A new scientific study concludes that changes in the Sun’s output cannot be causing modern-day climate change.
It shows that for the last 20 years, the Sun’s output has declined, yet temperatures on Earth have risen.
It also shows that modern temperatures are not determined by the Sun’s effect on cosmic rays, as has been claimed.
Writing in the Royal Society’s journal Proceedings A, the researchers say cosmic rays may have affected climate in the past, but not the present.
“This should settle the debate,” said Mike Lockwood, from the UK’s Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, who carried out the new analysis together with Claus Froehlich from the World Radiation Center in Switzerland.
“This paper re-enforces the fact that the warming in the last 20 to 40 years can’t have been caused by solar activity”
Dr Piers Forster
Dr Lockwood initiated the study partially in response to the TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast on Britain’s Channel Four earlier this year, which featured the cosmic ray hypothesis.
“All the graphs they showed stopped in about 1980, and I knew why, because things diverged after that,” he told the BBC News website.
“You can’t just ignore bits of data that you don’t like,” he said.
Maybe you can’t, but Republican-Americans can!