New paper by Love et al suggests no prominent role for solar‐terrestrial interaction in global climate change. I’m providing it here for discussion.
We are not convinced that the combination of sunspot‐number,
geomagnetic‐activity, and global‐temperature data can, with
a purely phenomenological correlational analysis, be used to
identify an anthropogenic affect on climate.
Abstract
Recent studies have led to speculation that solar‐terrestrial interaction, measured by sunspot number and geomagnetic activity, has played an important role in global temperature change over the past century or so. We treat this possibility as an hypothesis for testing. We examine the statistical significance of cross‐correlations between sunspot number, geomagnetic activity, and global surface temperature for the years 1868–2008, solar cycles 11–23. The data contain substantial autocorrelation and non-stationarity, properties that are incompatible with standard measures of cross-correlational significance, but which can be largely removed by averaging over solar cycles and first‐difference detrending. Treated data show an expected statistically significant correlation between sunspot number and geomagnetic activity, Pearson ρ < 10^−4, but correlations between global temperature and sunspot number (geomagnetic activity) are not significant, ρ = 0.9954, (ρ = 0.8171). In other words, straightforward analysis does not support widely‐cited suggestions that these data record a prominent role for solar‐terrestrial interaction in global climate change.
With respect to the sunspot‐number, geomagnetic‐activity, and global‐temperature data, three alternative hypotheses remain difficult to reject: (1) the role of solar‐terrestrial interaction in recent climate change is contained wholly in long‐term trends and not in any shorter‐term secular variation, or, (2) an anthropogenic signal is hiding correlation between solar‐terrestrial variables and global temperature, or, (3) the null hypothesis, recent climate change has not been influenced by solar‐terrestrial interaction.
Citation: Love, J. J., K. Mursula, V. C. Tsai, and D. M. Perkins (2011), Are secular correlations between sunspots, geomagnetic activity, and global temperature significant?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 38, L21703, doi:10.1029/2011GL049380.
Conclusions
One of the merits of using three separate data sets in a correlational analysis is that intercomparisons can be made. After treatment for removal of autocorrelation and nonstationarity through simple averaging and differencing, we find statistically‐significant secular correlation between sunspot number and geomagnetic activity. This is expected,
and it serves as important support for our analysis method. On the other hand, after making the same treatment to the global surface temperature, correlations between temperature and either sunspot number or geomagnetic activity are not significant.
We have not, in this study, considered derived proxy metrics of relevance to climate change, such as reconstructed total‐solar irradiance [e.g., Fröhlich and Lean, 2004] or
interplanetary magnetic field [e.g., Lockwood et al., 1999]. Still, we believe that our methods are general, that they could be used for other data sets, even though our analysis, here, is tightly focused on specific data sets. [15] From analysis of sunspot‐number, geomagneticactivity, and global‐temperature data, three hypotheses remain difficult to reject; we list them.
(1) The role of solarterrestrial interaction in recent climate change is wholly contained in the long‐term trends we removed in order to reduce autocorrelation and nonstationarity. This possibility seems artificial, but we acknowledge that our method requires a nontrivial time‐dependence in the data that is different from a simple trend. Still needed is a method for measuring the significance of correlation between data sets with trends.
(2) An anthropogenic signal is hiding correlation between solar‐terrestrial variables and global temperature. A phenomenological correlational analysis, such as that used here, is not effective for testing hypotheses when the data record a superposition of different signals. Physics is required to separate their sum.
(3) Recent climate change has not been influenced by solar‐terrestrial interaction. If this null hypothesis is to be confidently rejected, it will require data and/or methods that are different from those used here.
Paper: http://www.leif.org/EOS/2011GL049380.pdf
h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard
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Why are so many scientists afraid to analyze the obvious link between celestial mechanics and the Earth’s climate?
Ben Franklin was a paleoclimatologist with little technology yet did a lot better job foreacsting long range weather than any Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt, Kevin Trenberth, or Phil Jones with their billion dollar bloated budgets.
The late Dr. Theordore Landscheidt routinely forecasted El Ninos using celestial mechanics in the 1990’s.
Piers Corbin at WeatherAction continues to run circles around the inept Met Office forecasting weather events months in advance with 85% accuracy using only his laptop computer and his Solar Lunar Action Technique.
Professor Brown
( that takes me back centuries, I had professor Brown at the Imperial, his boss Dr. Leventhall use to say: always remember the science is advanced by reasoning of an individual, or something like that)
Orange line is of course sunspot record (which we know, judging by the geomagnetic activity is not as accurate as we would like it to be; Dr. L.S’s field of expertise).
Red line is a unique data set I personally compiled from available records, related to the North Atlantic and not considered by any of the climate models.
Polynomial line is directly and simply derived from the climate data, with the added CET’s 350 year trend of 0.25C/century, just finishing an article with definitions of all components.
I take data and see what possible patterns may be in there, and than think about the cuause.
Only today I placed at the HAL pre-print archives another article considering relationship of the two major North Atlantic Oscillations. It appears I committed cardinal error by calculating correlations on the moving averages, but following clear guidance from Dr. Svalgaard, I did redo one or two, resulting in reductions for R^2=0.5558 down to 0.43 and from R^2=0.7404 to 0.557, disappointing but not a totally embarrassing debacle. My newly baked article, short intro with the link to archive:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/theAMO.htm
it might be a bit dull (very dull actualy), but lot of stuff in there that even Michael Mann of the Penn, the AMO virtuoso, isn’t aware off.
Re your remark about CO2: here is my reply:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CO2-Arc.htm
O.K., techies. Help out the insufficiently geeky here. The message of this paper is that recent global warming is not a result of changes in solar activity, right?
Or a couple of other incomprehensible possibilities.
So we’re doomed.
And will be until Antony takes up the proposal that technical papers be accompanied by an abstract in sim-ple words for the sci-en-tif-i-cal-ly il-lit-er-ate. (Also known as me.)
I thought the science was settled? Apparently more work is required
We are not convinced … & etc …… Love et al
Piers Corbyn believes different …..
Weather Action News No 27 – 15th July 2010
What Does & Doesn’t cause Climate Change?
Direct Evidence of Solar driven Weather extremes PRESENTATION
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews10No27.pdf (PDF is 5.5Mb)
To Robert Brown.
One very different explanation for Gravity complete with mathematics can be found at http://www.milesmathis.com
In short when you let go of an apple and it drops to the ground, it didn’t drop to the ground. It in fact stayed exactly where it was when you let go and it didn’t move, instead, the Earth and everything on it moved / expanded at sufficient rate to make it seem as if the apple was attracted to the Earth.
An uncomfortable theory, I grant you, though some of his other stuff eg. the obliquity of different planets in our solar system and orbits get him a closer match to the observed situation than conventional physics.
It’s certainly mind opening stuff.
Way beyond the comprehension of people who think that all of climate history started in 1975.
steven mosher says:
November 15, 2011 at 2:34 pm
………….
Hi Steve,
Pleased to see you came along, please have look at this:
http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/64/12/35/PDF/NorthAtlanticOscillations-I.pdf
if you think this place is not suitable for a comment, my email is at page 1.
thanks.
So where does CERN’s CLOUD project and it’s preliminary results stand w.r.t. this report? CLOUD seemed to have found correlation between solar activity and cloud cover, and herefore albedo and therefore surface temperatures.
The use of second moment statistics on processes that do not have second moments is a fools errand. If there are to be any statistics done, they should be done using non-parametric measures. I reject any analysis done using parametric statistics as rubbish given that the series in question have not been shown to live in L2.
KR says:
November 15, 2011 at 2:49 pm
However, Anthony’s statement that this “New paper by Love et al suggests no prominent role for solar‐terrestrial interaction in global climate change” doesn’t match up. The only thing the paper is saying is that a “phenomenological correlational analysis” is the wrong tool.
The conclusion reads:
“[14] One of the merits of using three separate data sets in a correlational analysis is that intercomparisons can be made. After treatment for removal of autocorrelation and nonstationarity through simple averaging and differencing, we find statistically‐significant secular correlation between
sunspot number and geomagnetic activity. This is expected, and it serves as important support for our analysis method. On the other hand, after making the same treatment to the global surface temperature, correlations between temperature and either sunspot number or geomagnetic activity are not significant.”
Leif Svalgaard says:
November 15, 2011 at 2:37 pm
“The oft assumed theory says that many cosmic rays cause clouds. CMEs screen out cosmic rays, so should result in fewer clouds.”
I agree with this, tho the frequency and intensity between both CMEs and cosmic ray influence on cloud formation seems important, Is the underlining process the same? I under stand that CMEs form aurora over the polar regions, caused by the collision of charged particles with the atmosphere, and obviously this effects ozone etc.. Gravity is stronger over the poles than it is over the equator therefor the poles will attract (build up) more charged particles, this should form a protective membrane (a kind of bottle neck for high energies), possibly reflecting excess charged particles, and given X amount of time the energy will begin to dissipate where the influence of CMEs decline then the influence of cosmic ray energies begin. There certainly is lot of physics involved, to try and explain or even disprove what goes on with the atmosphere relating to temperature, it’s complex, but all these complexities add up and I don’t think that it is 100% impossible to define or even artificially re/sequence, but spending huge amounts of time isolating minor anthropological effects on atmospheric temperature seems bizarre to me when there are bigger fish in the sea.
Agree with Nicholas Scafetta that the paper is very simplistic ….. its like like testing a hypothesis that the reason I get fat is because I eat too much, while ignoring other factors like my lifestyle, diet, excersise routine, genetics etc etc. The truth is in the middle.
What is encouraging though is that it is abundantly clear that the ‘science’ is very far from settled and that all these ideas are now being tested and discussed, whether simplisticaly or not. Only this way will the scientifioc truth be found and like almost everything, its bound to be somewhere in the middle.
Anthony,
I was thinking maybe you could lease Madison Square Gardens. “And in this corner….”. “Lets get ready to RUUMMBLE!”
Thank youi Dr. Svalgaard for putting this in the public domain. It will take more than one read to digest. I appreciate your sharing of your knowledge and research.
Leif Svalgaard says:
November 15, 2011 at 1:52 pm
No probs Doc. I’ll toss one in the trunk the next time I’m out that way. You may have to pitch in for the gas though…
So there is a not significant correlation between sunspot activity and global temperature and a not significant temperature increase, when we take UHI out of it very little, if any, indeed. So it is possibly very much related after all.
It’s long been known: if you torture data long enough, it’ll give you any answer you want.
Dennis Nikol got to the key point: the Global Temperature…
From the abstract:
“Treated data show an expected statistically significant correlation between sunspot number and geomagnetic activity, Pearson ρ < 10^−4, but correlations between global temperature and sunspot number (geomagnetic activity) are not significant, ρ = 0.9954, (ρ = 0.8171). In other words, straightforward analysis does not support widely‐cited suggestions that these data record a prominent role for solar‐terrestrial interaction in global climate change."
To think that the global temperature value -obtained by what means, meaning what exactly?- represents the climate is simply naive at best. This is the trick here. Noise indeed!
Just a layman, but I can’t look at this:
http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/solarsystem/
and then not think that any temperature fluctuations on earth are ultimately caused by the sun, as we orbit it, and the sun orbits the milky way.
We don’t even know why the corona of the sun is millions of K, whereas the suns surface is cooler.
Yet we seem to believe our earth climate models have some sort of statistical validity and predictive power of the future or that we can tease some trend out of data containing alot of noise by applying multiple iterations of mathematical adjustments to the raw data, many of which are debated as to even being appropriate.
Excuse me for being sceptical, I’ll be sticking with Occam’s razor approach.
I just wonder what would happen if the same technique is used to test whether the IPCC climate models agree with the temperature. Do they agree with the data? That would be the real test because the IPCC GCMs are supposed to reproduce the temperature
A far better test comparing the astronomical harmonic model vs. the GISS ModelE is done in Figure 9 in
N. Scafetta, “Empirical evidence for a celestial origin of the climate oscillations and its implications”. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 72, 951–970 (2010), doi:10.1016/j.jastp.2010.04.015
http://www.fel.duke.edu/~scafetta/pdf/scafetta-JSTP2.pdf
If Leif likes this Love et al.’s paper where the Staw Man Fallacy is so evident, it is clear that he does not understand time series analysis and data mining thecniques.
From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
A straw man is a component of an argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position, twisting his words or by means of [false] assumptions.[1] To “attack a straw man” is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the “straw man”), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.[1][2] Generally, the straw man is a highly exaggerated[citation needed] or over-simplified version of the opponent’s original statement, which has been distorted to the point of absurdity. This exaggerated or distorted statement is thus easily argued against, but is a misrepresentation of the opponent’s actual statement.
“Nicola Scafetta says:
November 15, 2011 at 11:21 am
I think that this paper is quite naive.”
I think it’s fairly dishonest.
As my Daddy said “BULLSH*T BAFFLES BRAINS”
Of course solar activity – or more precisely solar-magnetic effects modulated by lunar factors – DRIVE world weather systems (and hence world temperatures for whatever they are worth). We are able using these factors to PREDICT with independently confirmed significant skill extreme events and general weather in USA and Europe months ahead – including for example the formation and track of Hurricane Irene from 85days ahead
Please see skill reports and news links on:-
http://www.weatheraction.com/displayarticle.asp?a=392&c=5
Thank, Piers Corbyn, astrophysicist, WeatherAction.com
How about Spearman’s Rho? Anybody consider that?
Dr. Scafetta,
Thanks for sharing http://www.fel.duke.edu/~scafetta/pdf/Scafetta-auroras.pdf
It is a very interesting paper that I now link from my Climate page.