A new paper published by the Astronomical Society of Australia titled:
Does a Spin–Orbit Coupling Between the Sun and the Jovian Planets Govern the Solar Cycle?
contains a warning about earthly climate change not immediately obvious from the abstract:
Based on our claim that changes in the Sun’s equatorial rotation rate are synchronized with changes in the Sun’s orbital motion about the barycentre, we propose that the mean period for the Sun’s meridional flow is set by a Synodic resonance between the flow period (~22.3 yr), the overall 178.7-yr repetition period for the solar orbital motion, and the 19.86-yr synodic period of Jupiter and Saturn.
According to an interview with Andrew Bolt, of the Australian Newspaper, Herald Sun, Ian Wilson, one of the authors explained:
It supports the contention that the level of activity on the Sun will significantly diminish sometime in the next decade and remain low for about 20 – 30 years. On each occasion that the Sun has done this in the past the World’s mean temperature has dropped by ~ 1 – 2 C.
###
Hmmm, I’m not sold on this idea. This is a lot like what Dr. Theodor Landscheidt proposes. I have a little bit of trouble understanding how the “mass at a distance” gravitational effects of Jupiter and Saturn could have much effect on the solar dynamo.
I’m sure both my readers, and Dr. Leif Svalgaard, who regularly monitors this blog, will have something to add to provide additional insight. – Anthony
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There are two issues here:
1) barycentric motion
2) planetary tides
The standard [and correct I think] objection to the barycentric motion having any effect is that the Sun is in free fall around the barycenter and therefore does not feel any forces from that [Equivalence postulate of General Relativity or some such, or in simpler terms: the gravitational and centrifugal forces balance completely].
The standard [and correct I think] objection to the planetary tides is that they are too small. Over at Climate Audit [Svalgaard #6, post #569] there has been extensive discussion on this. I quote here one of my comments:
“instead of me going through a long explanation, I’ll just refer to a good one at http://mb-soft.com/public/tides.html
Working through the math one gets that the tides by the Moon on the Earth is 367 mm high [mm = millimeter = 1/25.4th of an inch]. Inserting values for the Sun and Jupiter one gets a tide 0.47 mm high [if I have done the math correctly – you might want to check this !]. Put all the other planets where you want, their individual tides will be less that this. Venus’ is almost as high as Jupiter’s. All together, the tidal effects are of the order of 1 mm. Compare this to the convective overturning of the photosphere in Texas-sized granules moving at 1-2 km/sec [that is 1000000-2000000 mm/sec] and you might be able to see that planetary tidal effects can be ignored. Of course, there are always people that have problems with numbers. You might be one of them; if so, think of a large truck running over an ant at 100 miles/hour. The effect of the ant on the trajectory of the truck is relatively much larger than the tidal influence of the planets on the matter of the Sun. This much was known to Isaac Newton in the 1700th Century. Have we not progressed since then? Can we not stand on the shoulders of that giant? And can we not get off this topic, once and for all? BTW, the tides by Jupiter on the Earth is 1/500 of a millimeter [at closest approach].”
An objection to both theories is that they do not explain the reversal of all the magnetic polarities [of spot pairs, hemispheres, polar regions]. The standard way of ‘rescuing’ the planetary theory is to say that the planets do not ’cause’ the solar cycle, but only ‘modulates’ it slightly, letting the ‘real’ dynamo mechanism take care of the polarity reversals. The minuteness of the tidal effects leaves one grasping for how that modulation is achieved.
I have not read the Australian article. Seems they want money for it, and its author is ‘not at liberty to share it with us’. So, until he does, I’ll just let it rest there. I have found in discussion with many, many faithful that none of my above arguments carry any weight whatsoever with them. I’m at a loss why not [although this does not disturb me in any way].
Suzanne
It is really exciting to see the papers and theories of Landscheidt and Fairbridge discussed by people who have read them and understand what they are talking about. Has anyone read the Mikul Sharma’s (Dartmoth) study of Be10 levels in oceanic cores that found a 100,000 year periodicity in solar magnitism, i.e when the sun’s orbit was more oval, solar activity was lower (and the Earth was in an ice age)? This may explain the mechanism behind the eccentricity part of the Milankovich cycle being the “pacemaker of the Ice Ages”. There have been several recent papers that show warming before the insolation change from orbital changes is strong enough to cause warming-a “causality problem. The search for the real drivers of our climate is much more exciting than than the litany of woes caused by CO2.
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Leif,
I have no problem with your maths. I am certain you are correct. But you state that “Working through the math one gets that the tides by the Moon on the Earth is 367 mm high [mm = millimeter = 1/25.4th of an inch].” So the moon’s tides on the Earth cause only a 3.67CM rise in sea level?
Whilst your maths may be correct – this does not match with the empirical reality of ocean tides. It may be the case somewhere on Earth but certainly not in the temperate latitudes. So assuming that your maths is correct, something else must be causing the 2 – 3 metre rise in water level between low tide and high tide. Even the Earth’s crust rises by centimeters – perhaps your maths is talking of the rise in the mantle rather than the oceans and the atmosphere?
There are many references for this but see
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/sci/A0861552.html as one that puts them together in simple conceptual terms.
Dr. Manuel Oliver, astrophysics professor at the University of Missouri, Columbia, has some different ideas on the core of the Sun.
http://www.omatumr.com/abstracts2005/The_Suns_Origin.pdf
Essentially, he argues that the Sun is not powered by nuclear fusion and that it is what he calls a “clothed neutron star“.
I can`t say I agree with this rather exotic view, but he believes that this neutronium core moves about as a result of tidal forces from Jupiter and Saturn.
tbirdnow.mee.nu/planetsolar_interactions_and_the_earths_climate
This paper definitely buttresses his case.
Thought everyone would find this interesting.
Leif Svalgaard (13:21:32) :
“And can we not get off this topic, once and for all?”
QUIET EVERYONE!
The science is now settled. The SIM hypothesis has been debunked just this morning by the consensus of Dr. Svalgaard.
If I catch any one of you deniers discussing the discredited SIM hypothesis anywhere, I’ll cancel your research grant, refuse to publish your paper, and take away your AMS TV weatherman seal.
Dr. Svalgaard, I’m with you on the extremely small tidal forces.
But how do astronomers find planets around other stars based on the “wobble” of the star? What’s causing it to wobble?
REPLY: as I understand it, these are usually much more massive planets with smaller orbits than Jupiter and Saturn. To get an idea of how this works at the relative body sizes involved, see this animation of Pluto and it’s moon Charon:
http://orbitsimulator.com/gravity/PlutoCharon.GIF
Leif may have a different explanation, but I thought this would help visualize it – Anthony
Ian: from the very article you cited: The typical tidal range in the open ocean is 2 feet. The actual tides vary greatly depending on how far you are from the coast. In Fundy Bay it can be 10-15 meters. BTW, 1 CM is 10 MM, so the tides I calculated is 36.7 CM [more than a foot, then add 20 CM from the Sun… and it fits quite well].
John-X: no need to be so sarcastic. I was quoting from another blog, where there already is a prohibition [not mine] on barycenter theories, so get off your indignation and try to make a contribution to the subject instead. Maybe I should have excised that comment that triggered such a reaction in you, but, hey, if one has to cater for everyone’s sensibilities there would be little to say.
Here is a thought experiment: Add a pea to the solar system orbiting at some distance. The addition of the pea will alter the position of the barycenter. Not by much, though. Now, slowly move the pea away from the solar system. This will move the barycenter a bit further out. Still not by much. Since there is no [in my Newtonian thought experiment] limit to how far away we can move the pea, there is no limit to how far away we can move the barycenter, then watch the sunspots grow and GROW and GGRROOWW as we continue to move the pea away.
You have just defined a convergent series with an absolute limit Dr. Svalgaard, i.e. distance of pea = infinity, or to put it differently, the same barycenter as if there is no pea in the first place. What is the point of the thought experiment?
Jeff: the wobble is not tidal forces, but the regular gravitational interaction between the bodies as you can see here
Dr_Mike (05:05:11) :
“From the sun’s point of view, it can move from 0.1 solar radii from the CoM, out to 2 radii, in a mere 5 years or so (and other times it can spend decades at 0.7-1.3 or so). The sun’s orbital angular momentum is changing drastically during these times, but I said angular momentum is conserved. So what happens? The sun has to _transfer_ angular momentum from its orbit to its own internal rotation.
No – angular momentum within the solar system has to be conserved, and most of it is held in Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun. I haven’t worked though the math, but I bet that when the Sun moves from or to the barycenter the distance between the barycenter and Jupiter/Saturn/Venus changes in the appropriate amounts to keep the solar system angular momentum constant. Don’t get too excited about barycenters, they’re mainly mathematical constructs to solve N-body problems where one object’s mass is not much, much greater than others. They are not physical entities that have force, mass, and other attributes of a real object.
For the Sun to speed up its rotational period it needs some torque, and the only source of that is from tides, and those are so weak that internal thermal processes must overwhelm it.
One place where tides are affecting rotational speed is the Earth-Moon system. The Earth’s rotation pushes the Moon-facing tidal bulge ahead and that makes the Moon speed up and the Earth slow down. The other tidal bulge has a opposite but smaller effect since it’s farther away. Eventually Moon and Earth will become tidally locked.
That’s a long ways off, for now the Earth is slowing down 2.3 msec per century and the Moon’s orbit is increasing 3.8 cm per year. See http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEhelp/rotation.html for more and a lot of typos.
Leif Svalgaards last sentence somehow makes me wonder: “I’m at a loss why not [although this does not disturb me in any way].”
If the hypothesis is to be taken seriously, someone has to come up with a plausible mechanism. In the same way that they said for years that the change in solar activity was far too small to affect Earth’s climate, until Svensmark offered a mechanism that linked them via a route nobody had thought of, you have to give up on either the direct ‘shaking’ effect of wobbling around the barycentre or (very likely) the direct tidal effect. (Although if on Earth they can get amplified from that 36 cm up to 8 m tides or 17 knot tidal races by the existence of land, I wouldn’t like to make any firm assertions of impossibility regarding the sun just yet.) Correlation does not imply causation, and it is very easy to play numerology with sufficient free variables to find something that looks significant, but isn’t. The negative calculations referenced here so far don’t mean there cannot be any relationship, but there’s still a lot of work needed before it can even be considered to be shown possible, let alone a contender. Personally, I don’t think there’s much hope for it.
jeez: the point was to show that having the Sun orbit the barycenter with the added pea moving away from the sun would create ever growing sunspot activity if you believe that the Sun’s movement around the barycenter is the cause of the sunspot cycle. If you don’t believe so, there is no need to ponder the experiment any further.
Niels: Wonder is the first step towards Enlightenment.
Dr. Svalgaard–first of all, thank thank you. You are one of the few posters in my 7 year history online to have noticed I try and stick to lowercase in the use of my nom de plume.
I am not sure your thought experiment is valid. As the pea is moved away from the sun wouldn’t the barycenter move toward the original pea-free location, thus reducing the effect? This is your field and not mine, but I would assume that a fixed mass would have a decreasing effect with increasing distance.
Leif,
I think the problem with the pea example is that the period tends to infinity too, so you might think of it as infinite effect but taking place infinitely slowly – i.e. not at all.
Archimedes observed “Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.”
Leif Svalgaard observes [paraphrased] “Give me a pea and a really big orbit and I will relocate the solar system’s barycenter.”
It always bothered me that Archimedes neglected the need for bracing the fulcrum and how he was going to push on that lever. All Leif has to do is get a pea a _long_ way away and have it orbit the solar system. At least the tidal effect will be minimal, albeit computable. 🙂
Of course, this may add yet another periodic cycle to solar activity, so please keep the pea within the Earth’s carbon cycle but away from those wing flapping tropical butterflies. The USA has had enough tornadoes this year.
jeeztheadmin (14:24:4x) :
“What is the point of the thought experiment?”
To get people to think less of barycenters and more of dinner. 5:45 PM here, time to think about dinner.
jeez: Precision in thought and execution is a hallmark of mine, so, of course, I get the lower case correct. The center of mass [or barycenter] of a system of particles is a resulting vector that is the average of their position vectors weighted by their masses: R = sum(m[i]*r[i])/sum(m[i]), which grows without bounds if one of the r[i]s [that for the pea] increases without bounds. I didn’t want to cause you any further embarrassment by dissecting your comment too much, but since you asked… 🙂
Stevo: I can add a little demon that moves the pea around in my Newtonian Universe with any period I want and create effects [ever-growing sunspot cycles] progressing at any speed I want.
Leif,
If there is no limit to how far away we can move the pea, wouldn’t we then have to consider every other object in the known universe having an affect on the barycenter?
At certain point (most likely while still quite close to the barycenter) wouldn’t the gravitational affect of the pea on the barycenter become inconsequential?
I’m not embarrassed at all, it’s been over 30 years since I dabbled in physics and proper definitions are no longer accessible from memory in my aged gray matter.
I presumed there was a physical mechanism postulated (I admit to have read nothing of these threads or the underlying theory). It seemed counter intuitive, indeed nonsensical that a physical mechanism postulated which obeyed any laws of physics would have an increasing effect with a decreasing physical influence (gravitational forces). That may have been the point of your thought experiment in the first place, and if so, thank you for correcting me.
This is the problem when I jump in late to a conversation.
Leif’s objection ot barycentric motion is, IMO, ridiculous. The sun is in freefall around the barycenter? As a reader pointed out in a later post, other stars have wobbles. That’s how we know that there are planets around other stars. The gravitational pull of planets makes the star wobble as it spins. In other words, the planet’s gravity pulls the star t’wards it a little. If there were no planet, there would be no wobble. Now take our solar system, there are many planets, several of them large. The planets take different lengths of time to orbit the sun, yet each pulls on it a little. That means the sun will have a different position in the solar system depending on the location of the planets. As the planets orbit over hundreds or thousands of years, there will be cycles where they are in certain allignment. When alligned, they will pull the sun that much farther away from the center of the solar system. This will cause changes in the movement of the sun’s inner core (be it liquid or solid) and it’s surface (liquid or plasma) which spin at different rates (the different rate of spin between the center and surface of the sun is what stretches and twists the sun’s magnetic field which causes sunspots). With increased sunspots there is increased luminosity, flares, solar wind, and etc, not to mention the whole cosmic ray and cloud theory which is still being debated. None of these things will individually change the climate much, but added together, as well as their effect on other phenomenon that affect climate (ENSO, PDO etc), then you can understand how the sun impacts climate. If you wanna get really fiesty, throw the following into the mix: a few barbecues and air conditioners at the local temperature station along with a few politically and/or financially motivated goof-bags, well, a lot of goof-bags.