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Read other letters about this article
This is really tedious. Yes, some people has argued that it's changes in solar irradiance that drives climate change, not human activity. Lot of research, bottom line, it's been pretty well shot down.
Manacker posts, taking a random example, a 1999 paper by Lockwood and Stamper.
http://www.wdc.rl.ac.uk/wdcc1/papers/grl.htm
The arguments in the paper were tested, notably by a 2005 paper by Foukal, North & Wrigley.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5693/68?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=sunspots&searchid=1139607713241_15140&FIRSTINDEX=0&journalcode=sci#ref17
which politely blows most of the argument out of the water.
A more systematic study by the same writers was published in 2006, giving the bottom line:
http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2006/brightness.shtml
Similar exercises could be done for the rest of the stack.
The point I'm making is porting unsorted papers and then flatly announcing that they make the case that humans aren't causing climate change is a total crock, a rhetorical trick to intimidate and bamboozle.
My suspicion is that Mnacker hasn't himself read the papers and wouldn't understand them if he did. What I can say for a fact is that he didn't check up to see where they led. I'd rather believe he was mistaken or taken in than lying.
