Solar Energy and Global Climate Change

Previous studies have shown that the solar energy input to the earth system underwent significant decadal variations at individual surface energy budget stations, with a "global dimming" from 1950s to 1980s, but a "global brightening" from 1980s to 2000s, and a mixed tendency at different locations thereafter. Here we use a new global gridded solar irradiance dataset to show that the previous results from individual stations represent well the regional means but not the global mean or hemisphere means. The global mean has a decadal variation that is quite different from the individual station results reported in previous studies, which comes from the fact that the southern hemisphere mean has an opposite trend with the northern hemisphere mean. No long-term global dimming trend is found associated with global warming