Can sunspots impact the weather?

Can sunspots impact the weather? 

WHAT ARE THE SUNSPOTS?

Sunspots are darker regions on the sun's surface that come and go over days. Sometimes there are many sunspots on the sun, and they can even happen in swarms. Other times the sun has a no spots. Sunspots form when acute magnetic activity on the surface of the sun exposes the star's cooler layers. However, these cooler patches only happen in great numbers when the sun is especially active. So while a specific dark spot may emit less energy than the rest of the sun, the improved activity of the sun overall sends slightly more energy toward the Earth.

HOW DO SUNSPOTS INFLUENCE EARTH?

There is no direct link between a single sunspot seeing and a short-term cooling in Earth’s temperature. “It will decrease the amount of light hitting the Earth by about 0.1%,” said Greg Kopp, a senior research scientist at the varsity of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. “It would take the Earth’s energy system many months of such continual decrease to notice this effect energetically, but a sunspot doesn't abide that long.”

Earth’s system is too big  to be affected by small dimmings from sunspots on short timescales, told  Kopp, who likens it to dumping a bathtub of ice into a swimming pool. “You wouldn’t aware a change in overall water temperature, but if you did it all hour for days on end, you would  after all feel a change,” he said. 

But sunspots are a sign of a solar activity. “Solar variability does produce Earth-climate effects on long timescales,” Kopp said. Climate is a thirty -year average of weather(opens in new tab). “If the climate is warmer or cooler because of the sun, the average weather will be warmer or cooler too.”

However, there is wholly no evidence that the sun's activity is accountable for the climate change we’ve seen over current decades, which is caused by peoples pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.