Claims that increased solar activity is the cause of global warming – rather than man-made greenhouse gases – have now been comprehensively disproved by a scientific study.

The study was undertaken by Mike Lockwood, a physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Chilton, UK, and Claus Frolich of the World Radiation Centre in Davos, Switzerland.

It shows that, since the mid-80s, solar activity has been moving in the opposite direction to that which would be required to explain global warming. This means that the world should have been cooling over the past 20 years, if the sun were the cause. It hasn’t, of course - in fact the six hottest years ever recorded have all been within the last 10 years. 

Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, described the paper as: “The final nail in the coffin for people who would like to make the Sun responsible for present global warming.”

The Study was reported in Nature on 5 July and made it to mainstream media on 11 July with this report in one of UK’s national newspapers, The Independent.