There used to be talk of the 11-year cycle affecting weather on earth. I wonder whether that idea has been dropped.
oh, Steve
ah, no! 
Whaddya mean, Denny old chap? 
From http://www.crh.noaa.gov/fsd/astro/sunspots.php:
But the jury is still out on how much sunspots can (or do) affect the Earth’s climate. Times of maximum sunspot activity are associated with a very slight increase in the energy output from the sun. Ultraviolet radiation increases dramatically during high sunspot activity, which can have a large effect on the Earth’s atmosphere. From the mid 1600s to early 1700s, a period of very low sunspot activity (known as the Maunder Minimum) coincided with a number of long winters and severe cold temperatures in Western Europe, called the Little Ice Age. It is not known whether the two phenomena are linked or if it was just coincidence. The reason it is hard to relate maximum and minimum solar activity (sunspots) to the Earth’s climate, is due to the complexity of the Earth’s climate itself. For example, how does one sort out whether a long-term weather change was caused by sunspots, or maybe a coinciding El Nino or La Nina? Increased volcanic eruptions can also affect the Earth’s climate by cooling the planet. And what about the burning of fossil fuels and clear cutting rain forests? One thing is more certain, sunspot cycles have been correlated in the width of tree ring growth. More study will be conducted in the future on relating sunspot activity and our Earth’s climate.
So, the answer was uncertain, but now it’s maybe.
click the picture…read the text 
It’s 2008 ol’ boy!
I just spent half an hour reading about sunspots and weather to try to figure out what Denny meant. He is awfully…succinct 
Here’s some quotes from the above article
Astute readers will notice that there is a clear problem here. The widespread predisposition to believe that there must be a significant link and a lack of precise knowledge of past changes are two ingredients that can prove, err…., scientifically troublesome. Unfortunately they lead to a tendency to keep looking for the correlation until one finds one. When that occurs (as it will if you look hard enough even in random data) it gets published as one more proof of the significant impact that solar change has on climate. Never do the authors describe how many records and how many different smoothing methods they went through before they found this one case where the significance is greater than 95%. Of course, if they went through more than 20, the chances of randomly stumbling onto this level of significance is quite high.
The potential for self-delusion is significantly enhanced by the fact that climate data generally does have a lot of signal in the decadal band (say between 9 and 15 years). This variability relates to the incidence of volcanic eruptions, ENSO cycles, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) etc. as well as potentially the solar cycle. So another neat trick to convince yourself that you found a solar-climate link is to use a very narrow band pass filter centered around 11 years, to match the rough periodicity of the sun spot cycle, and then show that your 11 year cycle in the data matches the sun spot cycle. Often these correlations mysteriously change phase with time, which is usually described as evidence of the non-linearity of the climate system, but in fact is the expected behaviour when there is no actual coherence. Even if the phase relationship is stable, the amount of variance explained in the original record is usually extremely small.
This is not to say that there is no solar influence on climate change, only that establishing such a link is more difficult then many assume. What is generally required is a consistent signal over a number of cycles (either the 11 year sunspot cycle or more long term variations), similar effects if the timeseries are split, and sufficient true degrees of freedom that the connection is significant and that it explains a non-negligible fraction of the variance. These are actually quite stiff hurdles and so the number of links that survive this filter are quite small. In some rough order of certainty we can consider that the 11 year solar cycle impacts on the following are well accepted: stratospheric ozone, cosmogenic isotope production, upper atmospheric geopotential heights, stratospheric temperatures and (slightly less certain and with small magnitudes ~0.1 deg C) tropospheric and ocean temperatures. More marginal are impacts on wintertime tropospheric circulation (like the NAO). It is also clear that if there really was a big signal in the data, it would have been found by now. The very fact that we are still arguing about statisitical significance implies that whatever signal there is, is small.
In summary, although solar forcing is real, the implications of that are often rather overstated. Since there has been a clear history of people fooling themselves about the importance of solar-climate links, any new studies in the field need to be considered very carefully before conclusions are drawn, especially with respect the warming over recent decades, which despite all of this discussion about solar activity, is almost all related to anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
yer name is really Shirley, innit?
I did click the pic and read the text and it said nothing about the weather - did it? I could just be having one of those days.
ah…no…not directly!
the 11 year period link
did have a space weather link
that had a Atmospheric physics link
what sorta talks about Earth’s weather
what was what ya really were asking about, innit?
not that I’d remember after that…
yeah…lame…
had to go out…lost patience
ain’t no sun anyhow
It’ll be whenever the 11-year sunspot cycle gets in phase with the 19 year metonic cycle where the moon is sort of in phase with the solar calendar. I betcha. 
All I know is the 11 year sunspot cycle effects my radio hobby , weather be damned. In 2011 we’ll hit peak propagation again!!!
ya…ionosphere…that was easy!
for you:
great time to be a geek, innit?
ya! hyperlinks!
the 11 year period link
building off yours, in case anyone’s interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_propagation
Skywave propagation, also referred to as skip, is any of the modes that rely on refraction of radio waves in the ionosphere, which is made up of one or more ionized layers in the upper atmosphere. F2-layer is the most important ionospheric layer for HF propagation, though F1, E, and D-layers also play some role. These layers are directly affected by the sun on a daily cycle, the seasons and the 11-year sunspot cycle determines the utility of these modes. During solar maxima, the whole HF range up to 30 MHz can be used and F2 propagation up to 50 MHz are observed frequently depending upon daily solar flux values. During solar minima, propagation of higher frequencies is generally worse.
Forecasting of skywave modes is of considerable interest to amateur radio operators and commercial marine and aircraft communications, and also to shortwave broadcasters.
inn’t science fun!!?
Maybe I’ll start a movement predicting personality traits and the advisability of certain actions depending on when you were born in the various solar cycles. With lots of expensive measuring and graphing and stuff. Maybe I’ll call it “Solarology.”