The role of the sun – explanation for temperature rise without greenhouse gases?
By Willis Eschenbach
For the usual, unknown reasons that occur so often in my life, I started thinking about the number of hours of sunshine.
Several people have noted that the decrease in total albedo in the CERES dataset not only provides the extra energy needed to explain a quarter century of warming, but also shows changes in total absorbed solar radiation (ASR, incoming solar radiation minus reflected solar radiation) that correlate very well with the warming.
F
Figure 1. Normalized ASR and upwelling longwave radiation at the surface. “Normalized” means that the average is zero and the standard deviation is one.
A problem with the CERES data is that it only covers the last 25 years. Therefore, instead of albedo, I decided to look at “solar hours.” This is the percentage of daylight hours in a day, week, month, or year during which the sun shines. It is not albedo, but it is related to it. Research has shown that the longest dataset we have comes from Oxford in the United Kingdom. Here is that dataset.
https://www.climategate.nl/2026/06/de-rol-van-de-zon-2/
