, or whether Corbyn is also right to insist on the role of the Sun. Is it possible that everything we do is dwarfed by the moods of the star that gives life to the world? The Sun is incomparably vaster and more powerful than any work of man. We are forged from a few clods of solar dust. The Sun powers every plant and form of life, and one day the Sun will turn into a red giant and engulf us all. Then it will burn out. Then it will get very nippy indeed.'

Finally Climate Realists report some interesting and frankly scary analysis:

'“The big freeze of 2010 is part of a much broader climate change phenomenon,” he (author and climatologist Gavin Cooke) explains. Most alarmingly it appears to be following a similar pattern to the most recent seriously cold spell when the River Thames froze over in the 1700s.

The so-called Little Ice Age, which lasted about 70 years and was the coldest period in 1,500 years, was significant because it enabled astronomers to discover an unexpected connection between Earth’s climate and the action of the sun. “We get all our energy from the sun and it dictates our climate but the role of the sun is traditionally overlooked by meteorologists. The scary thing is that sunspot activity has a direct correlation to climate. When the sun is producing a lot of sunspots [cooler patches] – normally in a year there are 30,000 to 40,000 of these – the temperature on Earth is traditionally warmer.”

In 1645 there were no sunspots whatsoever, five years or so later the Little Ice Age began and lasted for seven decades.

“The scary thing is that NASA scientists discovered there were no sunspots in 2008,” says Cooke. “Now, as predicted, Northern Europe is once again entering a period of exceptionally cold winters.”

And 2010 is apparently just the beginning. According to Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics at the University of Reading, we can expect the cold weather to peak between 2025 to 2040. The problem for us is the impact that low solar activity has on the jet stream, the current of air that blasts across the Atlantic carrying all our warm weather with it.

“Britain lies just outside the Arctic Circle and on the same latitude as Labrador. If it wasn’t for the jet stream and to a lesser extent the gulf stream – the warming of ocean water – our winter weather would be similar to that the Eskimos experience every year,” says Cooke.

In simple terms sunspot activity keeps the jet stream going. Take them away and the warm air won’t reach us during the winter months. Instead freezing air from Siberia in the North rushes in to fill the vacuum. '

So there's a huge nuclear fusion reactor at the centre of our solar system that represents 99% of the mass in the solar system. It's gravity is so strong that we all revolve about it and it heats the solar system and beyond. How anyone could believe it has an influence on our climate is a mystery ...