New paper in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics demonstrates that planets do not cause solar cycles

Leif,
“The general consensus is that these effects are much too small to be detectable in the solar system, that is for bodies that are small compared to their separations, e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.0543 ”
The paper makes the point that given those conditions the world line of a test particle is a good enough approximation to the motion of the centers of masses of extended bodies. However, even their approximation considers the higher multipole moments of the extended bodies, but none of this is relevant to the issue of the torques of the planets on the Sun. The approximations in the paper hold for all the planets and the Sun except Mercury, which is why GR was needed to explain the motions of Mercury and newtonian gravitation was adequate for the motions of the planets and Sun.
The approximation described by the paper is also reasonably good for any internal particle in the extended bodies. The gravitational influence of other particles in the system on a particular internal particle is approximated by the world line for that particle given its mass and momentum. However, the GR difference still applies, the world lines of adjacent particles are not parallel, they interfere with each other, constrained both by the presence of each other and the extended bodies gravity. They have been given different accelerations and they collide or whatever. We know the convection zone of the Sun rotates at different rates and has mass currents. So even though the paper makes the point that the center of mass of the Sun takes the path approximated by the worldline of a test particle of the same mass, angular momementum and lower order multipole moments, it is still the case that the torques on the extended body from space curvature due to a body in motion like Jupiter and the self fields from internal mass currents still exist.

rgbatduke says:
April 16, 2012 at 10:43 am
Thanks for your very interesting and informative discussions concerning resonance issues and nonlinear forcing in the context of what we know (and dont) about what goes on in the sun. I’m sure this is the direction where research on this question should be directed.
Your argument that only a weak tidal force could entrain larger scale solar dynamic effect is elegantly supported by the posting by Paul Westhaver:
Paul Westhaver says:
April 15, 2012 at 4:37 pm
Leif,
Fluid instability requires infinitesimal triggers. A step gravitational event can have long lasting and durable consequences.
Look here:

A nonlinear oscillating system which is subject to multiple external forcings can sometimes jump from one forcing to another – perhaps symptomatic of the weak nature of the forcing. A good example of this is the timing of interglacials over the last 3 million years – about a million years ago it flipped from being driven by the 41 kYr obliquity oscillation to the 100 kYr eccentricity oscillation – i.e. from one weak orbital driver to another. Another example is the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (AMO) which – according to a presentation by P Chylek:

flips between 20 year and 60 year wavelength. Perhaps this flipping between alternative forcing frequencies is in some way diagnostic of a weakly driven nonlinear oscillator.
I am convinced that deep scientific problems about complex systems such as solar and earth climate will require analysis from the standpoint of nonlinear oscillatory systems, and nonlinear-chaotic dynamics in general.

barry says:
April 17, 2012 at 4:35 am
I am quite sure that if you asked Leif for science on the sun that is not settled he would have something to say. You curious? I am.
A sample:
1) heating of the corona [the precise mechanism]
2) is the dynamo deep or shallow? [most people think it is deep]
3) how deep is a sunspot rooted?
4) how does the polar fields maintain their polarity for years?
5) if the Livingston&Penn effect is real [I think it is] what is the cause? http://www.leif.org/research/Livingston%20and%20Penn.png
6) what is the rotation rate of the deep core [the innermost 10%]?
7) why do magnetic activity seem to prefer certain longitudes on the Sun? [or does it?] http://www.leif.org/research/Solar%20Sector%20Structure.pdf
8) is there a relic magnetic field in the core?
…many others.
all that said, we have have made great strides in our knowledge of the sun. Our models of the interior have been spectacularly confirmed by helioseismology and by observations of neutrinos. To claim, as many here do, that our knowledge is still in its infancy is dead wrong. There is a solid foundation.

As is explained in the paper under discussion the sun’s convection zone consists of millions of large [Texas-size] convection cells that randomly move up and down a thousand kilometer at speeds on 1 km/second with a life-time of a quarter of an hour. In addition there are tens of thousands horizontal flows with a life time of 20 hours and speeds of 0.5 km/sec. These movements completely wash out any millimeter-sized influence on the scale of days, month, or years and exclude resonances because of the random nature of the movements
Well, I admit I don’t know a lot about solar dynamics, but aren’t these movements superimposed on large bands of fluid matter that are actually rotating with different angular velocities at different latitudes with some sort of non-laminar flow boundary condition connecting them to a more or less static interior “ball” that rotates at a single angular velocity? And aren’t the convection cells and so on “random” in the sense that they nucleate and grow, but highly non-random in that they are far more likely to nucleate and grow in some places more than others? These motions have very long lifetimes, do they not.
The point being that in an object the size of the Sun, the existence of small scale fast structures (all the way down to the microstructure of the plasma) goes without saying, but that in no way precludes large scale slowly varying structure as well. I don’t know too much about the detailed structure of the Sun — although I am gradually learning as I have time — but I reiterate the notion that a lot of that structure and its dynamics are hidden from us.
As a single example — the solar core is (from what I understand) is a ball some 1/5 to 1/4 the solar radius in size. It is where fusion happens that powers the sun. The (remarkably low) power per cubic meter released varies with radius, which means that it effectively varies with pressure and temperature as the pressure and temperature peak in the center.
Again I must appeal to knowledge gleaned from the Earth, where the “rigid” crust rises and falls some 25 cm with the solunar tides as the entire planet develops a standing mode in its plastic interior. Again, this is not the tidal forces directly lifting all this matter, it is a driven spherical resonance that builds up over very long times but is also modulated over long times by the variations in the tidal forces that produce it. The atmosphere of the Earth has very small solunar tides as you note. The oceans (in spite of having all sorts of “random” small scale motion of its surface waters of the same or greater order as well as long range long lifetime persistent currents driven by all sorts of complex processes involving salinity/density, temperature, latitude, depth, note well) exhibit persistent very consistent tidal bulges that are sustained by self organized waves that actually require vast distances and volumes to emerge — the tides on the great lakes are barely measurable, the tides on a farm pond or glass of water are not measurable, but the tides given an ocean large enough to sustain a wave resonance with a 12ish hour period are substantial (and at the same time mere “noise” compared to the mean depth of the ocean. And the motion of the Earth’s crust itself — well, I would say the energy associated with lifting not just me but the entire crust under my feet up and down by a meter every two days is substantial, even as it is in some sense a tiny fraction of the energy delivered by e.g. insolation. I conveniently enough have a mass of roughly 100 kg, so every two days the Sun and the Moon are involved in an energy exchange of (order of) a kilojoule of energy mediated by my person. And of course, I’m just one person, and it isn’t just me, it is the entire crust under my feet that goes up and down the same way, not to mention the deformation of the entire plastic interior of the Earth below. With the entire sphere to play with as a plastic deformable medium capable of sustaining a volumetric rotating wave, the wave grows until energy input balances energy dissipation.
Such a wave on the Earth’s interior is a source of heat. Even though the rate of heat production per unit volume is small, all of the heat produced has to make its way out through the surface and so the very long time scale gravitationally mediated angular “inelastic collision” being played out between the moon and the Earth that will eventually cause them to become gravitationally locked at a common angular velocity is releasing the lost kinetic energy of that collision over geological time at a rate that keeps the Earth’s interior substantially warm (but still represents a trivial contribution to surface heating as it works its way outward).
In the Sun it’s direct contribution to heat production is likely very small, but there is an important possible feedback. Even a small modulation of the core pressure, a small (but systematic) travelling wave deformation of the core itself, can shift the probabilities of fusion events and hence the rate of energy production. This shift may be very small in absolute terms, but it is volumetric over a very substantial volume and because of the size of the core itself even a “small” travelling wave might produce a substantial uplift and downdrop of the isobars. Here one is modulating the real energy production mechanism of the Sun at the source, and it seems as though there is a distinct possibility for resonant feedback.
Then things get very complicated — energy produced in the core takes a very, very long time to diffuse to the exterior. The actual “diurnal” fluctuation in heat production (whatever its magnitude) would almost certainly thermalize quickly and so be smoothed, but — there are magnificent opportunities for the isobaric fluctuation to be propagated as a low frequency sound wave, and again one then has to think about the modes supported by the particular structure of the Sun and whether any of them might be resonant or near resonant. If there is a band of such frequencies (as one might reasonably expect) then again small modulation of the standing wave as might result for orbital resonances could shift the “ringing” of the sun by the low frequency noise generated by the furnace in its interior, which can in turn nonlinearly alter the ways that the patterns on its surface form.
The video so kindly provided above is a demonstration of exactly that sort of thing. Even on a very small scale, vibrating the plastic colloid creates “structure” that is at once quite random and yet isn’t random at all, it is patterned. Altering the driving frequency in certain (chaotic) regimes by even a small amount can very likely produce relatively large shifts from one pattern to another. The same sort of thing is visible in boiling liquids or in vertical convection patterns, which are absolutely apropos to what’s going on in the Sun. Simply stirring the liquid can shift one from one general pattern to another that may be quite different. The patterns themselves may be drawn out of a probability distribution (in some sense) of patterns that are consistent with the interior driving, the boundary conditions and geometry, and the (non-Markovian) past history of the system, but that’s the rub — what’s going on on the surface of the Sun now is at least partly a consequence of modulation of the core that happened in the past, and not just the past at a single time, but the past over a decomposition of time scales (presuming acoustical mode dispersion in the very long period modes in question).
I therefore reiterate that I do not find the unsurprising observation that a lot of the stuff that happens on the surface of the Sun to be high frequency, small scale phenomena to be even relevant to the question of whether planetary tides are in some way responsible for solar cycles that are decadal and longer in their time scale. That’s like saying that thermal motion of molecules makes low frequency sound waves or the wind itself impossible, a mistake that is so great, and so obvious, that one wonders how it can even be made.
It is a simple matter of observational fact that the Sun possesses structured interior dynamics with a time scale around a decade. It is a simple matter of observational fact that although this behavior is sort-of periodic (with considerable noise) it is strongly amplitude modulated, and that the amplitude modulations themselves appear to have structure with much longer time scales. These are direct evidence that there are nonlinear modes in solar dynamics with these time scales, and the lack of compelling pure Fourier regularity in them suggests further that they are very likely either highly multimodal or outright chaotic. In both of these latter cases, it is well-known that tiny changes in modulators can result in large changes in macroscopic behavior — sometimes, and possibly differently every time, and over widely varying timescales of persistence. All bets are off.
Please understand that I am not asserting that any of this is what happens inside of the Sun. I’m asserting that it seems to me that we do not know enough about the Sun to exclude this sort of possibility, that this general kind of possibility involves tweaking knobs like “modulating the solar furnace by 0.001% over a multiyear time scale (note well the irrelevance of the short time scales of fifteen minute surface phenomena that in the end are a consequence of the heat generated inside trying to self-organize for escape) plus (perhaps) “modulating the dispersion of long wavelength, long period solar modes that are manifest in the observational history of the Sun”. Nor am I asserting that any of the work that purports to show correspondence between planetary tidal beats and solar or climate state are correct — I’m simply not familiar enough with the data and conclusions and arguments to either endorse them or reject them.
My single conclusion is that analyzing the magnitude of tidal forces in the Sun and comparing them to short period secular activity on the surface of the Sun is completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not they modulate the decadal behavior of the Sun. This is the noise against which a much longer time scale signal must be resolved. The long time scale signal is clearly connected to completely different dynamics, probably occurring in a completely different place, and may have been modulated tens of thousands of years in the past an only be just now arriving at the solar surface. This means that the title of this thread oversteps.
Surely this isn’t such a radical observation. To quote from the Abstract itself above:
We do not exclude the possibility that the long term combined action of the planets may induce small internal motions in the sun, which may have indirectly an effect on the solar dynamo after a long time.
Translated: The forces are too weak to produce a direct signal resolvable from the chaotic turbulent surface noise. No surprise, there is no particularly good reason to think that there would be. But the entire paper is almost completely irrelevant to the real question of whether or not there is long time scale macroscopic influence, and hence it is irrelevant to the question of whether or not e.g. Scafetta’s correlations are or are not physical. At most it shows that they aren’t enough to produce it by directly modulating surface dynamics (although even that is arguable, signal to noise once again).
This is, or so I had thought, a hard problem. Feynman (my spirit guide in the wilderness of ego and egregious claims in all directions that is modern scientific research) would have us carefully limit our own arguments and freely admit their weaknesses as well as their strengths. The paper outlined in the top article is fairly honest about this, and its conclusions are fair enough, but we should all avoid blowing them up into egregious statements such as “planets to do not cause solar cycles”. Not even the authors make this claim. They simply assert that the forces are too small to be more than a small modulation on the direct surface dynamics of the solar cycle, but most of those dynamics are themselves irrelevant to the cause of the solar cycle — they are the effect of something else, not the cause, and the modulators of the real cause are not well understood (yet, as far as I know, although yes there are ever improving models out there and perhaps one of them is correct and complete, I don’t know).
So perhaps we can modulate the discussion to remain within Feynman bounds. That way we can learn from what the paper really says, and not translate it into a sound bite that turns out to be horribly incorrect in ten years when we learn more, or worse, puts off for twenty years the time required to get it right by becoming part of the scientific dogm- — I mean “lore” — in the meantime and used as an excuse for dismissing certain counterassertions out of hand.
rgb

tallbloke says: April 17, 2012 at 4:20 am
Anthony says: “Plus the authors say in their conclusion that “Hence, planetary influences should be ruled out as a possible cause of solar variability. ”
tallbloke renponded : “Well that’s just sloppy unscientific thinking and the reviewers have been remiss in allowing such a wide ranging conclusion to be drawn from such a limited study solely investigating planetary tides.”
Sorry Anthony, tallbroke is right. What the authors of that paper have proven is that they do not know what is the right way to do the calculations. That is all. Moreover, their paper is just a copy of their 2005 paper.
That paper is filled with prejudices and sloppy research. For example, they say:
“As an example we mention a paper by Scafetta (2010), who found that climate variations of 0.1–0.25 K with periods of 20–60 years seem to be correlated with orbital motions of Jupiter and Saturn. This was, however, not confirmed in another paper on a similar topic (Humkin et al., 2011).”
1) They ignore all literature (at least 30 papers) I have referenced that confirm those cycles, 2) Humkin et al, do not say what they claim, the right opposite; 3) phlogiston says: April 17, 2012 at 4:04 am has presented the last work by P. Chylek studing almost 3500 years of ice core data and he found bouth the 20 and the 60 year cycles as you can see above.
Keep an open mind and be humble. Take into account that Leif is not the creator of the universe and God might have made the universe differently from what he thinks.

Nicola Scafetta says:
April 17, 2012 at 7:54 am
…
Me: You had two papers rejected by solar physics. Rejected by six reviewers.
The reviews from all reviewers of which I was but one list several errors and comment on the low quality of the papers. As Anthony says “put up or shut up”. Publish those reviews and attendant email exchanges and threats and we can go from there. If you are not humble enough to do that, give me permission to publish them all. If you do not explicitly forbid me to publish them in your next comment, I’ll take that as permission to publish them as I please.
Since you did not forbid to publish, I now take it as permission for me to publish what I want.

Nicola Scafetta says:
April 17, 2012 at 7:54 am
Chylek studing almost 3500 years of ice core data and he found bouth the 20 and the 60 year cycles
Here is what they found “The longer multidecadal variability of 45–85 years is not well defined and none of the time scales in this band is statistically significant”

Dan says:
April 17, 2012 at 8:08 am
But to try and shut out the possibility that when statistical outlier type weak or strong systemic resonances take place there wont be any effect is simply too much to state with any certainty.
The claim is not there there is no effect whatsoever, but that any effect is bound to be very small and therefore will be submerged in the noise. Possibly one can eventually dig it out of the noise by sophisticated analysis on enough data, but that does not provide any predictive value.

Leif says:
Paul Westhaver says:
April 17, 2012 at 7:27 am
The next step is to open one’s mind to alternative hypothesis.
Not necessarily. A valid step is to intensity research building on existing knowledge using the laws of physics.
Where in anything that I have written did suggest a departure from laws of physics? That is a leap you just made and attributed to me.
It is poor science to not keep options open particularly when your existing models are fruitless.
Our existing models are not ‘fruitless’.
If the models advanced were any good then NASA et al would not be updating their predictions with serious fractions of error on a monthly basis. Since the models fail to predict, I think it is fair to say that they are fruitless.
Time for fresh eyes on the problem.

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