It’s Not the Sunspots
It’s the solar WIND – You’ve heard the complaint that “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” Well, the same thing can be said about the sun: New research finds that the number of sunspots provides an incomplete measure of the sun’s impact on global warming over its 11-year solar cycle. Earth was bombarded last year with high levels of solar energy at a time when the Sun was in an unusually quiet phase and sunspots had virtually disappeared. But there was LOTS of solar wind.
Researcher Sarah Gibson says, “The sun continues to surprise us. The solar wind can hit Earth like a fire hose even when there are virtually no sunspots.”
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