Is the sun causing global warming?

• Is the sun causing global warming?
  No. The sun can influence the Earth’s climate, but it isn’t responsible for the warming trend we’ve seen over the past few decades. The sun is a giver of life; it helps keep the planet warm enough for us to survive. We know subtle changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun are responsible for the comings and goings of the ice ages. But the warming we’ve seen over the last few decades is too rapid to be linked to changes in Earth’s orbit, and too large to be caused by solar activity. In fact, recently (2005-2010) the sun has become less active, while temperatures have marched upwards.
  One of the “smoking guns” that tells us the sun is not causing global warming comes from looking at the amount of the sun’s energy that hits the top of the atmosphere. Since 1978, scientists have been tracking this using sensors on satellites and what they tell us is that there has been no upward trend in the amount of the sun’s energy reaching Earth.
  

  

  Global surface temperature (top, blue) and the sun's energy received at the top of Earth's atmosphere (red, bottom), from 1978 to 2009. The amount of solar energy received at the top of our atmosphere has followed its natural 11-year cycle of small ups and downs, but with no net increase. Over the same period, global temperature has risen markedly. It is therefore extremely unlikely that the sun has been behind the global temperature trend we’ve seen over several decades. Credit: NOAA National Climatic Data Center.

  A second smoking gun is that if the sun were responsible for global warming, we would expect to see warming throughout all layers of the atmosphere, from the surface all the way up to the upper atmosphere (stratosphere). But what we actually see is warming at the surface and cooling in the stratosphere. This is consistent with the warming being caused by a build-up of heat-trapping gases near the surface of the Earth, and not by the sun getting “hotter.”