Talk:Solar variation

Chart looks rather out of date
The chart needs updating - as it ends in 2006 - missing the latest solar cycle. 131.111.23.90 (talk) 14:46, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Historical perspective
Is this quote really helpful? First off, it talks about weather prediction, not climate. The quote itself is ambiguous, open to interpretation as either: "history has shown time and again that it is pseudo-science" or as "in those days it was seen as pseudo-science, but now we have a better understanding". The intro of the source text would be a better choice imo:
 * Since it is the Sun's energy that drives the weather system, scientists naturally wondered whether they might connect climate changes with solar variations. Yet the Sun seemed to be stable over the timescale of human civilization. Attempts to discover cyclic variations in weather and connect them with the 11-year sunspot cycle, or other possible solar cycles ranging up to a few centuries long, gave results that were ambiguous at best. These attempts got a well-deserved bad reputation. Jack Eddy overcame this with a 1976 study that demonstrated that irregular variations in solar surface activity, a few centuries long, were connected with major climate shifts. The mechanism was uncertain, but plausible candidates emerged.  Ssscienccce (talk) 20:18, 20 October 2013 (UTC)


 * The article itself is rife with such conflicts. I don't expect an easy resolution. Batvette (talk) 12:50, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Solar constant
The article states that "The amount of solar radiation received at the outer limits of Earth's atmosphere averages 1366 W/m2." Yet the Wikipedia article on the solar constant gives the value of 1361 W/m2. Can anyone explain the discrepancy? Thanks. Mhklein (talk) 20:11, 27 March 2014 (UTC)


 * The lower estimate is more recent. Don't know if it is controversial. See Solar irradiation. Lfstevens (talk) 06:06, 16 July 2015 (UTC)


 * I moved the order of these around slightly, to put the solar constant before the variation in solar constant, but didn't change the actual number without a canonical reference. Different sources do use slightly different totals.  Several links were redirects to "solar irradiance", so I consolidated these to just one place. Geoffrey.landis (talk) 17:34, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

Predictions based on patterns
This section is a bit rubbish. Firstly, it "predicts" the 2010 peak, and no-one (including me!) has bothered update it for whatever happened. Secondly, its almost all about "predicting" climate (has it been copied in from elsewhere) not predicting the cycles, so it belongs under the climate heading William M. Connolley (talk) 08:15, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

Cosmic ray claim
Why is the stuff on cosmic rays in there? It doesn't apply to solar variation in any way. Lfstevens (talk) 16:41, 15 July 2015 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure I understand the question. The sun's magnetic field deflects galactic cosmic rays. Thus, cosmic rays decrease with higher solar actitity.  So this is related to solar variation.
 * However, if you're just saying that there's too much on this subject for the article -- well, ok, maybe there is, and possibly it should be compressed and put into a single subsection, instead of spread over several.
 * --by the way, you changed the term "galactic cosmic rays" to just "cosmic rays" in several places. I'm going to change those back-- the more generic term "cosmic rays" can also refer to solar proton events, which of course increase with solar activity. Geoffrey.landis (talk) 20:37, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

Restructure proposal
User:Lfstevens/sandbox

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