Historical sunspot and climate records were analyzed by means of nonlinear tools to study long-term trends and relationships with the solar activity variations. Cross Wavelet technique and Recurrence Plot analysis were applied to the data to find their similarities and phase coherence at dierent time and time-scale. It is shown that solar cycle signal is more evident in climatic data during the last 60 years. This result is discussed in conjunction with the problem of unprecedented high level of sunspot activity and climate warmth in the late 20th century.