You don't have to model the solar contribution to temperature, you can measure it. We have in fact been measuring total solar irradiance (TSI) for a few decade

You don't have to model the solar contribution to temperature, you can measure it. We have in fact been measuring total solar irradiance (TSI) for a few decades now. See http://acrim.jpl.nasa.gov/ http://acrim.jpl.nasa.gov/ for the newest version of the instrument. It's hard to paste the time series together from multiple instruments; not all of them work the same way, and there are discontinuities (TSI has to be measured from space, and you have to schedule launches to obtain overlap between the time series of successive instruments). Someone wrote a long article about it, citing most of the experts in the area (http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/VariableSun/variable.php http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/VariableSun/variab...). (Confession: I have not read the article carefully; it seems about right.) The current thinking is that there's no way that TSI increases can explain the warming we have measured of the Earth. The TSI changes are just not large enough. *** In fact, here's a nice recent summary of the big picture regarding remote sensing of climate variables: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/ http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/ It's no exaggeration to say this contains infinitely more usable information than the OP.