Dr. Nicola Scafetta writes:
Anthony, I believe that you may be interested in my last published work.
This paper suggests that climate is characterized by oscillations that are predictable. These oscillations appear to be linked to planetary motion. A climate model capable of reproducing these oscillation would outperform traditional climate models to reconstruct climate oscillations. For example, a statistical comparison is made with the GISS model.
Here’s the abstract at Sciencedirect:
Empirical evidence for a celestial origin of the climate oscillations and its implications
Abstract: We investigate whether or not the decadal and multi-decadal climate oscillations have an astronomical origin. Several global surface temperature records since 1850 and records deduced from the orbits of the planets present very similar power spectra. Eleven frequencies with period between 5 and 100 years closely correspond in the two records. Among them, large climate oscillations with peak-to-trough amplitude of about 0.1 $^oC$ and 0.25 $^oC$, and periods of about 20 and 60 years, respectively, are synchronized to the orbital periods of Jupiter and Saturn. Schwabe and Hale solar cycles are also visible in the temperature records. A 9.1-year cycle is synchronized to the Moon’s orbital cycles. A phenomenological model based on these astronomical cycles can be used to well reconstruct the temperature oscillations since 1850 and to make partial forecasts for the 21$^{st}$ century. It is found that at least 60\% of the global warming observed since 1970 has been induced by the combined effect of the above natural climate oscillations. The partial forecast indicates that climate may stabilize or cool until 2030-2040. Possible physical mechanisms are qualitatively discussed with an emphasis on the phenomenon of collective synchronization of coupled oscillators.
A free preprint copy of the paper can be found here:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4639 (PDF available in right sidebar)
Basil Copeland and I made some similar observations in the past, but we did not examine other planetary orbital periods. Basil also did a follow up guest post on the random walk nature of global temperature.
This paper opens up a lot of issues, like Barycentrism, which I have tried to avoid because they are so contentious. I ask that commenters keep the dialog respectful and on-topic please.
NOTE: Updated at 10PM PST to add Figure 12, plus some changes to the introductory text per the request of Dr. Scafetta. – Anthony
noaaprogrammer says:
June 4, 2010 at 10:28 pm
“…The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity…”
I think they’ve earned the right for me to not listen to what they say.
So I’m curious about this. I haven’t read the paper and it’s probably way over my head.
Is there any reason why this couldn’t be a player in the total game.
It’s seeming more and more to me that global climate change seems to be like a baseball team of players. Different things have been players at different times. Which I think is why I have such a hard time believing in any anthropogenic contribution.
In a simple way for us newer to this and not packed with 5 feet of scientific abbreviations behind our name.. Is this paper trying to include the movements, astral spew of matter, oddities in orbit and shed radiation from different directions and different planetary bodies as one of many causes of global climate change?
Like for instance on a simple comparison earth’s precession mixed with orbital changes causes different temperature and climate change patterns every so many thousand years?
I guess I’m not understanding why this wouldn’t be considered as a possible contributor among several? Such as PDO and Volcanic eruptions, greenhouse gases affecting the ocean and vice versa, sunspots and other forms of sun activity all working togethers?
I would certainly not say this is the only causal factor of warming but it seems like it would be a good contender as a contributor among other factors. Isn’t that the whole idea behind being a skeptic in that we don’t believe that man is the sole cause of current climate change which currently is neither warming or global in nature?
What the #$@ur momisugly! is the quadratic centred at 1850 supposed to be?.
Paul Vaughan says:
June 4, 2010 at 10:28 pm
“Starting from a random initial condition, the oscillators self-organize by collapsing their amplitudes; then they sort their phases so that the fastest oscillators are in the lead. Ultimately they all rotate as a synchronized pack, with locked amplitudes and phases.” (like geese)
A good demonstration
and it happens because of conservation of momentum, and coupling through friction
This has been the standard explanation for the synchronization of the moon.
http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast161/Unit2/phases.html
The main and insurmountable problem is that the force of gravity is so weak that any synchronization takes millions and billions of years and not decades and centuries as are the time scales of climate that are being discussed.
1personofdifference says:
June 4, 2010 at 11:19 pm
So I’m curious about this. I haven’t read the paper and it’s probably way over my head.
Is there any reason why this couldn’t be a player in the total game.
Lets say that you enter a casino and are attracted to the roulette table.
You have 5$ in your pocket and the game starts at 1000$.
Do you have to ask for a reason why you cannot be a player at that table?
( my knowledge of real stakes is sketchy, but you should get the gist 🙂 )
In the climate game it is energy instead of money. It takes energy to manifest changes in climate, and that is why watts/m^2 are thrown all over the place.
It does not matter that there are zillions of stellar bodies and galaxies, that there are other planets in the solar system and gases flowing around and magnetic fields and plasma. What does matter is the possibility of any of these to provide enough energy in watts/m^2 to affect the climate in the time scales we are observing it.
Gravity is very weak. Electric and magnetic fields in the space surrounding the earth are also very weak. The only gravitationally strong effects that exchange energy with the earth system within the time frame under observation are from the sun and the moon, combined, expressed as tides.
More generally:
Let us suppose that the correlation in the frequencies demonstrated in this paper are real , i.e. significant within errors. An explanation could be that in the billions of years that the planetary clock synchronized itself, producing a moon facing us with the same side as a by product for example, the sun/moon tides of the earth became modulated by the frequencies of the rest of the planetary system. Then any influence of the tides on the climate would be carrying the imprint of the synchronized planetary clock from millions of years back, and the correlation with the planetary orbits , though not spurious, will not be the causative effect. Causation, i.e. energy input, would be the tides.
stevengoddard says:
June 4, 2010 at 2:00 pm
No matter what the climate does, GISS will probably continue to show increasing temperatures. Eventually they may have only one station left (in a parking lot) and will have to extrapolate the rest of the planet on 12,000 mile smoothing.
You neglected to mention that the remaining station will have an idling vehicle parked next to it in order to ‘maintain’ the elevated temps.
:o)
Ric Werme says:
June 4, 2010 at 5:50 pm
tallbloke says:
June 4, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Leif is wrong. It’s one of his Newtonian thought experiments which fails to take acoount of the fact that the sun is not a rigid point like object.
How can a point-like object be anything but rigid? If you stretch it, it won’t be point like any longer!
Quite so, a neat logical point. Last time I checked, the sun was about 1.4 milion kilometers in diameter and made of wobbly highly mobile plasmas in it’s surface layers. This means it will be differentially affected across it’s diameter by disparate forces.
Stephen Wilde says:
June 4, 2010 at 8:07 pm
Dr. Scafetta has gone well beyond the principle known as Occam’s Razor or for those of a less scientific bent ‘Keep it simple,stupid’.
There is another principle concerning counting of the sheer number of hairs in a deities tangled beard or for those of a less literary bent ‘Accept that it’s complex, stupid’. I agree with you that big scale climate is about longer term changes in sun and ocean, but I don’t miss out the ‘so what affects the sun’ part.
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 4, 2010 at 10:04 pm
Craig Goodrich says:
June 4, 2010 at 6:05 pm
It would seem obvious to me that the Sun’s plasma would be affected in some way by the gravitational forces of its satellites, no?
Indeed it does. The tides are all of one millimeter high.
The vertical tides are small, just as the vertical tide caused by the moon on the earth is small, but the horizontal tides are huge in comparison, and they are the ones which cause much more tidal motion, same as here on earth.
Global climate correlations to any particular periodic forcing could be misleading for simple fact that anomalies in different parts of the globe often move in opposite directions (even on multi decadal scale). Correlation that works for CET does not work for N America (see H. Lamb – J. Eddy), etc.
Even correlation which may work for 100+ years may not work on scale 500+ due to the ocean conveyor; the heat absorbed in the Pacific and Indian oceans will take centuries to be transferred to the Arctic and released there into the atmosphere.
I found only one significant local correlation as shown here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NFC1.htm
but even that needs definition of the transfer mechanism, which I am pondering at the moment.
The various cycles based on planetary orbits I understand. What continues to puzzle me is the origin of the continuous upward trend in the global average temperature anomaly, what appears to be the “quadratic fit” in Fig. 12. I agree with an earlier commenter, this could very well be the bogus warming (my phrase) that simply does not exist as shown at E.M.Smith’s Chiefio blog. I found none of it, either, when examining the HadCRUT3 published data for the USA, at http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/usa-cities-hadcrut3-temperatures.html
Murray Duffin says: June 4, 2010 at 2:32 pm
Vuk – I find that so many of your curves
(re:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GandF.htm
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC-CETfiles.htm
)
are so inadequately labelled and/or titled that as an non-initiate I cannot use them. You would add greatly to your credibility and useability by assuming that your readers do not know what you know, and label everything so it would get a passing grade in a high school science report. Thanks, Murray.
Thanks for the note. You are right, it is a bit of shambles . This is a bit of a hobby, so when I come across something I put it up there just in case I move onto something else. A professional scientist may find whole thing unacceptable. In the past I was given numerous rather unflattering attributes (cyclo-maniac in extreme, man of superior ignorance, charlatan, and finally ‘danger to society’) and my actions described as deplorable.
I can’t think of a greater encouragement.
anna v says:
June 4, 2010 at 11:59 pm
The main and insurmountable problem is that the force of gravity is so weak that any synchronization takes millions and billions of years and not decades and centuries as are the time scales of climate that are being discussed.
What about the force which is 24 million billion (whatever the right number is for electromagnetism) times stronger than gravity.
Scafetta specifically includes that force in his hypothesis. Why are you ignoring it?
Nicola Scafetta is to be congratulated for getting his interesting work into a peer reviewed journal. His hard work will make it easier for others who are investigating this complex phenomenon from an astronomical perspective to get their ideas into print. I tip my hat to you Prof. Nicola Scafetta – a true pioneer.
I will be publishing two papers supporting at least some Prof. Scafetta’s work. One shows direct evidence of lunar tidal influences on the El nino/La Nina ENSO phenomenon, while the second shows the link between the Lunar tidal varaiations and planetary wide standing-wave patterns in large scale sea surface temperature anomalies. Both of these papers show that factors external to the Earth play an
important role in decadal to centenial climate variations in the Earth’s climate.
Apologies if this has been missed in a quick reading. Yes, there are geometry correlations with global temperature, but what is the favoured mechanism to create the heat that raises the temperature (and the reverse case of lowering)? I have heard about changes to solar energy output, changes to cosmic rays and their nucleation of clouds, I’ve read of the gravitational distortion heating some moons of Jupiter, of hanges to earth tides that present more or less hot/cold water to the surface, then of SST effects on cloud formation … etc etc.
Please clarify the mechanism(s) of importance that might arise from geometric/orbital changes, for a busy reader.
For those who want to play around with the dates of planetary alignments, this website is interesting: http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Solar
An extensive planetary alignment occurred in April, 1306 A.D.
The website accepts negative numbers for years B.C. (or B.C.E. for those who prefer that nomenclature).
anna v.,
You spoke of tides. Back in the early 90s I wrote an article that looked at a slightly less than twenty year cycle in tree ring data in Iowa. As I remember, the data went back to 1680, and the cycle appeared to be pretty strong. I speculated that this was the time required for Jupiter and Saturn to ‘lap’ – to line up with the sun. How possible is it that my speculation might have been correct that this could cause a tidal effect on the sun and the result could be similar to ‘stirring up a fire’? And then, this effect could be seen in weather in Iowa?
I wonder how many forced oscillators we could find in the solar system and near galaxy which. over billions of years, have become entrained by some type of coupling? What effect would a black swan event have as it rippled through this delicately balanced system?
Like a stone thrown into a pond, the event would set up a series of ripples, the effects of which would decrease the further you went from the origin. Due to the magnitude of the system it would probably be perturbed by a further event before it had time to settle down. More importantly because the system is driven by deterministic chaos, which exhibits sensitivity to initial conditions, even bodies at the periphery of the event would be effected.
No answers here, just more questions!
Carsten Arnholm, Norway says:
“This paper appears to be recycling the ideas of Landscheidt mostly (such ideas used to be out of favour here?). In chapter 6 “Possible physical mechanisms”, it is mentioned “spin orbit transfer phenomena” which appears to be the same “spin orbit coupling” idea promoted by Landscheidt.
The spin orbit coupling idea assumes angular momentum is constant within the solar system, but transferred between the planets and the Sun as the “solar orbit radius” changes (re. fig 4. of the paper). However, if you perform the calculations, you will find that there is no missing angular momentum to drive any variation of solar spin. The Sun is also in free fall and feels no forces anyway, as Leif has explained many times.”
This is true only if one assumes that the planets and the Sun are singular points or rigid bodies.
But, they aren’t!
The center of the Sun is in free fall. But this is not true for most of the rest of the Sun’s plasma.
Look at the Earth!
Because of the tidal effects on the Earth by the Moon, the Moon is slowly departing from the Earth by an average 38 mm a year and Earth’s rotation because of this is slowing down.
Look here under Tidal effects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon
Don’t forget the size of the Sun! If the Earth was surrounded with a sphere the size of the Sun, then the Moon in its orbit around the Earth would only be about halfway to this sphere and inside it. That’s how large our star is.
This means that even if the torque forces affecting different parts of the Sun are small. And with varying forces, with the strongest forces near the equator and near the surface, the mass displacements of plasma inside the Sun could be quite significant resulting from the elliptical and erratic movement of the Sun’s trajectory caused by the pull from the gas giants. These mass displacements are not homogeneous and could reduce and increase solar activity as a result from different and varying spin at different depth and latitudes.
If one has a correlation and especially if one has a strong correlation with two physical phenomena that could be connected, it makes sense for me to assume that there might be a physical link and look into it. Even if you don’t know what that is.
On a similar note. The CAGW scientists have for 20 years primarily assumed that the resent climate change is as a result of changes from small changes in the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and that the only solar forcing affecting the Earth comes from small changes in TSI. They disregard the strong correlation between solar activity and climate variations, because they don’t look and they say there can’t find a cause for such strong correlation. Yet they claim that they are expert on the Earth’s climate.
In the same vein, here the claim is that the effect from the gas planets on the Sun is only from the small gravitational pull, while not looking at the much stronger torque forces acting on the solar rotation caused by the changing path of the solar trajectory.
If one doesn’t look, one should not find.
Carsten Arnholm, Norway says:
June 4, 2010 at 3:32 pm
“Correlations are just correlations.”
True – and it would be better to have a causal mechanism. But when two phenomena are correlated then either there is a (perhaps undiscovered) causal relation between them or there is a third (perhaps undiscovered) phenomenon driving them both.
If a causal relationship exists between climate oscillations and planetary motion, it would be hard to see how climate could be driving the planets.
If, on the other hand, there is a third mechanism driving both climate and planetary motion, it would be hard to see how this could be CO2.
@tallbloke June 4, 2010 at 4:24 pm
Please do. I am sure it isn’t true. The JPL ephemeris is just a numerically accurate implementation of the laws of gravity, applied to an N-body system. There is no assumption wrt. angular momentum.
So if, if we assume it exists, it is an inmeasurable quantity below the levels of detection. Why then assume it is of importance?
@tallbloke June 4, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Leif has discussed tides at length. Tides on the Sun are very small indeed. Which other effects are you thinking of?
tallbloke says:
June 4, 2010 at 4:59 pm
steven mosher says:
June 4, 2010 at 3:47 pm
1. I hope that Dr. Niki is more willing to share his code and data this time around. or will he use the same tactics he has in the past? The last go round we had with him he was as bad or worse than Jones or Mann.
Maybe it’s in the way you ask. Perhaps dissing the man as a “numerologist” in the same post isn’t the best entree to an open exchange of code.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
I’m not saying here that I’m ‘dissing’ the idea that the sun, moon, and the planets have an effect on the earth, because I do think they do. But I think that Nicola Scafetta should not be slow in sharing his method with anyone—even if their intention is to try to prove him wrong. I can understand him wanting to wait until publication. But after that he should be open to anyone. My only caveat being if his method is used in his livelihood as is the case with Piers Corbyn. But then again Piers Corbyn is not publicly funded and can lock his method away in an eternal time capsule if he’d like.
I also would say it is unfair to compare Scafetta with Jones and Mann. No one is like the global warming guild.
@Ed_B June 4, 2010 at 5:13 pm
I agree that establishing mathematical correlations can be very useful in assisting pure intuition wrt. which paths of investigation to follow. However, if correlations are not backed up by physical mechanisms to explain them, they are just correlations that may be spurious or indicative of some other physical mechanism.
For example, Al Gore showed apparent correlation between CO2 and temperature proxies in his movie, which was used to argue that CO2 was the cause of the temperature shifts. What wasn’t mentioned was that the temperature shifts happened years before the changes in CO2 concentration. He had a correlation, but it didn’t prove anything wrt. his proposed mechanism.
tallbloke says:
June 5, 2010 at 2:41 am
What about the force which is 24 million billion (whatever the right number is for electromagnetism) times stronger than gravity.
Scafetta specifically includes that force in his hypothesis. Why are you ignoring it?
Both gravity AND magnetism from the planets are three orders of magnitude smaller than that of the Sun. On the Earth we have exquisitely sensitive devices capable of measuring these forces and there are essentially traces of any planetary influences [the Sun and the Moon can be seen – the former due to size, the latter due to proximity]. The expected Jupiter tide on the Earth is 0.002% of that of the Moon.
My main problems with the paper are that it is postulated that an unknown process accounts for the planetary influence on the Sun, then another unknown process amplifies the tiny TSI signal to have climate effects, and finally the reliance on Hoyt&Schatten’s obsolete TSI-reconstruction. But we have gone over this so many times, that it is not constructive to repeat all that. Suffice it to say that the usual suspects have been drawn out of the woodwork. Let them explain how Scafetta’s ideas match [or are at variance] with their own.
@ur momisugly Stephen Wilde says: June 4, 2010 at 8:07 pm: “Dr. Scafetta has gone well beyond the principle known as Occam’s Razor or for those of a less scientific bent ‘Keep it simple,stupid’.”
My preferred version is ‘Keep it simple, but don’t be stupid.’
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 5, 2010 at 6:39 am
Both gravity AND magnetism from the planets are three orders of magnitude smaller than that of the Sun. On the Earth we have exquisitely sensitive devices capable of measuring these forces and there are essentially NO traces of any planetary influences.