Sunspot-climate link discovered
Astronomers were startled and laymen amazed when in 1979 Jack Eddy of the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, claimed that the sun was shrinking at such a rate that, if the decline did not reverse, our local star would disappear within a hundred thousand years. However, Eddy’s initial claims quickly turned out to be overstating the case because he had taken old records dating back to 1836 at the Royal Greenwich Observatory at face value. By 1980 we realised the decline was much less but, even so, a tenth of an arc second per century may…
