Just a quick note to bring this to attention of readers. I have not been able to locate a copy of this paper other than the paywalled one at Springerlink, so I can’t comment much about it, but it looks interesting. The question is what is the mechanism? The abstract really doesn’t give a hint of that and just saying that “anomalously low solar activity” is the cause really isn’t definitive enough. – Anthony
The dynamics of solar activity and anomalous weather of summer 2010: 2. Relationship with the active longitude zone; effects in the west and east
(Geomagnetism and Aeronomy, Volume 52, Number 1, pp. 1-15, February 2012)
– K. G. Ivanov, A. F. Kharshiladze
Abstract:
“We confirm the close synoptic relationship of the sectoral structure of the Sun’s magnetic field of the with the near-Earth tropospheric pressure with a case study of three European points (Troitsk, Rome, Jungfrau) in the period of the anomalously hot summer of June–August 2010.
We substantiate the position that such a relationship was fostered by the anomalously low solar activity as a result of superposition of the minima of the 22- and 180-year cycles. Sectoral analysis of the solar-tropospheric relationships has shown that the appearance of a blocking anticyclone in the Moscow suburbs, its expansion to Rome and Jungfrau, and subsequent retreat at first from these points, and then from the Moscow suburbs was closely related to solar activity phenomena producing, according to contemporary notions, cyclonic activity, shown by simulation of the Earth’s electric field.”
http://www.springerlink.com/content/km64487726781347/
UPDATE: Thanks to readers, I have a copy of the paper, which I forwarded to Dr. Leif Svalgaard for inspection.In the introduction of the paper there is this:
1. INTRODUCTION
More than 40 years ago, a statistically significant relationship was discovered between the sectoral struc ture of the IMF and the zonal circulation in the atmosphere of the Earth’s Northern Hemisphere; it was suggested that so-called natural synoptic periods to
some degree were determined by the structure of the interplanetary medium (Dimitriev et al., 1978). Recently it was shown that in one important particular case, the anomalously hot weather of summer 2010, a synoptic relationship took place between the sectoral
structure of the solar and interplanetary magnetic field (SMF and IMF), on the one hand, and the surface atmospheric pressure in the suburban Moscow city of Troitsk, on the other (Ivanov and Kharshiladze, 2011).
Svalgaard writes:
The Russian paper “confirms the earlier conclusions on the
reality of a relationship between the sectoral structure of the IOMFS and the Earth’s troposphere (Mansurov et al., 1974; Wilcox, 1979; Wilcox et al., 1974;… Wilcox, J.M., Svalgaard, L., and Scherrer, P.H.,
Seasonal Variation and Magnitude of the Solar Sector Structure Atmospheric VorticityEffect, Nature, 1974, vol. 55, no. 5509, pp. 539–540.
We have long since abandoned the finding as spurious.
So it seems, they are chasing an old discarded theory, and their findings may be nothing more than coincidental – Anthony
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One last gasp: http://www.ann-geophys.net/27/1/2009/angeo-27-1-2009.pdf
So far we have determined,
1. It is possible for papers not to be cited and still be scientifically valid.
2. It is possible for papers to be widely cited and be scientifically invalid.
Thus citations cannot be used to determine the scientific validity of a paper, yet this is what Leif presents should be used.
To further invalidate all of Leif’s arguments he says you should not ask the original authors of a paper if their work is still valid because their opinion cannot be trusted when he is using exactly this as an argument.
Some sort of “home work” is supposed to be done with no objective method presented.
Can you not see the problem with failing to do this?
That is an assumption that can be incorrect.
Here we have a new problem with citations,
Prikryl et al. (2009) does not show up in Google Scholar as a citing Wilcox et al. (1975).
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=0&hl=en&as_sdt=5,31&sciodt=0,31&cites=15681490934722866424
This demonstrates that citation databases can be invalid or incomplete thus easily misleading.
We now have a third determination,
3. It is possible for citation databases to be incomplete or invalid.
Poptech says:
April 2, 2012 at 1:13 pm
Here we have a new problem with citations
I’m not sure what your problem is. It is blindingly obvious if an old paper is still of value. All value judgements are subjective. There is no absolute and objective measure of value or worthiness. Our paper in question was one of several on this subject that we published 1973-1981. The ‘discovery paper’ back in 1973 had as a coauthor the founder and director of NCAR so we even had authority on our side. The effect was hailed as a breakthrough with great promise for better predictions of weather [especially stormy weather] and in a sense revived the whole field of sun-weather-climate research which was pretty much dead by the 1970s and only pursued by cranks [more or less like the situation now]. If all this had held up, great strides would have been made in the 30 years since. None of this happened as the finding did not hold up. The many citations per year fizzled out and died [as was proper]. A few citations of late turn out to be by authors pushing marginal or dubious papers and do not add to the ‘scientific validity’ of our original. Examination of the publication record [even if incomplete] shows this with clarity and strength. On an even longer time scale, a finding may be elevated to a ‘fact’ and taught in elementary school. At that point [or perhaps a bit before] citations become irrelevant [except in historical reviews], but also unnecessary. Until then, doing your homework will give you a good idea of the continuing validity or relevance of old papers. This works fine for me and colleagues I know and ought to work for you if you listen to good advice and apply appropriate effort.
Leif, you realize you are completely illogical,
“It is blindingly obvious if an old paper is still of value.” – Leif
“All value judgements are subjective. There is no absolute and objective measure of value or worthiness.” – Leif
“The ‘discovery paper’ back in 1973 had as a coauthor the founder and director of NCAR so we even had authority on our side.” – Leif
“If one knows nothing and is not willing to do one’s homework, then there is not much hope, except appealing to authority, and if that is your choice, then that is also your loss.” – Leif
1. My problem is citations do not determine if a paper is valid. Yet this is what you claim should be used to determine this.
2. My second problem is the only way to find out if an author later found the results of a paper spurious (if this was not published) is to contact the author, something you claim is not trustworthy. Yet here you do just that, so should I trust your opinion on your older paper or not and why is your opinion on your older paper different from another authors on theirs?
“We have long since abandoned the finding as spurious.” – Leif
“Asking the authors is not a good thing, because many cling to their old [and spurious] work far too long.” – Leif
Effectively your arguments all revolve around your subjective opinion on everything.
Again, some sort of “home work” is supposed to be done with no objective method presented.
Poptech says:
April 2, 2012 at 8:24 pm
Effectively your arguments all revolve around your subjective opinion on everything.
Again, some sort of “home work” is supposed to be done with no objective method presented.
For me, my subjective opinion works quite well. The homework is simple: track down the old paper, read it, find citations to it, read those [and if needed, citations to those, recursively], see if the work has been followed up by other scientists, see if further progress has been made. If not, don’t bother with that old paper. Granted that that involves some ‘work’, but so do most other worthwhile things in life. Furthermore, you could do worse than take this advice from somebody faced with that very problem every day. If you want a ‘just click here’ oracle to form your opinions for you and tell you what is valid and what is not, without any effort on your part, I’m afraid you will not find any [that I would trust].
Poptech says:
April 2, 2012 at 8:24 pm
Effectively your arguments all revolve around your subjective opinion on everything.
Again, some sort of “home work” is supposed to be done with no objective method presented.
My subjective opinion works well for me, and is based on decades of experience with this.
The homework is quite simple: track down the old paper, read it carefully, find citations to it, read those [and if needed, citations to those, recursively]. If the work has not been followed up by other scientists, has not stimulated further research, and if nothing basically came of it, then don’t bother with that old paper. As simple as that. Now, I’ll grant that that involves some ‘work’, but so do most other worthwhile things in life. You could do worse than take this advice from someone who faces the problem every day. If you want a ‘just click here’ oracle to form your opinion for you and tell you what is valid and what is not, then I’m afraid you won’t find any [that I would trust]. There is no substitute for you looking into the subject for yourself and form your own subjective opinion. You may counter that you are incompetent in the subject and are seeking an authority to tell you what to think, and I’ll concede that there are people like that and will accept that you are one of them. We can’t all be experts in everything.
Leif, you are not following the conversation. A paper can be completely valid even based on new data and not be recently cited, followed up by other scientists or stimulate further research. Citation databases have been shown that they can be incomplete or inaccurate – Prikryl et al. (2009) does not show up in Google Scholar as a citing Wilcox et al. (1975). So citations cannot be used to tell if something is valid or not.
I am not looking for an “oracle”, I am pointing out that your citation method is flawed.
This is why Anthony’s question was excellent because Ivanov, could have “done his homework” and there would be no way for him to know you now consider the results from that paper, spurious.
Poptech says:
April 3, 2012 at 9:40 am
Leif, you are not following the conversation. A paper can be completely valid even based on new data and not be recently cited, followed up by other scientists or stimulate further research. Citation databases have been shown that they can be incomplete or inaccurate – Prikryl et al. (2009) does not show up in Google Scholar as a citing Wilcox et al. (1975). So citations cannot be used to tell if something is valid or not.
You are much too formalistic on this. Your so-called conversation is nothing but a demonstration of your inexperience with the process. Citations are VERY useful as I have outlined, provided you do the necessary homework. That our old paper is no good is shown by the lack of interest and follow-ups since ~1980. That does not mean it was not valid at the time we published it [it most certainly was based on the data we had then], only that the finding didn’t hold up or at least was not the breakthrough everybody thought it was.
I am not looking for an “oracle”, I am pointing out that your citation method is flawed.
What is flawed is our insistence that one blindly counts citations without thinking or doing the necessary follow up. Without citations, that follow-up would be next to impossible. Hence the value of citations. And the value of indices that count citations, e.g. the Hirsch-index. None of this is perfect, but it is also not ‘flawed’ or useless.
This is why Anthony’s question was excellent because Ivanov, could have “done his homework” and there would be no way for him to know you now consider the results from that paper, spurious.
Ivanov should have known this if he had done what I advise, but he is only interested in support [no matter how flimsy] for his own dubious papers.
Poptech says:
April 3, 2012 at 9:40 am
Prikryl et al. (2009) does not show up in Google Scholar as a citing Wilcox et al. (1975).
But if you read the Prikryl paper you’ll see that they do cite Wilcox et al.:
Wilcox, J. M., Scherrer, P. H., Svalgaard, L., Roberts, W. O., and Olson, R. H.: Solar magnetic sector structure: Relation to circulation of the earth’s atmosphere, Science, 180, 85–186, 1973.
Wilcox, J. M., Scherrer, P. H., Svalgaard, L., Roberts, W. O., Olson, R. H., and Jenne, R. L.: Influence of solar magnetic sector structure on terrestrial atmospheric vorticity, J. Atmos. Sci., 31, 581–588, 1974.
Wilcox, J. M., Svalgaard, L., and Scherrer, P. H.: Seasonal variation and magnitude of the solar sector structure – atmospheric vorticity effect, Nature, 255, 539–540, 1975.
Wilcox, J. M., Svalgaard, L., and Scherrer, P. H.: On the reality of a sun-weather effect, J. Atmos. Sci., 255, 1113–1116, 1976.
Study my comments carefully and see that I said that you should actually read the papers that have the citations.
My experience with using citations and citation databases like Google Scholar is very extensive but irrelevant to the logic of my argument. I never claimed citations were not useful, what I factually stated is when or how frequently a paper is cite cannot determine the validity of a paper. I am well aware that papers can be valid at the time they were published and later found not to be and I am well aware you consider your older paper to be no good anymore, these are not my arguments.
All a lack of citations can tell you is that the paper was not cited or recently. It can only measure popularity.
If the following question is true then your argument is invalid,
It is possible for an older paper to be valid (even with recent data) but not be cited, recently cited or widely cited and lack followups.
All citation indices do is blindly count the citations and apply a meaningless popularity metric to them. None of the citations to your older paper include any works by you or the other authors of your older paper so there is no way for Ivanov to know that you now consider the work spurious.
In which citation would he have found that you now consider the work spurious?
Yes I know this but Google Scholar does not list Prikryl et al. (2009) in the papers citing Wilcox et al. (1975).
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=0&hl=en&as_sdt=5,31&sciodt=0,31&cites=15681490934722866424
This demonstrates that citation databases can be incomplete or inaccurate and Ivanov could be unaware that Prikryl et al. (2009) cited Wilcox et al. (1975) so any “follow-up” that include reading Prikryl et al. (2009) would not be done.
You are making arguments based on knowledge you hold and others would not be able to obtain since mind reading is not possible yet.
Poptech says:
April 3, 2012 at 11:42 am
In which citation would he have found that you now consider the work spurious?
You miss the whole point. It is not that I consider the work spurious, but that almost everybody else also does. This you and everybody may deduce from the fact that nobody has seriously taken up the effect and used in their own work or kept comparing it to more modern data; in short: the promised breakthrough did not materialize because people found it did not hold up [and such negative findings are rarely published – nobody publishes serious papers anymore refuting the belief that the Earth is flat].
Another good example is the initial observations of 160-minute solar pulsations, which if real would be sensational and open up the solar core for seismic investigations:
Observations of solar pulsations
Severnyi, A. B.; Kotov, V. A.; Tsap, T. T.
Nature, vol. 259, Jan. 15, 1976, p. 87-89.
Here is the plot of citations with time:
http://www.leif.org/research/Citations-of-160-min-wave-paper.png
As with the VAI-paper, you can see the familiar trend: great initial excitement and many citations for a few years after the initial paper [we at Stanford joined in the search and co-published several papers on this as well]. As the finding didn’t hold up, citations slumped and dropped to a dribble of only a couple per year since. Those were either Kotov still clinging to the finding, or papers reminding the reader of previous failed attempts to discover such pulsations.
You are making arguments based on knowledge you hold and others would not be able to obtain since mind reading is not possible yet.
I think this example refutes your claim. As I said, this is a familiar pattern and holds in so many cases that it is a good first-order indication of the possible enduring ‘validity’ of an old paper. But as in most human endeavors, there is no objective, surefire way of being ‘sure’ of anything, one must do ‘homework’ and check for oneself.
Poptech says:
April 3, 2012 at 11:42 am
In which citation would he have found that you now consider the work spurious?
Another good example:
Solar Oblateness and General Relativity
Dicke, R. H.; Goldenberg, H. Mark
Physical Review Letters, vol. 18, Issue 9, pp. 313-316, 1967
If Dicke were right [he wasn’t], Einstein was wrong. Here is the citation history:
http://www.leif.org/research/Citations-of-Dicke-Solar-Oblateness-paper.png
And on and on.
You might here and there find counterexamples, where the original paper has been superseded by a later paper, which is now quoted instead of the original, but they are rare.
Poptech says:
April 3, 2012 at 11:42 am
All a lack of citations can tell you is that the paper was not cited or recently. It can only measure popularity.
That is key: correct papers are popular with scientists, papers that are clearly wrong are less popular. The case of Michael Mann is illustrative. His hockey-stick paper has been cited some 276 times and is thus popular and most scientists in his field still consider the paper valid. The citation history is not long enough to show the eventual fate of his paper. If in 20 years his paper is still considered valid it is a good bet that the citation history would show that. Also, should the paper be deemed invalid or no longer relevant it is also a good bet that the citations would drop off accordingly.
That is the point as you used your unpublished opinion as an argument against citing your old paper, the author would have no way to know this. You are then equating abandonment with falsification and even using citations abandonment cannot be determined as it is still cited. Regardless just because a paper is not recently or frequently cited has no determination on the validity of it. Unless the negative findings are published there is no way for someone to know they were found or exist at all. You are making unsupported assumptions that equate to mind reading.
I found 33 citations for this paper since 2000 in Google Scholar with only 5 from Kotov.
I searched through some of the papers that cited it and they did not refer to the original paper as failed. This one refers to it as a discovery, http://arxiv.org/pdf/0706.2504.pdf
I am not saying the paper is correct or not my point is, it does not appear to be as clear cut as you implied and scientists other than the original author may still find the paper valid.
That example simply shows when and how often the paper was cited, as that is all that can be determined from citations. If a paper is not published criticizing the original there is no “home-work” that can be done to determine if there was a problem with the original paper. Even with a published criticism this still does not mean the original paper is invalid because the criticism could itself be invalid.
Thus timing and frequency of citations can only determine popularity.
I believe popularity metrics (citation counts) are irrationally given scientific weight they do not deserve.
That is pure nonsense. Popularity does not equal scientific validity. Paper can be very popular and being completely fraudulent, http://tech.mit.edu/V125/N50/50van_parijs.html.
Do you consider Michael Mann’s hockey stick paper(s) to be valid?
Poptech says:
April 6, 2012 at 6:25
“That is key: correct papers are popular with scientists, papers that are clearly wrong are less popular. The case of Michael Mann is illustrative. His hockey-stick paper has been cited some 276 times and is thus popular and most scientists in his field still consider the paper valid. The citation history is not long enough to show the eventual fate of his paper. If in 20 years his paper is still considered valid it is a good bet that the citation history would show that. Also, should the paper be deemed invalid or no longer relevant it is also a good bet that the citations would drop off accordingly.”
That is pure nonsense. Popularity does not equal scientific validity. Paper can be very popular and being completely fraudulent, http://tech.mit.edu/V125/N50/50van_parijs.html.
Do you consider Michael Mann’s hockey stick paper(s) to be valid?
;—————
+1 for “popularity does not equal scientific validity”.
Popularity is just another manifestation of confirmation bias.
Poptech says:
April 6, 2012 at 6:25 pm
That is key: correct papers are popular with scientists, papers that are clearly wrong are less popular. The case of Michael Mann is illustrative. His hockey-stick paper has been cited some 276 times and is thus popular and most scientists in his field still consider the paper valid. The citation history is not long enough to show the eventual fate of his paper. If in 20 years his paper is still considered valid it is a good bet that the citation history would show that. Also, should the paper be deemed invalid or no longer relevant it is also a good bet that the citations would drop off accordingly.
That is pure nonsense. Popularity does not equal scientific validity. Paper can be very popular and being completely fraudulent, http://tech.mit.edu/V125/N50/50van_parijs.html.
Do you consider Michael Mann’s hockey stick paper(s) to be valid?
;———————–
+1 for “popularity does not equal scientific validity.”
Popularity ratings are a manifestation of confirmation bias.