The sun does indeed control normal climate variations! Thus when it waxes the joint warms up! And has done so in the past to the point that Antarctica was warm enough for part of the years to grow trees and support ruminants.

We know this unquestionably, due to the fossil record.

However when the sun enters a waning phase as now and since the mid-seventies! (NASA) The joint cools the ice advances and we can enter the next ice age.

That that's not happening now during this current waning phase! Should inform those still able to rationalise the irrefutable facts that the climate is well and truly out of wack and destined to get worse if the psychotics in charge keep heading toward the cliff pedal to the metal to use an appropriate analogy?

CO2 levels are at record heights and in uncharted territory. And given history, the only logical reason for the changes.

We need to change course, even if that involves sovereign risk for some folk who have all to clearly made money and its acquisition their God! And naught else!

And care not any legacy their, greed is good individualism leaves as their heritage. As we also witnessed during the curtailing of the tobacco industry!

If the (special vested interest compliant) hands on the wheel will not change course, regardless of the mountains of evidence! Then there's no other choice than remove them! VERY NEXT ELECTION!

It's not as if there were no other and dramatically better (carbon-free) energy choices that would massively boost our economy, e.g., MSR thorium.

But effectively prohibited! Solely to preserve the interests of the coal miners, the fossil fuel industry, big nuclear and big pharma? All of who are myopically focused on the ever-upward profit curve, And nothing else!

It's too late to exit the burning building when your mattress and the ass in it, is on fire.
Alan B.

Wasting our time Steel.
David

This s the clearest explanation yet of how sunspot activity affects the climate on Earth, so the authors deserve some kudos for that.

However they have no evidence for their headline claim that the sun dominates climate change. Indeed this claim, repeated in the body of the article, is downright unscientific because the evidence shows the opposite!

Sunspot activity is important, and should certainly be included in the models. But over the past few decades there's been a breakdown of the longstanding relationship between climate and cosmic rays. If it had held, temperatures would have fallen; instead they rose.

More cosmic ray induced cooling would be welcome now - it would give us more time to deal with all this greenhouse effect induced heat. But warnings of global cooling are baseless.

Congratulations on a well written article. Your comments re the IPCC are particularly important, but unfortunately any critical review of the IPCC is akin to the "emperors new cloths" except the little boys who point out the bleeding obvious are gagged! Solar activity drives global and solar system weather, and if it were not for our protective magnetic fields, we would feel its true might and be burnt to a frazzle. While climate study is vital, the dominance of the politically driven IPCC has destroyed science's reputation and gobbled up an excessive amount of earth science funding, to the detriment of other issues such as deforestation, land degradation and contamination of water bodies to name but a few. This is were the real danger of the climate change cult which has been indoctrinating children for over two decades now.. Hence comments such as the previous commentator made on your article. Religions/cults etc are consistent in one thing... there is only one truth and its hours... climate change cultists believe because it suits them, not because they have every studied, questioned or challenged climate change dogma, as that would be ... hmm now hats the word... too SCIENTIFIC!

"The sea level keeps rising regardless of sunspot activity".

Where is the sea level rising? Certainly not in our area, where it has been clearly shown that the islands inhabited by the scammers wanting our money are actually GROWING. Stop lying!

Water and CO2 have a natural affinity. Imagine if this was not so and the entire CO2 load was confined to the atmosphere!? We'd all but join Venus as the hottest planet in the solar system.

One notes that Venus inhabits the Goldilocks zone of habitable planets. And probably would be at the poles but for a sulphur laden atmosphere heavy with the entire moisture content of the planet, which then further compounds the problem by also trapping heat!

And further exacerbated by CO2 levels, none of which has been synthesized back to oxygen by sunlight and photosynthesis.

This natural affinity has been our saving grace, by limiting the amount of total CO2 in the atmosphere! And able to be removed, liquified and combined with hydrogen to create new, manmade hydrocarbons.

Only doable with nuclear power!

Interestingly, as the CO2 content is vacuumed out in vacuum towers, that natural affinity claws an equivalent CO2 number from the atmosphere.

Meaning we could if we were so minded and led by intelligent leaders not the motor mouth, moribund, moronic imbeciles, we're currently saddled with on both sides of the aisle!?

Create all the (endlessly sustainable) hydrocarbons/plastics/fertilizers we need, from ever-present, abundant seawater!

We might even put the survival interests of the human race, ahead of fossil fuel/corporate profits.

Albeit, they (most of them) could grow exponentially if we use (carbon-free) MSR thorium to reverse climate change and couple that to affordable deionization dialysis desalination to revegetate the arid wastelands and the deserts of the entire world.

Then allow mother nature, new abundant plant life and sunlight to further draw down excessive CO2. And allow the planet to progressively return to a self-regulating normal.

Even if that then allows the climate regulating sun to usher in a new (waning phase) ice age!

AND THEREFORE, GIVEN WE ARE NOW DEEP IN A WANING PHASE! ONE WE SHOULD BE HAVING NOW! IMBECILES!
Alan B.