Ammo for sceptics: solar effect on climate amplified

From The Science is Settled Department. The IPCC and all the AGW alarmists discount the effect of the sun on climate change because, they argue, the variation in solar output is too small to have any effect on the climate (and therefore it must be evil CO2, because, er… we can't think of anything else it could be):

A new study in Science demonstrates how two previously known mechanisms acting together amplify the Sun's impact in an unsuspected way. Not surprisingly, the new discovery is getting a cool reception from the CO2 climate change clique.

Scientists have long suspected that changes in solar output may have triggered the Little Ice Age that gripped Europe several centuries ago, as well as droughts that brought down Chinese dynasties. Now, in a report in the August 28 issue of the journal Science entitled “Amplifying the Pacific Climate System Response to a Small 11-Year Solar Cycle Forcing,” Gerald A. Meehl et al. have demonstrated a possible mechanism that could explain how seemingly small changes in solar output can have a big impact on Earth's climate. The researchers claim that two different parts of the atmosphere act in concert to amplify the effects of even minuscule solar fluctuations.
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As I have previously reported, scientific evidence from NASA points to changes in the type of solar radiation arriving at the top of Earth's atmosphere as a possible trigger for other powerful climate regulating mechanisms. Scientists have discovered, that while total solar irradiance changes by only 0.1 percent, the change in the intensity of ultraviolet light varies by much larger amounts. According to Judith Lean, a solar physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., its possible that long-term patterns—operating over hundreds or thousands of years—could cause even more pronounced swings in solar irradiance (see “Scientists Discover The Sun Does Affect Earth's Climate”). The discovery of the solar heat amplifying effect provides the causal link between historical changes in solar activity and climate change.

Previously, the direct impact of increased irradiance on global avarage temperature has been estimated at around 0.25°C last century—a three fold amplifying effect would raise that to 0.75°C. This leaves practically no warming effect for CO2 to account for and renders the whole anthropogenic global warming argument moot. In other words, if the atmospheric solar amplifier theory is correct anthropogenic global warming is wrong, a useless theory describing a nonexistent phenomenon. It seems like poetic justice that a modeling experiment may point the way to discrediting global warming once and for all.

Read it here.