Paper that claimed the Sun caused global warming gets retracted:
A paper published last June was catnip for those who are desperate to explain climate change with anything but human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. It was also apparently wrong enough to be retracted this week by the journal that published it, even though its authors objected.
The paper's headline conclusion was that it described a newly discovered cycle in the motion of the Sun, one that put us 300 years into what would be a thousand-year warming period for the Earth. Nevermind that we've been directly measuring the incoming radiation from the Sun and there has been no increase to explain the observed global warming—or that there is no evidence of a 2,000 year temperature cycle in the paleoclimate record.
Those obvious issues didn't stop some people from taking this study as proof that past warming was natural, and only mild and unavoidable warming lies in our future.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 09 2020, @02:33AM
Some people are trying to get it called the axis of evil [wikipedia.org]. Hopefully some editor won't put it on a book cover and we'll be stuck with it like the "God particle".
As far as the axis of evil goes, it is unexplained, which means that the models don't explain it, but it also means that it includes more mundane explanations such as that it isn't clear whether it isn't an issue with the way the data are processed.