Solar Activity to Increase

A more serious note on global warming and a possible factor... solar input or solar variablity.

Aviation Week & Space Technology:
"Space weather forecasters see a stronger-than-usual 'hurricane season' coming up on the Sun, based on past experience and new solar observations.

Beginning next year or in early 2008, sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections should increase 30-50% over the most recent solar cycle, with the potential for corresponding disruptions in space and terrestrial systems. Those include both communications and navigation satellites, as well as power grids and ground-based
communications networks."

Some more material - from wikipedia, sometimes needing a grain of salt.

Sunspot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Sunspot"

Solar variation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Solar variation"

From NOAA:
NOAA Paleoclimatology Program - Solanki et al. 2004 11,000 Year Sunspot Number Reconstruction:
"Direct observations of sunspot numbers are available for the past four centuries, but longer time series are required, for example, for the identification of a possible solar influence on climate and for testing models of the solar dynamo. Here we report a reconstruction of the sunspot number covering the past 11,400 years, based on dendrochronologically dated radiocarbon concentrations. We combine physics-based models for each of the processes connecting the radiocarbon concentration with sunspot number. According to our reconstruction, the level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years ago. We find that during the past 11,400 years the Sun spent only of the order of 10% of the time at a similarly high level of magnetic activity and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode. Although the rarity of the current episode of high average sunspot numbers may indicate that the Sun has contributed to the unusual climate change during the twentieth century, we point out that solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades."

Note the cautionary statement that solar variablity is unlikely to have been the dominate cause of current warming...

But consider this:

Maunder Minimum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The Maunder Minimum coincided with the middle — and coldest part — of the so-called Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America, and perhaps much of the rest of the world, were subjected to bitterly cold winters.

Whether there is a causal connection between low sunspot activity and cold winters is the subject of ongoing debate. Some scientists believe that solar variation drives climate change more than carbon dioxide does ..."