From this Georgia Tech article:
In 1657, Christiaan Huygens revolutionized the measurement of time by creating the first working pendulum clock. In early 1665, Huygens discovered “..an odd kind of sympathy perceived by him in these watches [two pendulum clocks] suspended by the side of each other.” The pendulum clocks swung with exactly the same frequency and 180 degrees out of phase; when the pendulums were disturbed, the antiphase state was restored within a half-hour and persisted indefinitely. Huygens deduced that the crucial interaction for this effect came from “imperceptible movements” of the common frame supporting the two clocks.
I can’t tell just yet if this is a new paper, or if the news story is a re-hash of the 2007 paper by these authors. Either way, it is interesting. See the authors pre press paper here – Anthony
MILWAUKEE — The bitter cold and record snowfalls from two wicked winters are causing people to ask if the global climate is truly changing.
The climate is known to be variable and, in recent years, more scientific thought and research has been focused on the global temperature and how humanity might be influencing it.However, a new study by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee could turn the climate change world upside down.
Scientists at the university used a math application known as synchronized chaos and applied it to climate data taken over the past 100 years.”Imagine that you have four synchronized swimmers and they are not holding hands and they do their program and everything is fine; now, if they begin to hold hands and hold hands tightly, most likely a slight error will destroy the synchronization. Well, we applied the same analogy to climate,” researcher Dr. Anastasios Tsonis said.
Scientists said that the air and ocean systems of the earth are now showing signs of synchronizing with each other.
Eventually, the systems begin to couple and the synchronous state is destroyed, leading to a climate shift.”In climate, when this happens, the climate state changes. You go from a cooling regime to a warming regime or a warming regime to a cooling regime. This way we were able to explain all the fluctuations in the global temperature trend in the past century,” Tsonis said. “The research team has found the warming trend of the past 30 years has stopped and in fact global temperatures have leveled off since 2001.”The most recent climate shift probably occurred at about the year 2000.
Now the question is how has warming slowed and how much influence does human activity have?”But if we don’t understand what is natural, I don’t think we can say much about what the humans are doing. So our interest is to understand — first the natural variability of climate — and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,” Tsonis said.Tsonis said he thinks the current trend of steady or even cooling earth temps may last a couple of decades or until the next climate shift occurs.
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Then we are looking for the climate variable that is badly out of phase. That would be the one that eventually draws the others partially towards it.
I would expect that to be the Sun, the biggest dude in the solar system.
Is this the way the media works these days — report on AGW-findings the day after they’re released and on contrarian studies a year-and-a-half later?
Silly rabbit – that’s a rhetorical question.
Who’d a thunk — a number of oceanic and atmospheric cycles sometimes running in synch, either in their positive or negative phases. I suspect a fair number of Anthony’s readers have made this point more than once. But who listens to a bunch of skeptics?
Very interesting!
The “mental picture” of climatic events like ENSO and NAO og AMO as quasi-synchronised systems seems very attractive to me (maybe “strange attractors” by themselves :-)) . I have previously mentioned the work of Ilya Prigogine summarised in his “Order out of Chaos” either here, or eventually over at Lucia’s “The Blackboard”.
While Huygens pendulums had more or less constant forces acting upon them, I suspect the the forces acting on “time-integrated” weather phenomena are non-constant both in intensity and possibly in direction.
I would however not be surprised if these forces could act as “attractors” thereby “simplifying” the chaotic propertis and increasing the predictability of the systems.
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
A previous paper by this team:
http://www.uwm.edu/~aatsonis/npg-14-723-2007.pdf
calculates the Hurst exponent to show anti-persistance in historical climate. This means reversion to a mean . Very interesting.
This may be of interest with those with a fast connection
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1TMZASCR-I&feature=related
showing the synchronization of two and four metronomes.
Isnt the internet marvelous.
Climate science in general, and those who advocate and support Global Warming now suffer from a disctintly unscientific condition where this week’s plausable theory supplants last week’s plausable theory, as long as it doesn’t contradict the general theme of self-loathing human activity in general and western prosperity in particular.
The left loves to breathlessly anticipate at “tipping point” where they will finally be shown to have been correct all along. They never consider how absurd their theory was, and how it eventually dawns on enough minds just how wrong it is. The tippinng point is reached alright, and we are close to the point in this adventure when it will suddenly go out of fashion.
If experience is any guide, the left will be back soon enough with another urgent issue that we must correct and fixate on or WE WILL ALL DIE. The only constant is that their pre-packaged solution will be similar in how it too will destroy liberty, increase government control and raise taxes.
So, what are good candiates for the next Urgent Issue?
I would nominate: estrogen analogs in wastewater.
I welcome other nominations.
Well I wouldn’t get too excited about what Christiaan Huygens did way back when in 1657. (Hey I once cited Huygens from about that time, as prior art in a Patent Lawsuit, that I was a Technical Expert witness on).
It is a cute experiment though and has paractical implications; like the multiple strings on the same note on a piano, are weakly coupled via the blacks at each end, that they run over.
But there’s one thing that is missing from this story. All of those clock pendula (ums) are fairly closely tuned to the same frequency, by design, and the effect of the extremely weak coupling is not to retune them, but to simply phase lock them.
If you couple together oscillating systems that are not tuned to the same frequency; then they most certainly will not retune themselves into mutual synchronism.
They will in fact transfer energy back and forth between themselves, so that one will gain in amplitude while another collapses to zero; and then the process will reverse, and they will swap the energy again. That’s with just two coupled oscillators; but with three or more they will get totally chaotic; but the one state they will never assume, is all (n) of them to come to the same frequency and then phase lock.
So if you are imagining from this experiment, that climate systems will synchoronize with each other; forget it; they drive each other bonkers; but they certainly will not operate co-operatively and synchronize. well unless by sheer accident, each oscillator, operating freely and uncoupled, happens to be tuned to rather closely the same frequency.
George
When you take many different oscillators with each having their own frequency, it might look chaotic when the sum is made but eventually and maybe for a very short time, they will all be synchromized and at another time they will all cancel themselves.
Ivanka Charvatova´s text to Fig.2:
“The orbit of the centre of the Sun around the centre of mass of
the solar system (in units of 10)3 AU) separated into two basic types,
the ordered (in a JS-trefoil) (top) and the disordered (bottom). The
area in which the Sun moves has a diameter of 0.02 AU or 4.4 rs, this
being the solar radius, or 3 á 106 km. The most disordered sections of
the intervals lying between the trefoils are plotted. The Sun enters into
the trefoils with a periodicity of 178.7 years, on the average (see the
times, years at the top of the respective ®gures). The value represents
the ®rst basic cycle of solar motion. While the trefoils are nearly
identical (after a rotation), the disordered orbits dier one from the
other. The Wolf, SpoÈ rer, Maunder and Dalton prolonged minima of
solar activity coincide with the intervals of disordered solar motion.
The Sun moves along a trefoil (along one of the loops), over 50 (10)
years, respectively. The two latest and the following trefoils are
denoted by triangles”
Link: http://www.giurfa.com/charvatova.pdf
Report from Houston; Wonder what Teddy Kennedy thinks?
see full article at http://www.oilonline.com/news/features/oe/20080319.ebb_and_.22646.asp
Overblown wind plan just hot air [from: Offshore Engineer]
by: Michael J Economides, professor at the Cullen College of Engineering, University of Houston, and editor-in-chief of the Energy Tribune.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
7000 turbines for Britain (equivalent to one every 1/2 mile around the ENTIRE coast of Britain.
Existing turbines in UK NOT achieving the 30% load factor conceded to be a minimum to be “economically viable and efficient” (sic). Offshore, about 20%; urban sites, as low as 9% (!! makes the Otto cycle look pretty efficient]
Der Spiegel reports on breakdowns in Germany and questions promises of 20 year lifespans for turbines.
[my father-in-law, mechanical engineer and Harvard MBA, has long suggested “domestic nuclear piles” in every basement. This would (a) cut dependence on the grid, which has a way of failing-down under sheets of ice in Upstate NY where he lives) and (b) would serve the Darwinian goal of improving the technical skills of subsequent generations (assuming that the less competent couldn’t handle the “evolutionary pressure” of maintaining a radioactive lump in the basement)]
Anybody know of up-time stats for US-based wind-farms?
I would GUESS that we should do better than that on the eastern slopes of the Rockies, but I wonder what the real numbers are.
See the discovery of Patterson et al. on how the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is synchronized with the 75-90 year Solar Gleissberg Cycle”
Tim Patterson et al. Gleissberg Cycle: Pacemaker for the Pacific Decadal Oscillation? (PowerPoint) International Climate Change Conference New York, March 2009
This type of synchronisation is imbedded in the planetary orbital (sidereal and synodic) periods, as described in the Titius–Bode law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titius-Bode_law
Very interesting research.
For one thing, given the inherent complexity and non-linearity of the Climate System (ala Lorenz et al), this dynamical systems approach makes a heckuva lot more sense than the standard approach of worshipping at the output of GCMs.
My formal background is in Geophysics and for those interested a similar mechanism has been proposed in the simulation of Earthquake Seismicity- e.g. see http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1993/93GL00292.shtml (phenomena such as faulting and Earthquakes also obey complex non-linear dynamics).
The synchronicity of mechanical systems relies on phased feedback through damped elasticity. I don’t see any feedback mechanism here that eventually dampens any solar effects.
Funny how little of this was even alluded to in the 2007 IPCC SPM and TAR. It was all about high confidence levels that only GHGs had any influence on climate variability.
Interesting reading:
Falsification of the atmospheric CO 2 greenhouse effects within the frame of physics
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0707.1161
Re: Robert Coté (10:20:05) :
“I don’t see any feedback mechanism here that eventually dampens any solar effects.”
Here is the way I interpretated this research (I could be wrong, but here is my 2 cents anyway).
The Climate System is forced by several mechanisms, a few of which are:
1) External Solar variability
2) Internal ENSO variability
3) Internal Thermohaline variability
4) Internal NAO variability
5) Internal AMO variability
etc. etc.
The “damped spring” in the system is the Climate itself (Air+Ocean+Land etc). Over a period of time (decades) these modes of variability become coupled, at which point a total phase transition is caused (we switch from a net warm to a net cold Climate) and the variability of the component parts of the Climate starts all over again. Several decades down the road the new modes of variability couple and cause the system as a whole to flip again.
Complex systems often contain periods of “pseudo-periodicity” (they look predictable for periods of time), but just when you think you have the new “pattern” classified and locked down, a phase transition occurs and a completely new mode (or set of modes) of variability are initiated.
From the text: “So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,” Tsonis said.”
Should not have said that. There goes their funding!
Strange – electrical systems have damping, and they don’t have mechanical systems!
FYI – fluid dynamics & heat transfer have multiple mechanisms for this sort of thing. It doesn’t surprise me that there are linkages between the various systems.
It is the “Music of the spheres” again, so there must be observable changes not only on the earth. A “gap” every 176 years!
Every 8 complete cycles, of 22 years, of the Sun.
The MSM are still completely synchronised especialy the BBC
From last weeks conference in Copenhagan
” The six key messages include statements that:
“the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised”
“there is no excuse for inaction”
“the influence of vested interests that increase emissions” must be reduced
“regardless of how dangerous climate change is defined”, rapid, sustained and effective mitigation is required to avoid reaching it”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7946476.stm
AS George E. Smith implies it is not necessary to infer synchronicity in a system which involves multiple variable cycles interacting with each other in both oceans and air.
All one needs to affect climate is an overall net balance of all the seperate cyclical components at any particular time trending towards cooling or warming and shifting between each at variable intervals
I described what I thought was going on last June in this article:
http://climaterealists.com/news.php?id=1487&linkbox=true
and so far the real world is co operating.
More from Wang, Swanson, and Tsonis on the way…
http://climateresearchnews.com/2009/02/new-paper-nao-the-pacemaker-of-major-climate-shifts/
How ’bout that NAO, sports fans!
Isn’t this Tesla, on a larger scale?
JimB