Poor Sun.

In your online travels, you've undoubtedly read that you needn't look any further than 90 million miles for the cause of rising temperatures on Earth. I know I have.

It turns out that solar activity has been trending downward since the 1980's, contrary to the assertion that the Sun's been turning up the heat. Mike Lockwood, of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK and Claus Fröhlich (+1 science skills just for the umlaut), at the World Radiation Center in Switzerland have the satellite data to prove it.

"The upshot is that somewhere between 1985 and 1987 all the solar factors that could have affected climate have been going in the wrong direction. If they were really a big factor we would have cooling by now," Lockwood told New Scientist. He adds that he wishes he knew why the Sun's activity had changed in this way.

The number of sunspots peaked twice during the 20th century, once in 1960 and then again in 1985 (see graphs, right), but have been dropping since.

Now that we settled that, let's start some rumors about other celestial bodies. You didn't hear it from me, but Jupiter...

[via Science Blog]