While it's true that our sun does have little tantrums now and then, they have so far (so far as we've recorded, at least) not had too many major effects on the surface of the planet (you'd probably get a different answer from someone who lives in Montreal, though ).

I highly recommend investing in the free program "SolScape", developed by the now-defunct software company Stimpsoft, formerly of http://www.stimpsoft.com and now available if you search for it in Google. It's a "solar data browser" that automatically retrieves data from the ACE, SOHO and a few other sun/earth-observing craft. Beautiful images result, and if you catch it at the right time you can see some spectacular CMEs every once in a while, then watch as the Earth's magnetic field goes all wonky a couple hours later. I've had the thing for years, and while the data has sometimes been worrying it's never led me to believe that the sun is going to blow up [/attempt to keep the post on topic]