Scafetta on 60 year climate oscillations

” The Monster says:
Professor Scafetta needs to show the physical processes by which Jupiter, the moon, Saturn, etc) change the Earth’s energy balance, then provide supporting data for those processes.
No, he doesn’t. He only has to show the correlation, which he’s done in spades. ”
Over the last two years in my city the rate of crime has fallen by about 6%. Over the same period, the rate of unemployment has risen by about 5%. Do you think this indicates causation? Do you think that people should go looking for a causal relationship between falling crime and rising unemployment based on this correlation?
Final piece of information: the crime rate fell ~5% from 4 years ago to 2 years ago…. even though unemployment was almost constant over that two year period.
Correlation does not prove causation, and in the absence of plausible causal relationship, correlation is hardly worth looking at. There are spurious correlations everywhere you look, and the more you look the more spurious correlations you will find.

What is missing are the mechanisms to explain a set of observations. The position of the planets does have an affect on both the sun and earth, the effects are complicated as the sun changes cyclically which affects the planets.
The observation of changes of nuclear reaction rates (both alpha and beta decay which rules out neutrinos as the mechanism as alpha decay is not affected by neutrinos) where the change in reaction rates correlates (15 years of observations two different observations in both hemispheres to rule out seasonal affects) with sun earth distance. The affect has a lag time (which also rules out neutrinos as they travel with the speed of light) is a significant clue as to what is causing the that affect as well as the affects of the planets on the sun and the sun on the planets.
A changing scalar field will affect both alpha and beta decay.
What it appears is the sun is not neutral. The sunspots appear to help the sun attempt to equalize. From time to time the sunspot mechanism is interrupted and charge builds up. The charge is released in a strong event which affects the geomagnetic field (geomagnetic jerks or geomagnetic excursions.) Both the geomagnetic jerks and geomagnetic excursions affect the climate.
The is a complicate set of reasoning concerning the geomagnetic field mechanisms (paradoxes) that supports this hypothesis.
There is a whole set of other phenomena that supports this hypothesis such as sprites and elves. (Massive electrical discharge from the ionosphere to the top of clouds. Massive electrical discharge from the atmosphere to volcanoes (sometimes but not all times), as well as set of astronomical observations. (There is a significant increase in volcanic activity during solar minimums and deep solar minimums. Following the hypothesis the solar charge is reduced during these periods and then a charge unbalance from the core to the surface of the planet. The energy from the charge release causes an increase in volcanic activity and earthquakes.)
http://www.universetoday.com/28774/new-array-captures-redoubt-volcano-lightning/
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/BardPapers/responseCourtillotEPSL07.pdf
“The final statement of BD07 regarding the fact that aa correlates “much better” than
magnetic data with solar irradiance and global temperature being wrong, the “clues” the authors discuss are actually irrelevant. The “long term trend” is the OMT and not a linear trend as recalled above. We should recall that the ESK and SIT magnetic series and the aa series do not measure exactly the same magnetic phenomena and are not expected to be related in a linear way. But the point of Le Mouël et al (2005) was to show with very simple indices that the entire ionospheric and magnetospheric current systems, despite their differences, pulsate on the long term at the rhythm of the Sun, as exemplified by the OMT. BD07’s next interrogation regarding open versus total magnetic flux is not founded. For example, it has long been known that a simple terrestrial proxy such as the amplitude of the quiet day solar variation of declination provides a wonderful representation of the eleven year cycle of sunspots (i.e. the Wolf number).”
Correlations Between Nuclear Decay Rates and Earth-Sun Distance
http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3283
Evidence for Correlations Between Nuclear Decay Rates and Earth-Sun Distance
Unexplained periodic fluctuations in the decay rates of Si-32 and Ra-226 have been reported by groups at Brookhaven National Laboratory (Si-32), and at the Physikalisch-Technische-Bundesandstalt in Germany (Ra-226). We show from an analysis of the raw data in these experiments that the observed fluctuations are strongly correlated in time, not only with each other, but also with the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Some implications of these results are also discussed, including the suggestion that discrepancies in published half-life determinations for these and other nuclides may be attributable in part to differences in solar activity during the course of the various experiments, or to seasonal variations in fundamental constants.
This experiment, which extended over 15 years, overlapped in time with the BNL experiment for approximately 2 years, and exhibited annual fluctuations in the 226Ra data similar to those seen at BNL. Figure 3 exhibits the PTB data as a 5 point rolling average, and it is evident from the figure that the PTB data closely track the annual variation of 1/R2. The Pearson correlation coefficient r for the data in Fig. 3 is r=0.66 for N=1968 data points, corresponding to a formal probability of 2×10−246 that this correlation could arise from two data sets which were uncorrelated. As in the case of the BNL data, there is also a suggestion of a phase shift between 1/R2 and the PTB data (see below), although this phase shift appears to be smaller than for the BNL data.
Yet another possible explanation for the apparent phase shift could be a seasonally-varying velocity-dependent effect similar to that observed by the DAMA/LIBRA collaboration [23].
The fact that the two decay processes are very different (alpha decay for 226Ra and beta decay for 32Si) would seem to preclude a common mechanism for both.

Leif Svalgaard says:
October 13, 2010 at 6:23 pm
Zeke the Sneak says:
October 13, 2010 at 5:20 pm
Satellites and spacecraft have detected electrons streaming from the poles of Earth, Jupiter and Saturn towards the Sun. here: http://www.physorg.com/news10765.html
No, not towards the Sun, just up into the magnetospheres of the planets [into the tail part directed away from the Sun, actually].
Dr. S, would you care to provide the information you cite for the direction, number, and strength of the electron rays above the poles of these three planets? These have been said to be Sunward by readers of the Nature article, which I cannot find in an online format.