Does the reversal of the Sun's magnetic field have any effect on the Earth?

The Sun has a roughly 11-year sunspot cycle, however, with the ending of each cycle, the polarity of the Sun's magnetic field reverses so that the North magnetic pole becomes the South and vice versa. Every 22 years we end up with the polarity returned to its 'previous' state. There have been many studies of what happens to Earth's weather when these flips occur, but to my knowledge, there has been no conclusive evidence that polarity reversal does much of anything.

The above figure shows the 'magnetic butterfly diagram' for sunspots. Blue colors indicate polarities of -40 gauss, yellow shows +40 gauss. Each 'butterfly' shows a full 11-year sunspot cycle, however for a given hemisphere, the overall magnetic polarity does not return to its previous polarity for 22 years; the Hale Cycle. It takes the Sun 22 years for the polarity in a given hemisphere to return to the same state. For more information, see the web page at the Marshall Space Flight Center

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