How well do we know solar activity?

[Skiessa]

TL;DR Summary

We can make predictions about solar activity, but is it possible that we are living on an in fact, small solar activity sub-cycle that's just a part of a much larger scale cycle, that we are still unaware of and therefore cannot really understand the climate of our planet's history?

From what I've understood, we know sun's activity well enough that we can make some good predictions about it for a decade or so to the future. But is it theoretically possible that all the measurements that we have been able to make about the solar cycles and their effect on our climate, are in fact just a part of a much larger scale cycle, that breaks down into smaller sub-cycles - like the one we have been taking all of our direct measurements from, meaning that our ability to predict the future or see the past climate of our planet would not be so trustworthy?

Basically meaning that after some time, something we are still unable to predict happens in the sun that ends the current sub-cycle we are living, causing the climate to even dramatically change in (relatively) short period of time. For example, if each sub-cycle builds up some energy in the sun that after reaching a certain level, bursts somehow and drastically changes it's behavior? Sun and the other stars are very old after all, and we have been measuring them for such a short time, that there's at least some space there - you could literally fit millions of thousand year cycles that we could never be aware of in it, to form all kind of weird causations that we would need to understand to truly be able to see the past climate anomalies and to predict the future climate.

How well we think we know the solar activity anyways?

 

[Vanadium 50]

How well we think we know the solar activity anyways?

What you mean "we", kemosabe?

A lot of stuff that you seem to think is not known is in fact known very well. Ten years? We have almost 300 years of direct observation and around 12,000 years of indirect measurements with Carbon-14.

 

[Skiessa]

What you mean "we", kemosabe?

A lot of stuff that you seem to think is not known is in fact known very well. Ten years? We have almost 300 years of direct observation and around 12,000 years of indirect measurements with Carbon-14.

by a decade i meant decade into the future.

and while i was aware of the 300 years of measurement, i don't think it's that long time when compared to sun's age.

how detailed picture can we paint with the carbon measurements?

 

[stefan r]

...

and while i was aware of the 300 years of measurement, i don't think it's that long time when compared to sun's age...

We have millions of stars we can look at.

There is a lot of uncertainty in climate data from the distant past.