Global Warming May be Partly Caused by Earth's Sun: Solar Activity Raises Temperatures

Global warming continues to be a problem for our planet. Yet scientists have long wondered whether solar activity has anything to do with it. That's why scientists took a closer look, and found the existence of significant resonance cycles and high correlations between solar activity and the Earth's averaged surface temperature.

Global warming is a hot debate currently. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently announced that human-caused greenhouse gases contributed to 90 percent or even higher of the observed increase in global average temperature over the past 50 years. Yet there are natural factors at play, and the solar cycle is one of them.

In order to see whether the sun might be impacting global warming, the researchers adopted the wavelet analysis technique and cross correlation method to investigate the periodicities of solar activity and the Earth's temperature as well as their correlations during the past centuries. The researchers combined measured data with those reconstructed to disclose the periodicities of solar activity during centuries and their correlations with the Earth's temperature.

So what did they find? It turns out that solar activity and Earth's temperature have significant resonance cycles. In fact, the Earth's temperature has periodic variations that are similar to those of the solar cycle. This seems to indicate that solar activity does indeed affect the temperature of our planet, and should be taken into account when creating climate models.

Our sun is currently in the midst of a solar maximum, which means that the sun is at a peak in solar activity. It's therefore not surprising that the "modern maximum" of solar activity corresponds with the recent global warming of Earth.

That's not to say that human impacts aren't playing a role in rising temperatures. It's very likely that the unprecedented rate of warming should largely be attributed to manmade causes. Yet this latest study reveals yet another reason why temperatures continue to rise.

The findings are published in the journal Chinese Science Bulletin.