Nicola Scafetta sent me this paper yesterday, and I read it with interest, but I have a number of reservations about it, not the least of which is that it is partially based on the work of Landscheidt and the whole barycentric thing which gets certain people into shouting matches. Figure 9 looks to be interesting, but note that it is in generic units, not temperature, so has no predictive value by itself.
While that looks like a good hindcast fit to historical warm/cold periods, compare it to figure 7 to see how it comes out.
Now indeed, that looks like a great fit to the Ljungqvist proxy temperature reconstruction, but the question arises about whether we are simply seeing a coincidental cyclic fit or a real effect. I asked Dr. Leif Svalgaard about his views on this paper and he replied with this:
The real test of all this cannot come from the proxies we have because the time scales are too short, but from comparisons with other stellar systems where the effects are calculated to be millions of times stronger [because the planets are huge and MUCH closer to the star]. No correlations have been found so far.
See slide 19 of my AGU presentation:
http://www.leif.org/research/AGU%20Fall%202011%20SH34B-08.pdf
So, it would seem, that if the gravitational barycentric effect posited were real, it should be easily observable with solar systems of much larger masses. Poppenhager and Schmitt can’t seem to find it.
OTOH, we have what appears to be a good fit by Scafetta in Figure 7. So this leaves us with three possibilities
- The effect manifests itself in some other way not yet observed.
- The effect is coincidental but not causative.
- The effect is real, but unproven yet by observations and predictive value.
I’m leaning more towards #2 at this point but willing to examine the predictive value. As Dr. Svalgaard points out in his AGU presentation, others have tried but the fit eventually broke down. From slide 14
P. D. Jose (ApJ, 70, 1965) noted that the Sun’s motion about the Center of Mass of the solar system [the Barycenter] has a period of 178.7 yr and suggested that the sunspot cycles repeat with a similar period. Many later researchers have published variations of this idea. – Unfortunately a ‘phase catastrophe’ is needed every ~8 solar cycles
Hindcasting can be something you can easily setup to fool yourself with if you are not careful, and I’m a bit concerned over the quality of the peer review for this paper as it contains two instances of Scafetta’s signature overuse of exclamation points, something that a careful reviewer would probably not let pass.
Science done carefully rarely merits an exclamation point. Papers written that way sound as if you are shouting down to the reader.
The true test will be the predictive value, as Scafetta has been doing with his recent essays here at WUWT. I’m willing to see how well this pans out, but I’m skeptical of the method until proven by a skillful predictive forecast. Unfortunately it will be awhile before that happens as solar timescales far exceed human lifespan.
Below I present the abstract, plus a link to the full paper provided by Dr. Scafetta.
=============================================================
Multi-scale harmonic model for solar and climate cyclical variation throughout the Holocene based on Jupiter–Saturn tidal frequencies plus the 11-year solar dynamo cycle
ScienceDirect link
Nicola Scafetta, ACRIM (Active Cavity Radiometer Solar Irradiance Monitor Lab) & Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA
Abstract
The Schwabe frequency band of the Zurich sunspot record since 1749 is found to be made of three major cycles with periods of about 9.98, 10.9 and 11.86 years. The side frequencies appear to be closely related to the spring tidal period of Jupiter and Saturn (range between 9.5 and 10.5 years, and median 9.93 years) and to the tidal sidereal period of Jupiter (about 11.86 years). The central cycle may be associated to a quasi-11-year solar dynamo cycle that appears to be approximately synchronized to the average of the two planetary frequencies. A simplified harmonic constituent model based on the above two planetary tidal frequencies and on the exact dates of Jupiter and Saturn planetary tidal phases, plus a theoretically deduced 10.87-year central cycle reveals complex quasi-periodic interference/beat patterns. The major beat periods occur at about 115, 61 and 130 years, plus a quasi-millennial large beat cycle around 983 years. We show that equivalent synchronized cycles are found in cosmogenic records used to reconstruct solar activity and in proxy climate records throughout the Holocene (last 12,000 years) up to now. The quasi-secular beat oscillations hindcast reasonably well the known prolonged periods of low solar activity during the last millennium such as the Oort, Wolf, Spörer, Maunder and Dalton minima, as well as the 17 115-year long oscillations found in a detailed temperature reconstruction of the Northern Hemisphere covering the last 2000 years. The millennial three-frequency beat cycle hindcasts equivalent solar and climate cycles for 12,000 years. Finally, the harmonic model herein proposed reconstructs the prolonged solar minima that occurred during 1900–1920 and 1960–1980 and the secular solar maxima around 1870–1890, 1940–1950 and 1995–2005 and a secular upward trending during the 20th century: this modulated trending agrees well with some solar proxy model, with the ACRIM TSI satellite composite and with the global surface temperature modulation since 1850. The model forecasts a new prolonged solar minimum during 2020–2045, which would be produced by the minima of both the 61 and 115-year reconstructed cycles. Finally, the model predicts that during low solar activity periods, the solar cycle length tends to be longer, as some researchers have claimed. These results clearly indicate that both solar and climate oscillations are linked to planetary motion and, furthermore, their timing can be reasonably hindcast and forecast for decades, centuries and millennia. The demonstrated geometrical synchronicity between solar and climate data patterns with the proposed solar/planetary harmonic model rebuts a major critique (by Smythe and Eddy, 1977) of the theory of planetary tidal influence on the Sun. Other qualitative discussions are added about the plausibility of a planetary influence on solar activity.
Link to paper: Scafetta_JStides
UPDATE 3/22/2012 – 1:15PM Dr. Scafetta responds in comments:
About the initial comment from Antony above,I believe that there are he might have misunderstood some part of the paper.
1)
I am not arguing from the barycentric point of view, which is false. In the paper I am talking
about tidal dynamics, a quite different approach. My argument
is based on the finding of my figure 2 and 3 that reveal the sunspot record
as made of three cycles (two tidal frequencies, on the side, plus a central
dynamo cycle). Then the model was developed and its hindcast
tests were discissed in the paper, etc.
{from Anthony – Note these references in your paper: Landscheidt, T.,1988.Solar rotation,impulses of the torque in sun’s motion, and
climate change. Climatic Change12,265–295.
Landscheidt, T.,1999.Extrema in sunspot cycle linked toSun’s motion. Solar
Physics 189,415–426.}
2)
There are numerous misconceptions since the beginning such as “Figure 9 looks to be interesting, but note that it is in generic units, not temperature, so has no predictive value by itself.”
It is a hindcast and prediction. There is no need to use specific units, but only dynamics. The units are interpreted correctly in the text of the paper as being approximately W/m^2 and as I say in the caption of the figure “However, the bottom curve approximately reproduces the patterns observed in the proxy solar models depicted in Fig. 5. The latter record may be considered as a realistic, although schematic, representation of solar dynamics.”
{from Anthony – if it isn’t using units of temperature, I fail to see how it can be of predictive value, there is not even any reference to warmer/cooler}
3) About Leif’s comments. It is important to realize that Solar physics is not “settled” physics. People do not even understand why the sun has a 11-year cycle (which is between the 10 and 12 year J/S tidal frequencies, as explained in my paper).
4)
The only argument advanced by Leif against my paper is that the phenomenon is his opinion was not observed in other stars. This is hardly surprising. We do not have accurate nor long records about other stars!
Moreover we need to observe the right thing, for example, even if you have a large planet very close to a star, the observable effect is associated to many things: how eccentric the orbits are and how big the star is, and its composition etc. Stars have a huge inertia to tidal effects and even if you have a planet large and close enough to the star to produce a theoretical 4,000,000 larger tidal effect, it does not means that the response from the star must be linear! Even simple elastic systems may be quite sensitive to small perturbations but become extremely rigid to large and rapid perturbations, etc.
It is evident that any study on planetary influence on a star needs to start from the sun, and then eventually extended to other star systems, but probably we need to wait several decades before having sufficiently long records about other stars!
In the case of the sun I needed at least a 200 year long sunspot record to
detect the three Schwabe cycles, and at least 1000 years of data for
hindcast tests to check the other frequencies. People can do the math for how long we need to wait for the other stars before having long enogh records.
Moreover, I believe that many readers have a typical misconception of physics.
In science a model has a physical basis when it is based on the observations
and the data and it is able to reconstruct, hindcast and/or forecast them.
It is evident to everybody reading my paper with an open mind that under the scientific
method, the model I proposed is “physically based” because I am
describing and reconstructing the dynamical properties of the data and I
showed that the model is able to hindcast millennia long data records.
Nobody even came close to these achievements.
To say otherwise would mean to reject everything in science and physics
because all findings and laws of physics are based on the observations and
the data and are tested on their capability of reconstruct, hindcast and/or
forecast observations, as I did in the paper
Of course, pointing out that I was not solving the problem using for example
plasma physics or quantum mechanics or whatever else. But this is a complex
exercise that needs its own time. As I correctly say in the paper.
“Further research should address the physical mechanisms necessary to
integrate planetary tides and solar dynamo physics for a more physically
based model.”
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Interesting, as you note, based on that correlation coefficient of 0.3. But as they say in Germany: “Ach! Das ist Wigglezusammenbringen!”
Leif Svalgaard says: March 21, 2012 at 10:39 am
Thousands of lives could be saved if just the lunatics were taking seriously
Dr. S ,
as a scion of land of Danes, can you help: are the visitors to the Copenhagen’s luna park ‘lunatics’?. I enjoyed it very much.
Seems like numerology to me. Whatever trace effect there may be of the planets’ configurations upon the Sun, would be dwarfed by the variabilities, however slight, of the Sun’s internal processes. A flea on a camel’s back.
On exclamations: This too is a pet peeve of mine. They should rarely (if ever) be used other than in dialogue, and then sparingly.
My personal dislike is in messages displayed by computer applications. I have to admit that I was bought up on, and firmly believe in the original Unix style where if something succeeds it does so silently. Messages are only printed in case of failure and where specifically requested by use of (for example) a debug flag.
The ones I really take exception to are messages such as:
Command succeeded!
That give the impression that the writer of this particular piece of code is astonished that it actually worked, and fully expects that the normal mode of operation will be failure.
It appears that many of the authors of code with this sort of message are not native English speakers, so perhaps there is a little leeway to forgive on that basis. But as I try to observe the customs and usage of other languages so should others learn and respect the English language to the best of their ability.
Russ R says: March 21, 2012 at 8:48 am
Because the force of gravity is proportional to an object’s mass, but inversely proportional to the squared distance between masses.
Jupiter’s mass is 20,837 times greater than the moon’s mass. But the mean radius of Jupiter’s orbit (actually the semi-major axis since it’s an ellipse) is 2025x that of the moon’s orbit.
20837 / (2025 ^ 2)
= 20837 / 4100231
= 0.0063
For gravity, correct. For tides, incorrect. The tidal force is the derivative of gravity with respect to distance (from one side of the Sun to the other vs. distance to Jupiter). So:
T = 20837 * d (2025-2) / dd (minus 2 drops out, as it is the same for both systems)
= 20837 * (2025-3/sup>) = 2.51 * 10-6
So, Jupiter’s tidal force on the sun would be ~2.5 * 10-6 of the moon’s tidal force on earth. Interestingly, if you want to calculate it from one side of the Sun to the other, you must then multiply by (1,320,000 / 12,756) 3.
This gives T = 20837 * 103.53* 2025-3 = 2.78
So, solar tides caused by Jupiter would be 2.78 times the size of those on Earth caused by the Moon. Total tides of ~1-10 meters.
Saturn, being less massive and more distant would be even less of a tidal influence.
@ur momisugly Leif Svalgaard says: March 21, 2012 at 10:39 am
I see that Leif does not have arguments any more.
So, until now the most serious criticism has been the accidental use of two exclamation points to express an emphasis on two comments I thought important to stress (according to their Italian usage which is more liberal in that than English). As I said, I will take your advise of not using them in the future.
The offending sentences are at page 13:
“The above critique in the early 1980s definitely convinced most solar scientists to abandon the planetary theory of solar variation first proposed in the 19th century. In fact, while good correlation patterns stimulate researchers to look for a possible explanation and their physical mechanisms, a lack of correlation can be easily interpreted as if no physical link truly exists!”
and
“Smythe and Eddy made the mistake of not taking into account the fact that solar variations had to be the result of a coupling between internal solar dynamo dynamics and external planetary tidal forcing, not just of the planetary tides alone: when the planetary tides interfere destructively with the internal solar dynamo cycle, the Sun becomes quieter and periods such as the solar Maunder minimum occur, as Figures 5-8 show. Thus, we conclude that a solar dynamo theory and a planetary-tidal theory of solar variation are complementary, not in opposition: there is the need of both of them to understand solar dynamical evolution!”
I’m sorry but fig. 7 the temperature does not match the lower graph. I see no correlation other than some peaks matching. This non-sense about planets and barycentric stuff just does not jive to me. I think most solar physicists want the sun to be the issue to get much more funding. Yes the sun may be the driver and it may be hyper sensitive but the proof is in the pudding. Proper speculation is not a bad thing and I am sure Leif and others would appreciate proper speculation.
Leif Svalgaard says: March 21, 2012 at 10:46 am
Leif, everybody here knows that you are not fair toward my research and you should not have served as reviewer on my paper. And my opinion is that your criticism was plainly wrong and clearly biased.
If Anthony allows, it would be a pleasure for me to discuss your criticism on this web-site. I can write a rebuttal, parallel to your arguments in a guest blog.
What do you think Anthony?
Let me know
Tidal action is caused by gravity. Gravity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the bodies. Jupiter is approximately 5 AU from the Sun and Saturn is approximately 10 AU from the Sun. 1AU ~ 150E6 km. The Moon is approximately 0.0025 AU from the Earth.
I believe the tallest tidal wave on the Sun is in the order of 1mm high.
I leave you to draw your own conclusion as to whether this is just trivial curve fitting. As for me, I see absolutely no scientific value in this at all.
I mostly agree, Willis, although I would be less vehement about the “no scientific value at all” bit. My difficulty (like yours, I think) is that I keep waiting for a hypothesis in there and one never quite appears. Surely at this point we have enough data and computational power to solve the equations of motion for the actual planetary and solar orbits to at least reasonable precision for a rather long time into the past and the future, so this using of this and that and another frequency/period picked out of all of the periods available and ignoring the rest, even though over time they can cumulate to not at all be negligible seems difficult to defend, and it is also unstated why or how the selected periods modulate solar state, let alone how they modulate the Earth’s nominal climate.
The Earth’s “mean temperature” (whatever that really means, given that we cannot easily measure or compute this in a non-controversial way even now with modern instrumentation and irregular non-systematic sampling, let alone in the distant past) appears to have a fair amount of natural variability with many different time scales present. Some of the time dependence appears to be “noise”. Some of it appears to be signal in the sense that characteristic frequencies rise above the general noise, where I have to use the phrase “appears to be” because our proxies suck, our reliable temperature record is phenomenally short compared to the time-scales of variation visible in the proxy record such as it is, because every time we extend the time domain over which such analysis occurs some of what appeared to be predictive signal turns out to be longer period noise and new possible harmonics appear, and because we are almost certain that the actual climate system modulation is described by some sort of complicated nonlinear delayed differential forms that exhibit chaos, where quasiperiodic oscillations around local attractors appear and disappear after a few cycles as the system evolves to where new attractors dominate the dynamics.
Identifying things that might be important periodicities is “science”, but if it stops there it isn’t very complete or useful science. Humans knew the day was one day long and highly reliably periodic for a very long time, but that in and of itself didn’t help us understand the dynamics that makes it so for almost all of that time, and many false models occurred that could explain the data as well as anything in the meantime, from a very regular god riding a flaming chariot across the sky once a day up to a fairly small ball of fire that orbited us once a day. As always, to move it from a set of unexplained observations that might well be coincidences or artifacts of an insufficiently long period of observation that happens to transform chaotic quasiperiod noise into hypothetical periodic signal one requires a concrete causal chain that can be verified and/or falsified.
In this case one needs to build a model that is more subtle and physically motivated than just displaying a fourier sum of a few harmonics and noting that it has a fair degree of correspondence to a data set over a few periods. Does it work across the last few cycles of glaciation and interglacials? Does it work across the whole Holocene, including the Younger Dryas? If it doesn’t, why should we believe that it is true/correct now? And above all, how is Jupiter affecting anything enough to produce the observed climate variations (let alone still smaller Saturn, still farther away)? What is the causal chain? Without a concrete hypothesis, there is nothing to verify or falsify, not really.
rgb
rgb
You probably mean the Sun’s change of orbital angular momentum. This is accounted for by similar change of orbital angular momentum of the planets, i.e. well known orbital perturbations, resulting in no change in the angular momentum of the whole solar system.
It may be the other way around, our motion, and that of the other planets affects the suns climate, which in tern than affects us. Tidal force, which is influence by the planets to a lesser extent also affect the earths climate. Tidal force changes the shape of the atmosphere, the shape of the ocean and the crust of the earth, it also affects wind patterns as friction of ocean currents can move air masses along with it, thats why when the tide changes and starts to come in we suddenly get mist roll over the town I live in. I can tell what the tide is doing by looking at the wind direction and the clouds outside! Theres far more affecting the climate than we realise
If Jupiter can have a measurable influence on the Sun why does it not have a measurable influence on the Earth during appropriate times when both are on the same side? If it does has the influence been measured to be what? BTW I did observe the Jupiter/Venus show last week. I did actually feel my heart strings being pulled just knowing what I was looking at.
harrywr2 says:
March 21, 2012 at 10:50 am
So they are kinda close every three years, gosh, that’s impressive… which I suppose fits perfectly with the “kinda close” numbers that they’ve picked to represent everything else.
SO WHAT? Your claim is that as long as the cycle comes back somewhere near the start every three years, heck, it’s only nine degrees off, lets call it a real 3X cycle …
I find these kind of explanations and excuses ludicrous.
w.
We know one thing causing periodic ice ages: Milankovitch cycles
Nicola Scafetta says:
March 21, 2012 at 11:14 am
I see that Leif does not have arguments any more
There are things not worth discussing. All has already been said about this subject.
Philip Peake says: March 21, 2012 at 11:12 am
“But as I try to observe the customs and usage of other languages so should others learn and respect the English language to the best of their ability.”
Talking is very easy, Philip. How many languages do you master?
Leif Svalgaard says: March 21, 2012 11:42 am
“There are things not worth discussing. All has already been said about this subject.”
Not really, Leif. The discussion just started.
Carsten Arnholm, Norway says:
March 21, 2012 at 11:42 am
“First, something is causing periodic ice ages on this planet, the most likely causative factor is the sun for such regular occurrences”
We know one thing causing periodic ice ages: Milankovitch cycles
Of course, the planets [mostly Jupiter] change the Earth orientation and orbit on time scales of tens of thousands of years and hence the climate. This has nothing to do with the Sun and we should all keep the distinction and the time scales in mind.
Carsten Quite right – I thought my meaning was clear from the context- but obviously not and course the total angular momentum of the whole system is constant.
Richard Verney says:
“I have long held the view that we may underestimate the significance of the atmospheric bulge.”
—————————————————–
If this were a factor, there would be a 19-year signal in the weather/climate record. I do not see much evidence for this.
.
Exclamation points to not alter the truth or falseness of an argument…. but neither does snark, nor unsupported dismissiveness on the part of ‘scientists’ who disagree with it.
Nor, for that matter, does the ‘quality’ of the ‘publication’ which first prints it.
Amazes me, the adolescent hangups & personal emotionality that supposedly qualified scientists allow themselves to engage in, when they are supposed to be objectively pursuing truth.
As a scientific layman, I’d have a lot more faith in the evaluations of ‘professionals’ who behaved more professionally, to be completely honest.
To Willis and to others interested in the progress of astronomical forcings:
Willis has the tendency of getting lost in smallish effects and starts to dicker
whether a cycle is 11.97 or 11.98 in length….but….he loses the oversight over
the whole battleground at the same time……
Therefore, one has to judge from a Napoleons position to see any progress:
The IPCC is still centered around AR4 and the astronomical/planetary orbit
arguments made in AR4 are not only weak but grossly false, as I have stated
in my AR4 error complaints: They “ASSUME (!!) that “”orbital forcing is INVARIANT” (!!)
on less than milleniums scale…(AR4-wg1-chapt2) or “insignificant” (chapt9).
These statements are based on nonsense of some Belgians (Goosse 2005, and
Bertrand 2002) as reference, NASA JPL Horizons is completely ignored in
their papers……these guys have never heard of planetary
cycles or forcing…..they would not even know what Scafetta is talking about…
I had some correspondence with the great Andre Berger as former head
over there….they are decades behind in their outfit in Louvain…. too bad…..
Whereas Nick Scafetta is the grand astronomical climate pioneer, leading us in
showing the road to real climate science; he being ahead of our times……
If smallish effects are still unresolved, then lets join and take the few disturbing
hair out of the soup instead of dipping the complete pot out…..
Nick Scafetta did it and we can expect more of progress…..
JS
tallbloke says:
March 21, 2012 at 9:26 am
It was lack of understanding of those harmonic resonances that caused the collapse of the three cooling towers at Ferrybridge in the ’60s.
DaveE.
Robert Brown says:
March 21, 2012 at 11:27 am
My difficulty is that I keep waiting for a hypothesis in there and one never quite appears.
Patience is one of the seven ‘heavenly’ virtues.; forgive the pun.
Couple of years now, I am waiting for others to have their go first.
For the moment just a graphic preview:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GTC.htm
the words will come later.