As I struggle to find the truth in this area, I found this article (linked to by title) interesting because he mentions the politicising of the issue and shows the state of known solar causes knowledge:
"What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on long before human industry was a possible factor? Less than nothing. The 2007 Summary for Policymakers boasts of cutting in half a very small contribution by the sun to climate change conceded in a 2001 report.
Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The sun’s brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.
He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun’s magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier."
Read the rest of the article ... http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece
See Also:
Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years
Humans vs Sun as cause for climate change
Astronomer Sallie Baliunas on sunspots, global warming, ...
Global Warming - Humans and/or the Sun? ... and more!
Sun more active than for a millennium
Sally Baliunas inteviewed on Solar Fluctuations and Global Warming
Interview: James Lovelock on Climate Change
Humans, Cycles, Sun or Ice-ages - What affects our climate most?
Sun's fickle heart may leave us cold
Blog of Ray Tomes research on cycles, news reports on cycles, my original research on the Harmonics Theory and discussion of these matters.
There are cycles in everything. There are cycles in the weather, the economy, the sun, wars, geological formations, atomic vibrations, climate, human moods, the motions of the planets, populations of animals, the occurrence of diseases, the prices of commodities and shares and the large scale structure of the universe. None of these are independent of each other.
Research shows that very different disciplines often find the same cycle periods in their data. The inter-relatedness of all things is an idea who's time has come. The study of cycles is an excellent way to understand this because the periods of cycles are as easy to recognise as fingerprints or DNA sequences.
"The universe, believe it or not, is nothing other than a giant musical instrument with a very special but predictable pattern of harmonically related oscillations which determine the structure of everything from galactic clusters to subatomic particles and we are just parts of the various vibration modes."
The single axiom of the Harmonics Theory is that:
The Universe consists of a standing wave which develops harmonically related standing waves and each of these does the same.