In this blog post, I have uploaded a graph of the running average over 132 months (11 years) of the average number of daily sunspots per month as found by the Royal Observatory of Belgium Av. Circulaire, 3 – B-1180 Brussels, Belgium and the running average over 132 months of the global average temperature anomaly taken from a source I have lost and cannot find. I believe the temperature anomalies are for air temperature over the ocean. The years are 1850 to 2013. I created the graph.
From 1855 to 1900, it appears that changes in the temperature anomaly follow the sunspot numbers by a year or two. And temperatures loosely increased as sunspots increased but not like from 1855 to 1900. By the average at 2008 there was no connection.
The source of just about all heat coming into this planet is the sun. Sunspots appear to be related to the solar flux, more sunspots correlate with a denser flow of energy, so one would expect the temperature of the earth to correlate with the sunspots.
I tried to take out the cycle of the sun spots and focus on the level of sunspot activity by taking a running average of the observations over the approximately 11 year sunspot cycle. The averages run from July of 1855 to June of 2008.
The plots indicate to me that there is more to global temperature than the sunspot cycle over the years for which we have data.
Vanward Statistics 