Climate skeptics beware, your “blame the sun” tactic of global warming denial just got a little harder. A new study shows that regardless of what the sun is doing, the earths climate continues to get hotter. It shows that the sun effect on cosmic rays has nothing to do with the average global temperature.

So in case you are coming into this a bit late, the basic theory worked something like this. There are cosmic rays that shoot around space, and when they hit the air over the oceans they form clouds, which help to cool the earth by reflecting light back into space. The idea is that during active times the suns magnetic fields will block these cosmic rays and thus result is less clouds and more heat. The global warming skeptics claimed that it was an active sun, by both producing more output, and at the same time blocking the helpful cosmic rays (that bastard!) was the real reason that the earth was heating up and not the rampant burning of fossil fuels. This new study shows that that argument just doesn’t hold up.

“This should settle the debate,” said Mike Lockwood, from the UK’s Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, who carried out the new analysis together with Claus Froehlich from the World Radiation Center in Switzerland.

Dr Lockwood initiated the study partially in response to the TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast on Britain’s Channel Four earlier this year, which featured the cosmic ray hypothesis.

“All the graphs they showed stopped in about 1980, and I knew why, because things diverged after that,” he told the BBC News website.

“You can’t just ignore bits of data that you don’t like,” he said. (via)