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.
I have to admit it – I’ve always wondered philosophically how a trace gas in our atmosphere can be the chief cause of so many problems and the focus of so many debates. I hope our descendants don’t think us mad for having wasted so much time on CO2. Certainly there has to be more to this warming phenomenon than man-made CO2 alone.
(aka Larry Kirk, but changed to avoid confusion with the other Larry commenting here..)
re Comments by Stephen Wilde
Stephen, thanks for your further enlightening comments. I have had a moment to think further about the oceans, and realised this:
1. Ignoring salinity, if max H20 density is 4C, and if all hotter and colder waters float on top of this, then..
2. The hot and cold water must sit side by side at the surface!
3. And so, where hot and cold surface waters meet (somewhere between balmy tropics and polar ice caps), they must eventually cool/heat one another down/up to 4C
4. At which point, this ‘densest’ ocean water must sink, with the less dense hotter and cooler waters closing in over the top of it, meeting again to perpetuate the process
5. Thus there should be an outflow of surface waters form the equator and the poles towards downwelling zones somewhere in between
(I may be one of the few here who didn’t already know this.. a geologist, not an oceanographer)
And then all this will then be made horrendously complicated by the coriolis effect, the prescence of intervening landmasses, sea floor topography, salinity/density differences, geological heating, eg. at mid ocean ridges, etc.
What a different system it is from atmospheric circulation! (And if this is the beast that actually powers the atmospheric weather and climate..how could you ever model the latter in isolation?)
Further thought required
Quite right Laurence.
The recent discovery of multidecadal oceanic oscillations in each ocean combined with my simple observation of the changes in the latitudinal positions of the weather systems when a warming trend changed to a cooling trend and vice versa is what led to my novel ideas about the climate mechanisms.
This post which I put on another board sums it up very well and I think I’ll post it in many places (and often) whenever it seems relevant:
“Changing temperatures induce circulation changes as the air seeks to restore the sea surface/surface air temperature equilibrium and at the same time resolve ocean induced variations in the sun to sea / air to space equilibrium.
The circulation changes alter all the processes involved in the rate of energy transfer from surface to space. In so far as the air circulation fails for a time to maintain temperature stability then radiation from surface to space will also change but in due course stabilty is always restored between the four said parameters (sea surface / surface air / sun to sea / air to space).
Only huge catastrophic changes capable of altering the temperature of the whole body of the oceans can set a new global equilibrium in the short term (less than millennia). The sun can also do it gradually but it takes centuries e.g. from Roman Warm Period to Mediaeval Warm Period to Little Ice Age to now. The solar effect is heavily modulated over time by ocean cycles. A change in the composition of the air alone cannot do it.
The role of water vapour combined with the latent heats of evaporation and condensation gives the circulation changes the major part of their ability to accelerate energy transfer from surface to space.
So, the most common and by far the largest forcing at any given time is multi decadal variations in energy emissions from the oceans. In the background are slow century scale changes in solar output.
Temperature changes induced by sun and oceans drive air circulation changes which drive changes in every aspect of climate including convection, conduction, evaporation, condensation, precipitation, windiness, cloudiness, albedo and humidity as regards both quantities and distribution.
Water vapour in itself is not a driver nor does it have cycles or periodicities of it’s own. It’s a very useful contibutor to the whole process though and without it the Earth would be entirely different.”