Paul L. Vaughan, M.Sc. – October 2011
This post has no introduction, per the author’s request, start with the graphs. A PDF of a more complete paper is linked at the end. – Anthony
Motivation
One purpose of this article is to direct the attention of sensible observers to a serious oversight in the mainstream quest for understanding of multidecadal solar-terrestrial relations (section I).
Another is to ask the community to start thinking carefully about what can be learned from rotating multivariate lunisolar spatiotemporal phase relations shared by Earth Orientation Parameters (EOP) and terrestrial climate records, while seizing the same opportunity to highlight critical omissions in “classic” works on alleged solar-barycentric terrestrial influences (section II).
These data exploration notes are volunteered in support of ongoing publicly collaborative multidisciplinary research.
Audience
The diverse audiences addressed might not be the ones preferred by some readers. Addressing rotates priority across a spectrum of functional numeracy & orientation.
Format
Volunteer time & resources are limited, so presentation is skeletal & informal.
Conclusion
The majority of recent multidecadal terrestrial variability is due to natural spatiotemporal aliasing of differential solar pulse-position by terrestrial topology over basic terrestrial cycles including the year.
It’s not the deviation of solar cycle frequency from average solar cycle frequency that’s of practical significance from a terrestrial perspective. Earth, the receiver, has no clock locked to the average solar cycle length, so the pulse-position modulation is differential.
These observations depend on neither the success nor failure of CERN’s CLOUD experiment.
Details
Vaughan, P.L. (2011). Shifting Sun-Earth-Moon Harmonies, Beats, & Biases.
Vaughn Sun-Earth-Moon Harmonies Beats Biases (1MB 25pp PDF)
Best Regards to All,
Paul L. Vaughan, M.Sc.
But what a tongue! and oh what brains! were in that parrots head.
It took two men to understand one half the words he said.
Know how they felt after taking a look at this.
Kindest Regards
Suggest sending to Walter Munk at UCSD; he is author of “Rotation of the Earth,” the classic on the subject of the Chandler Wobble, length of day, unforced nutations and all that kind of thing. These matters come up in detrending sea level rise data which has attracted much attention.
If nothing else, it sure brought out your lurkers 🙂
Spray that again Sam?
I honestly can’t tell if Vaughn is right or not. Or funny. I can’t even tell for sure what he’s claiming. If his sanity isn’t in doubt, then mine most assuredly is.
-Leif Svalgaard 1973
If the internet had been around in ’73, I wonder if the usual suspects of that ‘time’ would have been as harsh and critical of your work as some of you are right now of this work.
I didn’t become involved in the skeptical movement just to watch one ultra-elitist scientific regime be replaced by another.
Looking beyond the technical jargon and questionable graphs, there may lie some evidence of a trend that could benefit our understanding of climatology.
But some of you would rather just be dismissive and negatively profile Paul L. Vaughan.
Way to go gentlemen!
Amazing to think that all that Earth-Sun-Moon moon stuff is trumped by a .03% atmospheric gas component.
Truly amazing.
“rotating multivariate lunisolar spatiotemporal phase relations” =
turning many times in a moon/sun context, added to and incorporated with a space and time [space/time] aspect, in a relationship which is in phases or reiterations [repeated].
Quite simple really
I am uneducated, and therefore reading a scientific paper might be beyond me. Even so, the phrase seems to indicate to me that the the author is looking at the sorts of effects that can be seen in the fact that the Moon rotates at the same rate as it revolves around the Earth – which indicates that the Moon and the Earth, at least, appear to be locked in a particular rotating univariate LuniTerra spatio temporal phase relation.
I believe there are other bodies in the Solar system with the “phase locked rotate/revolve”
relationship.
Now, if you throw Sol in, things become rather more complicated. Does this make sense?
The Moon’s effects are obvious, the Sun’s less so. However, if the climate is indeed a chaotic system (dynamical etc.,), by definition, an infinitesimally small change in input can have a vast effect to the final output. Is the author trying to examine if this is indeed the truth?
If so, I think some of the laughing and derisory comments may demonstrate the tolerance and scientific approach of the commenters.
On the other hand, the author may be a complete lunatic, or practical joker. I certainly don’t have the education to know.
Thanks.
Why use complicated words when simple ones are much more effective. Maybe Paul is onto something or maybe he’s not. If he is, he needs to explain it in words that everyone can understand.
re: David Spurgeon says: October 15, 2011 at 4:45 pm
David, are you secretly working on that Google Translate Science module? If so, you’re off to a great start! If not, perhaps offer them the service, or create a webpage for it yourself!
In retrospect I should probably note that my earlier post wasn’t meant to in any way denigrate the paper – I haven’t read it yet, and besides, I doubt I know enough about that subject area to say anyhow. I was just tickled by the suggestion that Google Translate ought to be able to handle science as a foreign language. Something that would be awfully difficult to actually create if not impossible, particularly considering term definition overlap/differences between different disciplines…. but wouldn’t something like that be sweet? Then that spawned thoughts of some of the really awful science papers I’ve seen at times, with clear logical flaws (gee, if a highly concentrated herbal preparation kills sperm in a test tube, then eating that herb must reduce male fertility! rrrr-i-i-i-i-ght), or conclusions that go so grossly beyond the experimental design or observational data set as to be ludricrous, or what’s becoming my pet peeve & as noted by someone else above, where results are one or more orders of magnitude smaller than the measurement methods can detect…. and so on. All of which immediately suggests that if we have a ‘detect and translate science as a foreign language’ module, we similarly need a ‘detect and translate, e.g., primarily explain the flaws, of pseudo-science.
None of which relates directly to the actual article here, and wasn’t meant to reflect in any way on it….but I couldn’t resist posting — Translate Science as a Foreign Language — was just too funny to me!! (my keyboard is very happy that I didn’t happen to be drinking coffee when I read that comment)
All that most of the posters to this blog are doing is highlighting their profound ignorance.
Yes, Paul Vaughan’s work is very difficult to follow. It has to be picked through very carefully and very slowly in order to try and make sense of the links and associations that he is trying to illuminate and highlight. The complexity comes about because Paul is trying to explain, as best he can, a very complex topic. His use of what we see as “convoluted English” is his attempt to be as precise as possible about what he is talking about. Unfortunately, it does detract from the very important message that he is trying to get across.
Make no bones about it, what he is saying is of critical importance as it shows that there very real external influences upon the Earth’s climate system. What Paul is trying to highlight is that the reason we do not see the effects of these external drivers is that we are using the wrong tools to carry out our observations and analysis and we are looking for the wrong tell-tale signals and markers of this link.
I believe that his first (or masthead) plot tries to highlight the stark reality of the Solar-Terrestrial link. In this plot you have the cosmic-ray flux received here at the Earth [a known indicator of the general level of solar magnetic activity] varying in lock-step unison with rate of change in the Earth’s rotation rate [a indicator of the rate of momentum transfer between the solid Earth and the atmosphere]. I do not know of any other plot that so clearly raises the possibility that external factors [e.g. solar magnetic activity] play an important role in influence the earth’s climate.
In addition, I believe that Paul is saying that we might not be able to see the direct impact of the external drivers on climate since the long term periodicities and cycles that are seen in the Earth’s atmosphere may be distinctly different from periodicities and cycles of the drivers themselves (e.g. the length of the solar cycle). He highlights the fact that periodicities and cycles of the external drives interact with a complex atmospheric/ocean climate system which has it own natural resonances and periodicities (e.g. the annual seasonal cycles). He tries to point out that unless we take into account the nature of the coupling between these two systems (i.e. the Earth’s climate and the external drivers) then we will continue misunderstand and misinterpret the observational evidence that supports this link.
For more on parts of this topic, see http://www.john-daly.com/sun-enso/sun-enso.htm
A few sentences from #6, first paragraph: “The contribution of the sun’s orbital angular momentum to its total angular momentum is not negligible. It reaches 25 percent of the spin momentum. The orbital angular momentum can increase or decrease forty-fold within a few years. Thus it is conceivable that these variations are related to varying phenomena in the sun’s activity.”….”The four giant planets, which regulate the sun’s motion, carry more than 99 percent of the angular momentum in the solar system, while the sun is confined to less than 1 percent. So there is enough angular momentum that can be transferred from the outer planets to the revolving sun and eventually to the spinning sun.”
Anthony,
Might I suggest you get in touch with TonyB?
He and I were involved in a thread on another blog along with Ernst Beck about CO2 levels in the 1920 to 1950 range when there was a brief period of warming followed by cooling that lead to the 1970’s ice age scare. Ernst Beck launched into one of his tirades and angrily suggested that his critics didn’t understand that there was a “lunar phase reversal” that began in 1929. Even I as one of Beck’s supporters had to think that perhaps he was as looney as his critics claimed. In private correspondence however he calmed down and explained. TonyB later sent me a paper that I MIGHT still have around that actually studied and explained what Beck called “lunar phase reversal” and which Paul Vaughn is (I think) trying to explain in this article.
The principle Beck was reffering to was that the moon’s orbit is elliptical, and also that the plane of the orbit has a “wobble” to it. So, sometimes perihelion occurs well north of the equator, and sometimes well south. The paper studied various wave and “wavelet” cycles of the ocean that were caused by the various fluctuations in gravity from earth’s elliptical orbit and varying plane around the sun, the moon’s elliptical orbiot and varying plane around the earth, and increasingly lesser wavelets that corresponded to Juptier’s orbit and other smaller planets.
Sure enough, all the wavelets “converged” smack dab on 1929 which was the year that the moon’s orbit hit a minimum from both an elliptical orbit and from the plane of the orbit compared to the earth’s axis (or maybe it was a maximum?) In any event, that was the phenomenon that Beck was referring to. As best as I can make out the graphs and explanation from Vaughn’s article, it seems to me that he is talking about the same thing.
Maybe.
I think.
Paul, I’m very interested in what you’re trying to do here, but not even someone studying the precise same thing as you are is going to be able to understand all the graphs and explanations unless you define the terms and units and sources of data. Lots od people would like to help you with whatever it is you are trying to show, but even for PhD’s in physics, your explanation is nearly sanscrit.
Crosspatch you evil man!
All you have to do is solve the Three-body Problem.
The more I look at this the more I think Paul is actually making some pretty simple points but setting them out in language so obtuse that it obscures his meaning.
Essentially he is just saying that there are multiple overlapping cycles or oscillations within the climate system that change in amplitude and interact with each other in varying combinations over time and in variable locations.
He links that to the various changing components of the system and notes correlations and then pronounces that something has been overlooked by the climate community that deserves more detailed consideration.
My problem then is that it is hardly news that some correlations do apparently arise from a consideration of factors such as length of day, movement of the solar system barycentre, changes in solar cycle length, the oceans and atmosphere swishing about and deforming to various degrees and the interacting gravitational effects of sun, moon and planets.
The article then begs the questrion as to how meaningful such correlations are and how well (if at all) they can be used for predictive purposes.
So reluctantly I come to the conclusion that this is just a very mundane restatement of stuff we already know dressed up in impenetrable language to make it sound more significant and/or ‘original’ than it really is.
Unless, Paul, you can restate at least some of it in much clearer and simpler terms to bring out something new that you are bringing to the table.
Prove me wrong, please.
Scientists use really big words that I don’t understand and so people think scientist are important and they get a lot of respect.
So I will use lots of really big words and I will get a lot of respect too and people will think I am really important.
[NOTE: LT – the best advice I can give you is just be a contributor. Snark and obfuscation don’t cut it, no matter which “side” you are on. You have the capability to be a serious contributor. As we say here… Capice? -REP]
?
Jeff D says:
October 15, 2011 at 6:30 pm
?
And every additional comment I can make is superfluous.
3 possibilities:
1) Paul Vaughan is a genius and we are all relative dunces.
2) Paul Vaughan is a very bored creator of practical jokes.
3) Paul Vaughan should potentially seek some professional advice (note: I’m not specifying what kind).
Any one of these possibilities leaves me without further comment.
R. Gates says:
October 15, 2011 at 6:59 pm
3 possibilities:
1) Paul Vaughan is a genius and we are all relative dunces.
2) Paul Vaughan is a very bored creator of practical jokes.
3) Paul Vaughan should potentially seek some professional advice (note: I’m not specifying what kind).
Any one of these possibilities leaves me without further comment.
============================================
You…”without further comment”??
Well then I support all three!!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Give Paul a break. Geez.
As long as Leif calls it “mumbo jumbo”….I am constrained to listen to the mumbo jumbo even harder [and try to understand it]. I do that with respect for one of the most prodigious intellects on things solar [Leif], the world has ever known.
But that does not excuse the stonewalling from the “conventioneers” and the pseudo-Establishment groupthink exhibited on here.
Beyond that, I agree with Lucy Skywalker’s remarks….which [as always] are very prescient.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Stephen Wilde wrote: Prove me wrong, please.
We already have Stephen. However, you are going to have to wait till my paper is published in 2012.
Has Alan Sokal adopted another pen name?