Solar bollocks

Some one's gotta wack-a-mole. Good on Mike Lockwood for doing the deed (yet again). Unsurprisingly, solar variation, cosmic rays, unicorns etc. are not the major cause of recent warming.

To help nail down the effect of solar radiation, geophysicist Mike Lockwood of the University of Southampton, U.K., examined data available since 1955 on the monthly average output of the sun, including sunspots, magnetic activity, and cosmic-ray variations. Then he compared those data, month by month, with average global temperature records, as well as El Niño- and La Niña-induced weather cycles and the atmospheric effects of major volcanic eruptions. The result, Lockwood and colleagues report in two papers published online this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, is that for the past half-century, the sun has exerted only a small influence on climate--about 3% compared with the warming influence of greenhouse gases and natural climate cycles.

Lockwood says a key advantage of his approach is that he relied on hard data rather than computer models. "One problem that crops up [in the climate discussion] is that scientists use complex models that nonspecialists don't understand and therefore don't trust," he explains.

Lockwood's research represents "a solid look at whether global temperature increases are being driven by changes in the brightness of the sun," says geophysicist Dáithí Stone of the University of Oxford in the U.K. The work suggests that "there is basically no way that this can be the case," he says.

Colour me shocked!