Much research has been conducted in an attempt to link sunspots or other forms of solar activity to the weather.

The subject is often extremely popular with the media. Countless hours have been spent in trying to convince the world that droughts or floods are the consequence of an unprecedented outburst of solar fury. Unfortunately, for each paper published showing a relationship between the floods of some year and sunspots, there can usually be found a contradictory paper showing no relationship between sunspots and a drought of the same year. Some scientists believe there may be a small connection between weather disturbances and solar activity. Still others believe there is very little connection. The reason why many scientists have difficulty accepting that solar activity has a major affect on our weather is very simple. Even a large solar eruption (either a coronal mass ejection or a flare) - although a gigantic explosion by Earth standards - only releases an amount of energy comparable to what the whole sun emits in a few seconds. In other words, solar activity is only a very small variation of the total solar output. Much larger variations in the received sunlight at the Earth's surface are due to the Earth's tilt and its elliptical orbit.

During the solar maximum there are many sunspots, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections, all of which can affect communications and weather? here on Earth. Sunspots increase and decrease through an average cycle of 11 years. The previous two sunspot maximums occurred in 1979-80 and in 1990-91.  These two time periods coincided with a large amount of the United States being generally hot and dry. Currently, we are very near a peak in solar activity. This past summer, the intermountain west and south have been very warm and dry.  Only the Great Lakes and Northeast have experienced consistently below normal temperatures and adequate rainfall in the summer of 2000.  But again, is the hot, dry weather over much of the country due to a solar maximum, or the waning La Nina, or both.

A typical variation of solar radiation between max and min of solar cycles is near 0.1%, which is expected to produce a corresponding variation of about 0.2°C in globally averaged equilibrium surface temperature [Hansen and Lacis, 1990]. Because of the thermal inertia of the oceans, however, the time needed to approach equilibrium is much longer than 11 years, so that the actual temperature response to the observed variation is likely to be considerably smaller, and probably insignificant from a climatic point of view.