Solar Variations Not Behind Global Warming – Study

The sun’s changing energy levels are not to blame for recent global warming and, if anything, solar variations over the past 20 years should have had a cooling effect, scientists said on Wednesday.

Their findings add to a growing body of evidence that human activity, not natural causes, lies behind rising average world temperatures, which are expected to reach their second highest level this year since records began in the 1860s.
There is little doubt that solar variability has influenced the Earth’s climate in the past and may well have been a factor in the first half of the last century, but British and Swiss researchers said it could not explain recent warming.

“Over the past 20 years, all the trends in the sun that could have had an influence on Earth’s climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures,” they wrote in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

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