Abstract
The Earth's climate is a function of the Earth's radiative budget which is dependent on the Sun's incoming energy and the energy escaping the Earth's atmosphere. While the Sun is the primary source of heat to the Earth, the structure and composition of the Earth's atmosphere modulate the amount of heat that the Earth receives or reflects. However, the Sun itself is not a constant. The energy that it radiates changes over different time scales due to the Milankovitch cycles and changes in its solar activities, namely solar flares, geomagnetic storms, coronal mass ejections, solar wind, and emission of solar energetic particles. The present chapter briefly discusses the historical role of the sun in controlling Earth's climate and describes the various solar cycles and its instrumental or paleoclimatic records. A section of the chapter also illustrates the potential of different proxies in reconstructing solar cycles along with accounts of paleoclimatic records in and around the Indian subcontinent, that highlight the role of solar activity in modulating the Earth's climate. The chapter underscores the Sun as the eternal external climate driver, which does not only amplify climatic events but continuously controls climate change.
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