Current climate change is not caused by the sun
The BBC recently reported on a paper that disputed the effect of the sun on climate change. The BBC story is here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6290228.stm.
In the story they say that the paper's authors:
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.
It disproves the idea claimed by sceptics of anthropogenic global warming that current climate change is primarily down the sun rather than human activity. I can't attach the whole paper but here's the text of the Abstract and Conclusions...
Proceedings of the Royal Society A
Recent oppositely directed trends in solar climate forcings and the global mean surface air temperature
MIKE LOCKWOOD AND CLAUS FROHLICH
May 2007
Abstract
There is considerable evidence for solar influence on the Earth’s pre-industrial climate and the Sun may well have been a factor in post-industrial climate change in the first half of the last century. Here we show that over the past 20 years, all the trends in the Sun that could have had an influence on the Earth’s climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures.
Keywords: solar variability and climate; solar–terrestrial physics; anthropogenic climate change
5. Conclusions
There are many interesting palaeoclimate studies that suggest that solar
variability had an influence on pre-industrial climate. There are also some
detection–attribution studies using global climate models that suggest there was
a detectable influence of solar variability in the first half of the twentieth century
and that the solar radiative forcing variations were amplified by some mechanism
that is, as yet, unknown. However, these findings are not relevant to any debates
about modern climate change. Our results show that the observed rapid rise in
global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability,
whichever of the mechanisms is invoked and no matter how much the solar
variation is amplified.