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Sun's impact on climate questioned
A PUZZLING discovery has raised a question mark over the sun's impact on climate change and could provide ammunition for sceptics. Until now it has been assumed that less activity from the sun equates to less warming of the Earth.
But the new research, which focuses on a three-year snapshot of time between 2004 and 2007, suggests the opposite may be true.
waned at the end of one of the sun's 11-year cycles, the new data shows the amount of energy reaching the Earth at visible wavelengths rose rather than fell.
Professor Joanna Haigh, from Imperial College London, who led the study, said: "I think it doesn't give comfort to the climate sceptics at all. It may suggest that we don't know that much about the sun. It casts no aspersions at all upon the climate models."
The research, published in the journal Nature, is based on data from a satellite called SORCE (Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment) that has been measuring the sun's energy output at X-ray, ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared wavelengths.
Prof Haigh's team found that, above an altitude of 45km, concentrations of ozone in the atmosphere increased as total solar output decreased. The ozone rise accompanied a steep fall in levels of ultraviolet radiation.
Closer to the ground, meanwhile, an increase in visible radiation caused heating of the lower atmosphere.
Source: news.scotsman.com