The article says that the radiation intensity of the Sun varies by just .1 percent over the sunspot cycle. That small variation has significant effect on Earth.
Could it be that other solar variations have similar effect?
keep in mind that we do not know nor understand everything about the sun’s interaction with the earth!!!!!
Dec. 11, 2007: NASA’s fleet of THEMIS spacecraft, launched less than 8 months ago, has made three important discoveries about spectacular eruptions of Northern Lights called “substorms” and the source of their power. The discoveries include giant magnetic ropes that connect Earth’s upper atmosphere to the Sun and explosions in the outskirts of Earth’s magnetic field....
Right away the substorm surprised investigators: “The auroras surged westward twice as fast as anyone thought possible, crossing 15 degrees of longitude in less than one minute,” says Angelopoulos. The storm had traversed an entire polar time zone in 60 seconds flat! ....
Even more impressive was the substorm’s power. Angelopoulos estimates the total energy of the two-hour event at five hundred thousand billion (5 x 1014) Joules. That’s approximately equivalent to the energy of a magnitude 5.5 earthquake.
Where does all that energy come from? THEMIS may have found an answer:
“The satellites have found evidence for magnetic ropes connecting Earth’s upper atmosphere directly to the Sun,” says Dave Sibeck, project scientist for the mission at the Goddard Space Flight Center. “We believe that solar wind particles flow in along these ropes, providing energy for geomagnetic storms and auroras.”
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2007/11dec_themis.htm
...adding more on how little we know:
NASA: Ionosphere not where it should be
UPI) Dec 17, 2008
The U.S. space agency says it has discovered the boundary between the Earth’s upper atmosphere and space has moved to extraordinarily low altitudes...
But the first discovery was that the ionosphere was not where it had been expected to be. During the first months of the satellite’s operations, the transition between the ionosphere and space was found to be at about 260 miles altitude during the nighttime, barely rising above 500 miles during the day. Those altitudes, said NASA, were extraordinarily low compared with the more typical values of 400 miles during the nighttime and 600 miles during the day....
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/NASA_Ionosphere_not_where_it_should_be_999.html
The problem with most of these articles related to sunlight is that they have so little specific information that their statements are meaningless. When someone states that sunlight varies by 0.1 percent during the solar cycles, I guess we have to assume they are referring to only the light (electromagnetic radiation) that human eyes can perceive. Which is some violet, blue, green, yellow, orange and some red. We cannot see at UV and beyond and at infrared and beyond. Now the problem with using visible light is that sunspots in a basic sense have 2 components. A dark area and a bright area. The higher visible light output is due to the bright area being slightly more intense then the dark area is dark. The problem with that metric is that a large portion of the activity level itself is canceling out and you end up with only a 0.1 percent difference when in actually the percentage change in solar surface activity can be much much greater. Its kind a like using temperature to determine heat content, but hey, what else can you expect on planet ape.
The fool alarmists keep claiming that everything is understood, and that it is impossible that the Sun is responsible for the bulk of the warming despite such CLEAR historical data such as:
From Lassen linked here which points out that Solar Cycle length is HIGHLY correlated to temperature of Earth, which temperatures can NOT be explained by the CO2 hypothesis.