The Truth About Global Warming - It's The Sun That's To Blame

snip:
Dr Solanki does not know what is causing the Sun to burn brighter now or how long this cycle would last.

He says that the increased solar brightness over the past 20 years has not been enough to cause the observed climate changes but believes that the impact of more intense sunshine on the ozone layer and on cloud cover could be affecting the climate more than the sunlight itself.

snip:
Dr David Viner, the senior research scientist at the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit, said the research showed that the sun did have an effect on global warming.

He added, however, that the study also showed that over the past 20 years the number of sunspots had remained roughly constant, while the Earth's temperature had continued to increase.

Someone had to say it. I really think the OP was written with a dose of sarcasm. :)

Hmm, that article is 2-and-a-half years old....!

This came out soon after it....

Environment Newswire

snip:

KATLENBURG-LINDAU, Germany, August 3, 2004 (ENS) - Solar activity affects the climate but plays only a minor role in the current global warming, a German-Finnish team of scientists has found.

Since the middle of the last century, the Sun has been in a phase of unusually high activity, shown by frequent occurrences of sunspots, gas eruptions, and radiation storms.

The influence of the Sun on the Earth was believed to be one cause of the global warming observed since 1900, along with the emission of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, from the combustion of coal, gas, and oil.

But Professor Sami Solanki, solar physicist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, is not convinced that the increased activity of the Sun is responsible for global warming.

A recent paper in Nature sez not...

Variations in solar luminosity and their effect on the Earth's climate

Nature. vol 443, pp 161-166 (14 September 2006)

P. Foukal, C. Fröhlich, H. Spruit and T. M. L. Wigley

Abstract

Variations in the Sun's total energy output (luminosity) are caused by changing dark (sunspot) and bright structures on the solar disk during the 11-year sunspot cycle. The variations measured from spacecraft since 1978 are too small to have contributed appreciably to accelerated global warming over the past 30 years. In this Review, we show that detailed analysis of these small output variations has greatly advanced our understanding of solar luminosity change, and this new understanding indicates that brightening of the Sun is unlikely to have had a significant influence on global warming since the seventeenth century. Additional climate forcing by changes in the Sun's output of ultraviolet light, and of magnetized plasmas, cannot be ruled out. The suggested mechanisms are, however, too complex to evaluate meaningfully at present.

Here's a much more accurate article:
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2004/2004-08-03-03.asp

eeeeevil trees :grr:

...that's why Thor smites them.