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If climate is not a random walk, then we can predict climate if we understand what drives it. The energy that stops the Earth from looking like Pluto comes from the Sun, and the level and type of that energy does change. So the Sun is a good place to start if we want to be able to predict climate. To put that into context, let’s look at what the Sun has done recently. This is a figure from “Century to millenial-scale temperature variations for the last two thousand years indicated from glacial geologic records of Southern Alaska” G.C.Wiles, D.J.Barclay, P.E.Calkin and T.V.Lowell 2007:

The red line is the C14 production rate, inverted. C14 production is inversely related to solar activity, so we see more C14 production during solar minima. The black line is the percentage of ice-rafted debris in seabed cores of the North Atlantic, also plotted inversely. The higher the black line, the warmer the North Atlantic was. The grey vertical stripes are solar minima. As the authors say,” Previous analyses of the glacial record showed a 200- year rhythm to glacial activity in Alaska and its possible link to the de Vries 208-year solar (Wiles et al., 2004). Similarly, high-resolution analyses of lake sediments in southwestern Alaska suggests that century-scale shifts in Holocene climate were modulated by solar activity (Hu et al., 2003). It seems that the only period in the last two thousand years that missed a de Vries cycle cooling was the Medieval Warm Period.

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