Climate change contrarians have come up with all kinds of explanations to prove that humans aren’t responsible for global warming, ranging from changes in solar activity to natural cycles in Earth’s own wobbly climate system.

One of the increasingly popular reasons given by them was cosmic rays, which contains highly energetic particles from outer space sources that are constantly bombarding our planet.

Since long, scientists have considered this argument to be baseless, and now, a latest study has further focused on this point and has proved it right.

In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers have reported that changes in amount of cosmic rays hitting Earth could affect temperatures only in the short term, and not in long term.

According to the scientists, cosmic rays serve the basis of formation of the clouds, which can change the temperature by bouncing sunlight back into space. They said that as more rays hit our atmosphere, the more clouds are formed. The more the formation of clouds, the more the sunlight gets bounced back into space, resulting in the cooling of the planet.

It is true in the opposite case also, which means that fewer rays will form fewer clouds and so, less sunlight will get reflected, warming the planet a bit.

Multiple studies have showed that that this argument is flat-out baseless, and have focused on how well global temperatures and cosmic rays were connected.

But Anastasios A. Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and his colleagues, in a new study, have tried to tease out whether our planet’s cosmic ray dose had influenced temperatures or not.

In order to do that, they collected temperature and cosmic-ray data for each year in the 20th century, and further determined that how a particular year’s temperature when compared with other years’ temperatures predicted what the cosmic ray dose was just before that year.

The findings of the study revealed that the cosmic rays were not the reason behind the warming that we experienced in the 20th century.