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Climate: how unusual is today's solar activity?

Muscheler R, Joos F, Müller SA, Snowball I

National Center for Atmospheric Research, Climate and Global Dynamics Division, Paleoclimatology, Boulder, Colorado 80305-3000, USA. raimund@ucar.edu

To put global warming into context requires knowledge about past changes in solar activity and the role of the Sun in climate change. Solanki et al. propose that solar activity during recent decades was exceptionally high compared with that over the preceding 8,000 years. However, our extended analysis of the radiocarbon record reveals several periods during past centuries in which the strength of the magnetic field in the solar wind was similar to, or even higher than, that of today.

Published 28 July 2005 in Nature, 436(7050): E3-4; discussion E4-5.
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