Recent global warming isn’t a result of solar radiation, scientists said, disputing a theory advanced by some researchers as an alternative to the United Nations’ view that temperatures are rising as a result of human activities. The scientists examined historical records of solar activity over the past century, studying measures such as the number of sunspots and the amount of light emitted. They found that the total radiation from the sun peaked in 1985, according to Mike Lockwood, co-author of the paper published today in the U.K. journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A. ‘The sun did a U-turn around 1985, but the temperatures kept on rising,” Lockwood, a solar physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Chilton, central England, said late yesterday in a telephone interview. “Everything on the sun that could have affected climate has been going in the wrong direction to cause warming, and we’ve seen continued warming.” The findings contradict scientists who posit that the sun is the main cause of recent warming, rather than human emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. The discovery also goes against the central arguments of “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” a documentary aired earlier this […]