In a relatively minor work, “Commercial Crises and Sun Spots”,[4] Jevons analyzed business cycles, proposing that crises in the economy might not be random events, but might be based on discernible prior causes. To clarify the concept, he presented a statistical study relating business cycles with sunspots. His reasoning was that sunspots affected the weather, which, in turn, affected crops. Crops changes could then be expected to cause economic changes.
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This is the same Jevons of Jevons Paradox – he found that increases in coal use efficiency resulted in MORE coal being used, not less. Something I point out to folks when they say we can cut back our oil usage by using more efficient cars…

Also from the wiki:

In The Coal Question, Jevons covered a breadth of concepts on energy depletion that have recently been revisited by writers covering the subject of peak oil. For example, Jevons explained that improving energy efficiency typically reduced energy costs and thereby increased rather than decreased energy use, an effect now known as Jevons paradox.
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So it would seem that energy policy, weather cycles, sunspots, and economic performance have been seen as linked for quite some time…

FWIW, Jevons invented a ‘logic piano’, an early form of mechanical computer. He took the very long colonial records of grain production in India and correlated it with the sun spot cycles. He didn’t just make up an idea, he started from the data and looked for a correlation. One only hopes he didn’t do it with a ‘logic piano model’ ;-)

I find the sun spot / stock market correlation to be very plausible. If everything gets a double dose of snow this year, you can bet that natural gas company stocks will be going up. A lot. (APA, XTO, CHK, UNG) If crops fail from cold and wet, watch DBA and JJG along with ADM. And don’t forget the cold remedies from MRK, PFE, JNJ, et. al. Who sells snow plows and road salt? ;-) Oh, and don’t forget MTN for the ski business. But I’d steer clear of the insurance companies (due to losses…) and the swim suit makers. And beer makers would have to pay more for barley! Damn!

…a work, found on the economic branch of a university in Europe, where they compared wheat prices in England and solar cycles since 1260.

The Great Wave, David Hackett Fischer, Oxford University Press, 1996, has some relevant material. On page 50 of the book (linked below) is an interesting graph gleaned from James Thorold Rogers’ price series, as it appeared in Rogers’ History of Agricultural Prices in England

http://books.google.com/books?id=-efB6GTgNdAC&pg=PA265&lpg=PA265&dq=crisis+of+the+14th+century+fischer&source=web&ots=xn8LoZMgbA&sig=d9x6tFA08lzLle14MCVugspJWOo&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA36,M1

Fischer himself does not make the link to solar cycles. In fact, he issues the following caveate to readers in his introduction: “…the movements we are studying are waves – not cycles. To repeat: not cycles, but waves.”

Fischer is mostly concerned with four major waves of economic history. I am chiefly interested in one of these, the Medieval price revolution, which commenced circa 1180 to 1230, with surging populations, greater personal wealth, ascendancy of great political and military forces, and building projects, such as Cathedrals. Much of the source material he has assembled to support his “waves” theory recreates the grain harvests of the periods.

The graph on p. 50 shows departures of wheat prices from the decenial mean, between the years of 1260 to 1356, during the so-called Wolf Solar Minimum, and it is striking. For about 100 years, there are alternating negative and positive price excursions, with a complete cycle completed every 10 – 12 years. In other words, grain prices spiked every 10 – 12 years. The excursions from the mean grew higher and higher, til, around 1316 – 17, when they reached about 200% of the price averages of the previous 50 years.

I’m no statistician, but I’ve watched enough of the CA demonstrations to see that a “cyclical” (or any other) appearance can be an “artifact” of its creator or manner of creation. Perhaps someone better at this than I can point out whether in this case, the business of decennial averaging manufactures this tendency.

What I do know, is the historical evidence of a climatic downturn that “peaked” around this time. Sir William Chester Jordan, in his The Great Famine, characterizes the unremittingly bad weather – cold, wet and raining at all the right times to prevent in subsistence planting, and the ensuing period when “no bird could be heard to sing”. There are many other references to the cold of the Wolf minimum, and its catastrophic effects on Europe.

see my dutch blog
http://klimaathype.volkskrantblog.nl/

Interesting remarks, indeed. There is somewhere – haven’t the link anymore –
a work, found on the economic branch of a university in Europe, where they compared
wheat prices in England and solar cycles since 1260.

Re: DJIA and solar cycles, it’s not that easy: When looking, sometimes there is a trough – on high level – at solar cycle peak (exhaustion?). Because, the best DJIA increases are
on strong solar cycle up phases (beginning 1/3 of whole cycle).
Too, it may count, if we are in a more financial oriented cycle,
or a more commodities oriented cycle.

The crash of ’29 was pretty near the solar cycle peak then (Using 12 month centered mean).
Same to the 2000 peak.
The top of Gold and Silver in ’80 was pretty near to that peak (again using 12 month centered means)

The cra

Also the data here are a bit spotty in demonstrating cause & effect. We’d want GDP trend data. And frankly unless we can succinctly key solar cycles to seasonal variations (crop levels and/or heating fuel use), to GDP to the DJIA, we have a pretty weak case.

It makes some sense that agrarian societies would be keyed on significant solar minima due to general changes in climate, but those are different from the typical 11-year solar cycle.

The only trends that really matter are the long-term trends, and on that note, did anyone notice that Keenlyside released another paper that further explicates a continued 10-year plateau/cooling in global temperatures? He’s now blaming the concordance of the PDO with the AMO (or MAO) or something. After that the paper concludes that temperatures will then shoot up to play catch up with all that extra, new & clumpy CO2 added since 1999 ^H^H^H^H 1985.

(for you young’un’s who never worked on ASCII greenscreen *nix & VMS terminals, ^H was a backspace… however on some misconfigured terminals the ^H actual data on the host would be stored as a “^H” character pair with the previous data unredacted … which lead to sometimes embarrassing moments in memo writing)

Also try looking at the level of daily sunspots against the level of daily dow and look at what happens to price as sunspots turn up. There is a lot to be said for starting with the raw data and eyeballing it.

It’s funny – most non-medical people wouldn’t dream of having an opinion about brain surgery but when it comes to other highly-competitive fields where experience and familiarity with the data is important (and rare), everyone is happy to come right out with a strong view. It’s one of those topics that is more than occasionally about the conversation than about learning what’s true.

Wheat data going back centuries is available on the net – quite easy to find via google. (Often priced in silver – you can convert to pounds sterling if you prefer).

Gann says there is a seven year low to low price cycle in corn – that might be something to explore.

There are plenty of older books written on the relationship between famines and the solar cycle. It was a problem of more pressing concern to previous (and perhaps again to future) generations than has been our recent experience. Solar minimums and solar maximums can create vulnerabilities, for different reasons.

I would encourage anyone interested in pursuing investigation of solar and related cyclical phenomena as as manifested on earth to take a look at Dewey’s book on Cycles, and the work of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles. They have been publishing on this topic since the early 50s, and it would be a shame to reinvent the wheel unnecessarily.

As for investment based on solar, I’ll cast a tentative vote for P Folkens’ interpretation. If it’s true, then by the time each solar max arrives, the price is “baked in the cake”, as they say. Whether the oven actually had any heat may be irrelevant. Such, I think, are the futures markets.

I tried (a little half-heartedly) to get a closer look at historical wheat prices a few years ago as we were entering the solar minimum. I found out that the Chicago Mercantile exchange requires a mebership fee that I wasn’t interested in paying. So I contented myself with keeping my money and just following the headlines. If I recall the sequence of affairs from memory:

Wheat commodities futures started climbing seriously about 2006. The spike by last year was substantial, perhaps a doubling from the lows(?), and the downturn just as dramatic. It has been suggested above that (if you’re only interested in investing) it isn’t necessary to make sense of the how many bushels of wheat per acre were actually being harvested, because it’s human emotion that drives stocks, not empirical reality. Actually, here in Colorado, the 2007 wheat harvest was a bumper crop, so large that, due to a shortage of railcars, the crop couldn’t be hauled away to eastern markets for months. Grain silos full, it just sat (and may yet be sitting) out on the tarmac. But elsewhere in the world it seemed there were a preponderance of famine stories:

“grains stocks fall to 57 days of consumption” http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/Grain/2006.htm
“grains at 30-year lows” http://envirostats.info/2007/12/20/0636/

A lot of the stories I read at the time attributed grain failures (especially in Africa) to drought, whereas we had had logged record snowfalls in most of Colorado’s major drainages. So, what is the effect of a solar minimum or maximum? (I continue to read here with baited breath.)

A point about the former citation: A policymaker, bureaucrat, journalist, politician – all these people are inclined to irrational behaviors (and perhaps ulterior motives) as readlily as a blog-reading nobody, such as myself, and if he wanted to affect world food stores, or prices, he might be inclined to talk up the famine and shortages to suit his benevolent / selfish purposes.

I also realize that it is rash to base any predictions – including future food stores – on a single event or summary of events, such as the world food shortage of 2006. It would be equally rash to predict grand solar maxima or minima on similar history.

But, it would seem, if you see no connection between sun and our investments, then you still are faced with the question of whether the sun can affect the climate. And as long as someone is able to answer, “Yes, it can”, and is willing to parse the tables, charts and graphs…

Then you can bet we’ll soon be off again on the next cycle of speculations.

Personal disclaimer: I have no stock at this time in sunspot or grain “futures”.

Our brain, built from some 10^11 neurons and interconnected by 10^14 synapses, is known to be very sensitive to quickly changing, strong magnetic fields (by means of locally induced eddy currents — such you can artificially trigger seizures.) To a much less extend, there are certainly also effects from weak alternating fields. It’s therefore not unthinkable that the mean human arousal/aggression level is somehow connected to solar activity too.