One More Climate Skeptic Argument Dims

Per a Reuters news item “Researchers from Germany, Switzerland and the United States found that the sun's brightness varied by only 0.07 percent over 11-year sunspot cycles, far too little to account for the rise in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution”. What the Reuters story refers to is a review paper published in the journal "Nature" . For discussion of the weak and strong points of the review, we highly recommend you pursue the RealClimate link here. The Reuters coverage does contain, however, a perfect statement from one of the review authors 'for the Skeptic In Your Life' (we all have at least one): -- "This basically rules out the sun as the cause of global warming," Henk Spruit, a co-author of the report from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, told Reuters. By the way, if your Skeptic mentions the anomaly of the Little Ice Age, Mr Spruit also said that the “Little Ice Age around the 17th century, when London's Thames River froze, seemed limited mainly to western Europe and so was not a planet-wide cooling that might have implied a dimmer sun”. Solar Flare Image Credit: Standford University