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BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | 'No Sun link' to climate change

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Scientists have produced further compelling evidence showing that modern-day climate change is not caused by changes in the Sun's activity.

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The research contradicts a favoured theory of climate "sceptics", that changes in cosmic rays coming to Earth determine cloudiness and temperature.

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Lancaster University scientists found there has been no significant link between them in the last 20 years.

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The idea is that variations in solar activity affect cosmic ray intensity.

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UK team explain that they used three different ways to search for a correlation, and found virtually none.

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Presenting their findings in the Institute of Physics journal, Environmental Research Letters, the UK team explain that they used three different ways to search for a correlation, and found virtually none.

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The IPCC has got it right, so we had better carry on trying to cut carbon emissions

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at the very least

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If he is right, then we are going down the wrong path of taking all these expensive measures to cut carbon emissions; if he is right, we could carry on with carbon emissions as normal.

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Dr Svensmark's idea formed a centrepiece of the controversial documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.

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If he is right, then we are going down the wrong path of taking all these expensive measures to cut carbon emissions; if he is right, we could carry on with carbon emissions as normal.

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streams of electrically charged particles coming from the Sun.

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The Svensmark hypothesis is that when the solar wind is weak, more cosmic rays penetrate to Earth.

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Professor Sloan's team investigated the link by looking for periods in time and for places on the Earth which had documented weak or strong cosmic ray arrivals, and seeing if that affected the cloudiness observed in those locations or at those times.

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So we looked to see whether cloud cover increased after one of these bursts of rays from the Sun

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Svensmark hypothesis has also been attacked in recent months by Mike Lockwood from the UK's Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory

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Over the course of one of the Sun's natural 11-year cycles, there was a weak correlation between cosmic ray intensity and cloud cover - but cosmic ray variability could at the very most explain only a quarter of the changes in cloudiness.

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This work is important as it provides an upper limit on the cosmic ray-cloud effect in global satellite cloud data

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Dr Giles Harrison from Reading University, a leading researcher in the physics of clouds

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The Svensmark hypothesis has also been attacked in recent months by Mike Lockwood from the UK's Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory.

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He showed that over the last 20 years, solar activity has been rising, which should have led to a drop in global temperatures if the theory was correct.

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Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

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since temperatures began rising rapidly in the 1970s, the contribution of humankind's greenhouse gas emissions has outweighed that of the Sun by a factor of about 13 to one.

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We tried to corroborate Svensmark's hypothesis, but we could not; as far as we can see, he has no reason to challenge the IPCC - the IPCC has got it right

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