That was when Danish physicist, Henrik Svensmark, decided to explore the matter after coming across a 1991 paper by fellow Danes Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen that charted solarvariations and global surface temperatures since 1860.
"The possibility that current climate models underestimate the effect of solarvariations on climate is probably the single most contentious issue in climate research at the moment, " said Dr Myles Allen of the department of physics at Oxford University.
Joanna Haigh, a solar physicist at Imperial College London, has spent a fair bit of research time investigating mechanisms that could potentially amplify solar changes into meaningful temperature variations on human timescales on Earth.