Without this one thing there would be no Global Warming at all and we’d all freeze to death!

“It matters, especially in modern times, what the Sun is doing.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson

The Sun [Sol] is the star at the center of the Solar System. The Sun has a diameter of about 1,392,000 kilometres (865,000 mi) (about 109 Earths), and by itself accounts for about 99.86% of the Solar System’s mass; the remainder consists of the planets (including Earth), asteroids, meteoroids, comets, and dust in orbit.[10] About three-fourths of the Sun’s mass consists of hydrogen, most of the rest is helium. Less than 2% consists of other elements, including iron, oxygen, carbon, neon, and others. [11]

The Sun’s color is white, although from the surface of the Earth it may appear yellow because of atmospheric scattering.[12] It has a spectral class of G2V, informally designated a “yellow star” because the majority of its radiation is in the yellow-green portion of the visible spectrum.[13] The G2 indicates its surface temperature of approximately 5,780 K (5,510 °C.) The V (Roman five) in the spectral class indicates that the Sun, like most stars, is a main sequence star, and thus generates its energy by nuclear fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium. Once regarded as a small and relatively insignificant star, the Sun is now presumed to be brighter than 85% of the stars in the galaxy, most of which are red dwarfs.[14][15] (Estimates for its magnitude are around 4.8)[16][17] The Sun’s hot corona continuously expands in space creating the solar wind, a hypersonic stream of charged particles that extends to the heliopause at roughly 100 AU. The bubble in the interstellar medium formed by the solar wind, the heliosphere, is the largest continuous structure in the Solar System.[18] [19]

The Sun is currently traveling through the Local Interstellar Cloud in the Local Bubble zone, within the inner rim of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. Of the 50 nearest stellar systems within 17 light-years from the Earth, the Sun ranks 4th [20] in mass. The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy at a distance of approximately 24,000–26,000 light years from the galactic center, completing one clockwise orbit, as viewed from the galactic north pole, in about 225–250 million years.

The mean distance of the Sun from the Earth is approximately 149.6 million kilometers (1 AU), though this varies as the Earth moves from perihelion in January to aphelion in July.[21] At this average distance, light travels from the Sun to the earth in about 8 minutes 19 seconds. The energy from this sunlight supports almost all life on Earth via photosynthesis, [22] and drives the Earth’s climate and weather. The enormous impact of the Sun on the Earth has been recognized since pre-historic times, and the Sun has been regarded by some cultures as a deity. An accurate scientific understanding of the Sun developed slowly, and as recently as the 19th century prominent scientists had little notion of the Sun’s physical composition and source of energy. This understanding is still developing; there are a number of present-day anomalies in the Sun’s behavior that remain unexplained.
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The Sun is a magnetically active star. It supports a strong, changing magnetic field that varies year-to-year and reverses direction about every eleven years around solar maximum.[61] The Sun’s magnetic field gives rise to many effects that are collectively called solar activity, including sunspots on the surface of the Sun, solar flares, and variations in solar wind that carry material through the Solar System.[62] Effects of solar activity on Earth include auroras at moderate to high latitudes, and the disruption of radio communications and electric power. Solar activity is thought to have played a large role in the formation and evolution of the Solar System. Solar activity changes the structure of Earth’s outer atmosphere.[63]

“Of all the solar system’s planets, only the Earth possesses a unique atmosphere that provides a friendly climate for the development of higher life forms on its surface. This is due to a fortunate combination of a number of preconditions: the Sun is a quiet star; the Earth is at an optimal distance from it; the Earth has a massive satellite, the Moon; the chemical composition of the primeval Earth itself, etc. The comfortable climatic conditions for life on our planet have developed owing to the optimal composition and pressure of the earth’s atmosphere and strong feedbacks between the evolution of the earth’s biota and the development of the atmosphere. As for the periodic coming of ice ages, they are connected to precessional self-oscillating processes provoked by lunisolar interactions; this is the topic of the article below.” – Professor Oleg Georgievich Sorokhtin, Dr. Sci. (Phys.–Math.), chief researcher at the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, Russian Academy of Sciences, The Evolution of the Earth’s Climate and the Genesis of Glacial Epochs

“Abstract: The authors identify and describe the following global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate: (1) solar radiation as a dominant external energy supplier to the Earth, (2) outgassing as a major supplier of gases to the World Ocean and the atmosphere, and, possibly, (3) microbial activities generating and consuming atmospheric gases at the interface of lithosphere and atmosphere. The writers provide quantitative estimates of the scope and extent of their corresponding effects on the Earth’s climate. Quantitative comparison of the scope and extent of the forces of nature and anthropogenic influences on the Earth’s climate is especially important at the time of broad-scale public debates on current global warming. The writers show that the human-induced climatic changes are negligible.

Identification and understanding of global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate is crucial for developing adequate relationship between people and nature, and for developing and implementing a sound course of action aimed at survival and welfare of the human race. The latter is especially important in the light of presentday public debates on causes and ways of mitigation of the current global atmospheric warming. After the Kyoto Protocol had been announced in 1997 (Kyoto Protocol 1997), many researchers around the world criticized its provisions (that imposed drastic restrictions on anthropogenic carbon dioxide emission in developed countries) as meaningless and catastrophic. Logical and quantitative comparison analyses presented in the publications of Robinson et al. (1998), Soon et al. (2001), Bluemle et al. (2001), Baliunas (2002), Sorokhtin (2001), Sorokhtin and Ushakov (2002), Gerhard (2004), and Khilyuk and Chilingar (2003, 2004) showed that the theory of currently observed global atmospheric warming as a result of increasing anthropogenic carbon dioxide (and the other greenhouse gasses) emission is a myth. This myth proved to be an enduring one.

The Earth’s climate is a generic term for a relatively stable long-term state of the Earth’s atmosphere. The main parameters that describe the Earth’s climate quantitatively are the atmospheric temperature and pressure averaged over certain areas and chosen time intervals. They are determined by the energy and matter flows from inside and outside of the terrestrial body, matter transformation over the Earth’s surface (at the interface between lithosphere and atmosphere), and parameters of the Earth’s atmosphere and the World Ocean. Solar radiation supplies the major energy influx to the Earth’s atmosphere that determines the Earth’s heating and cooling, and the outgassing supplies the major matter influx to the Earth’s atmosphere that determines its physical and chemical properties.” – L. F. Khilyuk1 and G. V. Chilingar, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA, On global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate. Are humans involved?

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Wonderful imagery of the sun Sol set to amazing music. Sunshine, a very good science fiction movie by the way.