The Koch brothers are not known to be progressive, tree hugging liberals. Yet their funded study, “A New Estimate of the Average Earth Surface Land Temperature Spanning 1753 to 2011,” offers evidence that the observable increase in global temperatures is not the result of solar effects, a position taken by many people claiming the sun is responsible, not human beings, for climate change.
The study concludes,
“… solar forcing does not appear to contribute to the observed global warming of the past 250 years; the entire change can be modeled by a sum of volcanism and a single anthropogenic [human-made] proxy.
The decadal land surface temperature from BEST average (black line), “compared to a linear combination of volcanic sulfate emissions (responsible for the short dips) and the natural logarithm of CO2 (responsible for the gradual rise) shown in red. Inclusion of a proxy for solar activity did not significantly improve the fit. The grey area is the 95% confidence interval.”
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Reference
Rhode, Robert, et al. “A New Estimate of the Average Earth Surface Land Temperature Spanning 1753 to 2011.” Geoinformatics & Geostatistics: An Overview 1:1.