Guest essay by David Archibald

In the time before the current period of faith-based science, much good work was done on the role of the Sun in controlling climate. One of the best monographs from that time of innocence is Hoyt and Schatten’s The Role of the Sun in Climate Change, published by Oxford University Press in 1997. That book starts with this paragraph:

About 400 years before the birth of Christ, near Mt. Lyscabettus in ancient Greece, the pale orb of the sun rose through the mists. According to habit, Meton recorded the sun’s location on the horizon. In this era when much remained to be discovered, Meton hoped to find predictable changes in the locations of sunrise and moonrise. Although rainy weather had limited his recent observations, this foggy morning he discerned specks on the face of the sun, the culmination of many such blemishes in recent…