Sun
Go to Climate Change Overview Understanding Global Warming It is sunshine that warms. The sun warms the Earth. Variability is created by the sunshine that reaches down to the Earth's surface. Sunshine heats land and sea. Land and sea heat the air. Danish astrophysicist Henrik Svensmark has shown the importance of cloud cover for the climate, but not all clouds are equally important. However, this mechanism may not be transparent to lay people. Sunshine data is otherwise intuitively understandable and turn out as an excellent reverse proxy for cloud cover. The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) has measured the number of hours of sunshine nationwide since 1920 and temperatures since 1874 - hyperlink . Intuitively we associate sunshine with warm weather, and it is obvious to try picture both in the same graph. Figure 1. The drawn lines are 11-year moving averages. Sun and warmth seem to follow surprising...