Is there a planetary influence on solar activity? It seems so according to this new paper

2-D Sun 3Mar2007 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Guest post by David Archibald

Long suspected, it seems that this has now been confirmed by a paper in Astronomy and Astrophysics with the title “Is there a planetary influence on solar activity?” by Abreu et al that was published on 22nd October, 2012.

From the Discussion and Conclusions section:

The excellent spectral agreement between the planetary tidal effects acting on the tachocline and the solar magnetic activity is
surprising, because until now the tidal coupling has been considered to be negligible. In Appendix A we show that the possibility of an accidental coincidence can be ruled out. We therefore suggest that a planetary modulation of the solar activity does take place on multidecadal to centennial time scales.

The authors note that current solar dynamo models are unable to explain the periodicities in solar activity such as the 88 year (Gleissberg), 104 year, 150 year, 208 year (de Vries), 506 year, 1000 year (Eddy) and 2200 year (Halstatt) cycles. They adopted a different view by regarding the planets and the solar dynamo as two weakly coupled non-linear systems.

The idea that planetary motions may influence solar activity seems to have been initiated by Rudolf Wolf in the 1850s. While energy considerations clearly show that the planets cannot be the direct cause of solar activity, they may perturb the solar dynamo.

Specifically, the authors calculated planetary torque at the tachocline. The tachocline of the sun is a shear layer which represents a sharp transition between two distinct rotational regimes: the differentially rotating convection zone and the almost rigidly rotating radiative interior. The tachocline plays a fundamental role in the generation and storage of the toroidal magnetic flux that eventually gives rise to solar active regions. A net tidal torque is exerted in a small region close to the tachocline due to the buoyancy frequency originating from the convection zone matching the tidal period. The tachocline is thought to be non-spherical – either prolate (watermelon-shaped) or oblate (pumpkin-shaped). The authors’ model describes planetary torques acting on a non-spherical solar tachocline.

Figure 5 from the paper shows the 10Be record, shown as modulation potential, and planetary torque in the frequency domain:

Figure 5: Comparison between solar activity and planetary torque in the frequency domain.

Panel a is the Fourier spectrum of the solar activity quantified by the solar modulation potential. Panel b is the Fourier spectrum of the annually averaged torque modulus. The spectra display significant peaks with very similar periodicities: The 88 year Gleissberg and the 208 year de Vries cycles are the most prominent, but periodicities around 104 years, 150 years, and 506 years are also seen.

The match between theory and the physical evidence is very, very good. As the authors put it,”there is highly statistically significant evidence for a causal relationship between the power spectra of the planetary torque on the Sun and the observed magnetic activity at the solar surface as derived from cosmogenic radionuclides.”

They also advance a plausible mechanism which is that the tachocline, playing a key role in the solar dynamo process, is a layer of strong shear which coincides more or less with the layer of overshooting convection at the bottom of the convection zone. The overshoot layer is thought to be crucial for the storage and amplification of the magnetic flux tubes that eventually erupt at the solar photosphere to form active regions. Small variations in the stratification of the overshoot zone “of about -10-4 may decide whether a flux tube becomes unstable at 2·10-4 G or at 10-5 G. This makes a great difference, because flux tubes that do not reach a strength close to 10-5 G before entering the convection zone cannot reach the solar surface as a coherent structure and therefore cannot form sunspots.” This sounds like an explanation for the Livingstone and Penn effect of fading sunspots.

Figure A.1 from the paper also shows the very good correlation between cosmogenic radionuclides from the period 300-9400 years BP and the model output:

Top panel: 10Be from the GRIP ice core in Greenland
Upper middle panel: 14C production rate derived from the INTCAL09 record
Lower middle panel: solar modulation record based on 10Be records from GRIP
(Greenland) and Dronning Maud Land (Antarctica) and the 14C production rate
Bottom panel: Calculated torque based on planetary positions

If planetary torque modulates solar activity, does solar activity in turn modulate the earth’s climate? Let’s have a look at what the 10Be record is telling us. This is the Dye 3 record from Greenland:

All the cold periods of the last six hundred years are associated with spikes in 10Be and thus low solar activity. What is also telling is that the break-over to the Modern Warm Period is associated with much lower radionuclide levels. There is a solar mechanism that explains the warming of the 20th Century. It is also seen in the Central England Temperature record as shown in the following figure:

Conclusion

This paper is a major advance in our understanding of how solar activity is modulated and in turn its effect on the earth’s climate. It can be expected that planetary torque will progress to being useful as a tool for climate prediction – for several hundred years ahead.

Reference

J.A. Abreu, J. Beer, A. Ferriz-Mas, K.G. McCracken, and F. Steinhilber, Is there a planetary influence on solar activity?” Astronomy and Astrophysics, October 22, 2012

Thanks to Geoff Sharp, the full paper can be downloaded from here.

290 thoughts on “Is there a planetary influence on solar activity? It seems so according to this new paper”

1. temp says:

But… but but the sun doesn’t effect the earth weather or climate useless research is useless.

2. What about a outside influence that synced both over time. Pulsar, binary star…

3. pat says:

I have to admit, I had not given this hypothesis any credit what so ever. I suspect a few astrophysicists are now walking around campuses knocking on the doors of Archeology and Meteorology Departments to see if they can come up with a coincidental weather pattern.

4. What did I tell you7

5. noaaprogrammer says:

6. Pamela Gray says:

I believe that tidal influence has been known. But do these influences change any other solar metric outside of variation noise? That is the question even CO2 enthusiasts deal with. And so far, all these external and anthropogenic influences do not rise above intrinsic natural variation noise.

7. One may wonder how effective peer-review of this paper has been. “Received 17 Mai 2011 Accepted 17 Mai 2011”. Usually, such instant acceptance is reserved for climate papers from the “Team”.

8. Jim G says:

In the 1980’s -90’s it was theorized that solar, lunar and planetary gravitational effects influenced earth’s volcanic activity and subsequently climate. Dr. Iben Browning was a noted supporter of this idea and predicted global cooling as a result.

So low solar activity causes the climate to cool. Who woulda thunk?

10. Bloke down the pub says:

Does that mean I can sell my warm coat or do I need to look out my fur-lined walking stick?

11. Hoser says:

Rubbish. They are finding coincidence. Too many peaks, and amplitudes mismatch. Correlation doesn’t prove causation.

If you believe the interpretation, make a prediction. Try to get the right phases to go with the amplitudes. Unfortunately, it will take years to get results, just need to keep up the funding….

12. J Martin says:

If they got such a good match then weren’t they just a little bit curious to extend it forward in time ?

204 years ago we had the Dalton, and 500 years ago the Maunder was about to get into its stride. The next few years might be interesting. Presumably the authors felt that we wouldn’t be interested, or perhaps they thought that it would be better if we didn’t know.

Oh, I know why they didn’t, co2 has already saved us.

13. tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 9:26 am
Geoff Sharp’s work gets a mention in this very informative and easy to read paper
If the Abreu torque-mechanism is working, Geoff’s Angular Momentum [AM] ideas are moot. The AM ‘mechanism’ would not have worked anyway because the Sun is in free fall.

14. J Martin says:

My sarc tags disappeared, guess I can’t use ><

/sarc Oh, I know why they didn’t, co2 has already saved us. /sarc

15. It’s clear the solar specialists do not know what the H they’re talking about.

16. rgbatduke says:

I like the fact that this paper connects (at least arguably) plausible physical mechanisms to observations. What it is basically saying is that things that happen within the thin shell of the thermocline — in particular the formation of defects, convective rolls — are the proximate cause of surface solar activity. Defects that form there nucleate magnetic flux tubes that much later emerge as sunspots and solar surface magnetic activity. Even small degrees of modulation of the nucleation process can make big differences at the surface, just as only micro-droplets of water nucleated around particles or aerosols reach the critical size necessary to grow into actual clouds or raindrops.

In the case of rain, it is surface to volume plus some surface chemistry that largely determines the success of the process initially, but tiny modulation in terms of aerosol concentration makes a big difference in the probability of cloud formation because there are strong positive feedbacks once a cloud reaches the point where it starts reflecting sunlight and differentially cooling the interior and lower layers.

Two things I would like explained in more detail before I completely buy the argument, though, are:

* The forces/torques involved are very, very small — I would like to see some sort of numerical magnetohydrodynamic computation that made plausible assumptions about the viscosity, density, lapse rate and UNinfluenced nucleation process (plausible enough to reproduce at least approximately observed surface phenomena) that, when the very weak planetary tidal torque was turned on altered the flux-tube nucleation rate as is asserted by the paper. Or COULD alter it, for some not unreasonable values of the parameters, across the critical boundary where the grow if the tidal forces are large, fail to grow if they are small. It’s one thing to say “this could be happening”; another to say “when we solve the equations of motion for a plausible model system, we observe that this happens”.

Lacking this, their argument is much weaker.

* I find myself vaguely disturbed by the fourier transforms above. Figure 5 is reasonably plausible — note well that the solar proxy peaks are broad and smeared out, with the long period peaks being much broader than the short period peaks and with a lot of undifferentiated “noise” in the short period high frequency domain. This can be understood very simply — the dataset being fourier transformed has a finite length, a length commensurate with (within an order of magnitude or so) the longest period peak displayed. Consequently those long period peaks are poorly represented in the sample, and the peaks are broad and accompanied by peaks that might well be entirely spurious, artifacts of the length of the dataset and the accidental noise. Basically, the fourier transform itself has artifacts that correspond to (inverse) Gibbs phenomena arising from the de facto decomposition of a Heaviside function representing the length of the data set, which broadens the longer period peaks and introduces irrelevant shorter period peaks both.

The shorter period peaks have many more periods in the integral and hence are much narrower, although they are quite reasonably accompanied by a lot of short period noise because the Sun is a chaotic turbulent magnetohydrodynamic system and probably has internal e.g. breathing mode oscillations with a variety of frequencies that also modulate the phenomenon (if the hypothesis is correct, that small variations in the thermocline can and do produce macroscopically resolvable differences in surface output).

Figure b is similar. Obviously they did a F.T. on the same interval as used in a) so that the peak at e.g. 506 years is similarly broad even though one would rather expect it to be quite sharp given that one is simply doing a fourier decomposition of the vector sum of a set of completely determined torques due to the periodic planetary orbits. If they’d done the F. T. on a much longer time interval (as they easily could have) one would expect the 506 year peak to be much sharper. This also explains why the widths of the 88 year peaks etc scale pretty well between a) and b), and shows that their hypothesis has a very hard time accounting for the largest peaks in the Be proxy in the broad zone between 200 and 500 years. Nor can these peaks in a) be easily explained away as Heaviside/Gibbs artifacts, as the artifacts would be expected to appear in figure b) as well.

Again, perhaps these correspond to breathing mode oscillations, the sun’s internal furnace “chuffing” a bit due to some sort of resonance between gravitational force, fusion rate, and thermal expansion (a feedback loop where the sun contracts slightly, increasing the efficiency of the core fusion process, which heats the core a bit more, which then takes a long time to propagate to the thermocline, which expands the thermocline a bit, which decompresses the furnace so that its output cools/decreases a bit, which propagates outward to cause the thermocline to contract a bit, which recompresses the core a bit, resulting in a wave train of small modulations in output due to coupled breathing mode oscillations of solar density in the “critical” domain of the thermocline). Again, it would be lovely to see a model that reproduces this sort of coupled nonlinear phenomenon even qualitatively.

So figure 5 is moderately convincing. The short period peaks line up very nicely with peaks in Be production, there is at least a peak at 508 years in both (along with a lot of unexplained structure in between), and yes, it could be true that small forces drive relatively big changes if there is any possibility of resonance, where 5a actually provides some evidence of undriven resonances as it is.

What I don’t like so much is figure A.1. To be frank, it looks impossible. The peaks are far too sharp, far too localized, and utterly inconsistent with figure 5. The interval of integration is only around 20x the size of the longest period and yet the 508 year peak is sharp as an arrow in the radionucleotide data. If anything, the SHORT period peaks have widths. I would have rather expected this figure to look a lot more like 5 for all of the proxies, even if they did the FT of the torque over a long enough interval to sharpen up the long period peak(s). This F.T. looks more like a quantum spectrum, where there is actual physics prohibiting most of the possible frequences in the temporal signal, not the FT of a chaotic, noisy process.

Where is all of the noise?

To conclude — it convinces me that planetary tides are a plausible physical mechanism for modulation of the magnetic state, one that is empirically correlated with proxy derived data. Some of the data expressing the correspondence is “reasonable”; other data is rather puzzling although they may have some explanation for it and my intuition of the wrong shape and lack of noise of the FT on a 20x interval in multiple proxies may be wrong. Finally, this is probably not the only important factor — note the other peaks in figure 5 — and the entire argument would be greatly strengthened by even a crude model calculation that can reproduce the result qualitatively and demonstrate that small torques are indeed “capable” of producing the large modulations observed via nucleation and growth in an actual magnetohydrodynamic convective model of the Sun.

rgb

17. Bart says:

In many discussions with planetary perturbation advocates on these pages, especially involving Nicola Scafetta who no doubt will be making an appearance in 5, 4, 3… ;-), I have agreed that there could possibly be a link due to gravitational gradients, but that I doubt the argument can be made compelling enough for widespread acceptance.

I will also go out on the limb a little and make a perhaps novel suggestion that causation could be the reverse – that solar activity, resulting in increased solar radiation pressure, might perturb planetary orbits. Satellites at geosynchronous orbit drift significantly due to this factor, as well as due to gravitational perturbations from the Sun, Moon, and Earth, and their orbits have to be periodically corrected via stationkeeping maneuvers to maintain position. If solar radiation pressure were the primary driver of the correlations between solar activity and planetary motion, it might explain stochastic variation in the phases and amplitudes of the cycles.

In any case, the bottom line is that the cycles exist regardless of the mechanism. The warmist line is that the existence of such cycles must depend on some kind of unknown, and unlikely, deterministic driver, and those pointing to coincidence with planetary cycles are ceding the high ground in the battle to the opposition by accepting this premise. But, the premise is flawed. The danger is that the advocates of planetary influence may find evidence which proves the naysayers wrong, but they may not, and the naysayers will then claim that the hypothesis is disproved when, in fact, the hypothesis of natural cyclical climate behavior does NOT depend on the existence of a deterministic external driver.

Oscillations in natural systems depend only on the ability to store energy in alternating states, e.g., potential to kinetic, and back again. Such oscillations arise frequently and naturally in systems which are governed by partial differential equations on a bounded domain, and can be continuously excited by purely random forcing. Such oscillations are ubiquitous in nature.

The oscillations exist, and we are at the peak of an approximately 60-65 year cycle in the global temperature metric right now. The entire AGW scare was mounted on the back of the preceding upsweep in that cycle, and it is going to fail on the imminent downsweep.

18. Central to the torque mechanism is that the solar dynamo is working in the overshoot layer just beneath the tachocline. BTW, Abreu et al. accepts that a dynamo is creating the solar cycle.
Central to many dynamo mechanisms is a shear layer across which the solar rotation speed changes. There is such a layer at the tachocline [that is what defines the tachocline which is about 30% of the solar radius below the photosphere]. Another important ingredient is a Meridional circulation that recycle surface magnetic flux back into the interior where it can be amplified for the next cycle. This is the idea of the ‘conveyor belt’. Modern observations seem to indicate that there is no such single large conveyor belt. There is a shallow belt just under the surface where, BTW, there is also a shear layer, so dynamo models may be moving to a shallow dynamo rather than the deep one needed for the torque mechanism to work.

19. Ed_B says:

Hoser says:
“Rubbish. They are finding coincidence. Too many peaks, and amplitudes mismatch. Correlation doesn’t prove causation. ”

I read that they developed a theory and a model. and then tested it against the real world data. That in their opinion, is validation of their theory and model. Just where did you get your “coincidence” concept from? Maybe I missed it, please advise.

20. Kev-in-Uk says:

To me the title of the paper seems somewhat rhetorical IMHO.
Simply put, if gravity is real (which, of course, it is) – the planetary gravitational exchanges and combinations via elliptical orbits MUST have a corresponding change on the gravitational forces experienced by the sun and its surface (if we are simply considering sunspots for example).
Irrespective of the actual suns ‘burning’ processes – simple logic dictates that if its ‘surface’ is subjected to an external variation in gravity – it must likely affect the way that that ‘surface’ emits its radiation/plasma, etc, etc. The gravitational ‘impacts’ will presumably also affect the magnetic fluxes and so on. Perhaps, the gravitational effects of planetary motions can also affect the ‘spin’ of the sun or some of its component parts (does it have a rotating core?), e.g slowing them down or speeding them up.
Following this through, it is quite obvious that the summary solar output/activity WILL almost certainly be affected in some way by planetary gravitational effects (irrespective of what those effects actually are!). I suppose the argument is then about how much of an effect these gravitational changes are on the (largely unknown?) actual internal processes of the suns ‘workings’.
We know that lunar influences cause tides on earth, what’s to say that ‘jovian’ influences don’t have a similar effect on the actual gas/plasma ‘surface’ of the sun? – albeit on a much ‘longer’ timescale (perhaps a bad analogy, but readily understood I think).
Thence, it is a simple deduction to conclude that if the suns output can vary (for whatever reason) and that solar energy is primarily what drives our climate – then logically, changes in solar output can and will likely result in a change to our climate. (I do largely subscribe to the ‘it’s the sun stupid’ meme, because, in the end, even if TSI only varies by 1% – 1% of a lot of energy, is still a signifcant amount! My secondary view is that earth’s biosphere and atmosphere has the ability of adjusting to such solar changes amidst all its complexity, and thus perhaps to mitigate such minor solar effects)
If gravitational forces are also considered as able to cause an effect on the space betwixt sun and earth and indeed affect the earth itself, altering its magnetosphere/heliosphere, etc – then this is another ‘influence’ of planetary motions which can change the actual solar ‘input’ reaching earth?

21. Doug Proctor says:

The Central England Dye temperature graph: if the datapoints were coloured to show decade or greater, you might see an unexpected pattern that indicates time as an important factor, that is, something that is time-related.

22. TRM says:

Nice theory and observation, now how about some predictions! Yes it will take time to see but we have lots of time.

23. DAV says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 9:42 am

One may wonder how effective peer-review of this paper has been. “Received 17 Mai 2011 Accepted 17 Mai 2011″. Usually, such instant acceptance is reserved for climate papers from the “Team”.

Not to mention they reference a 2012 paper presumably prior to 17 Mai 2011:
Steinhilber, F., Abreu, J. A., Beer, J., et al. 2012, PNAS, 109, 5967

24. CRS, Dr.P.H. says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:04 am
The AM ‘mechanism’ would not have worked anyway because the Sun is in free fall.

Thank you for this, Leif, it is a critical distinction to make.

I’ve never found planetary tidal arguments very plausible, you’ve always enlightened us on the facts.

25. Bart says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:13 am
I will also go out on the limb a little and make a perhaps novel suggestion that causation could be the reverse – that solar activity, resulting in increased solar radiation pressure, might perturb planetary orbits.
That limb is very thin. Solar radiation pressure does have an effect on minute dust particles [basically cleans them out], but is MUCH to week to have any influence on planets or even comets. It was once speculated that radiation pressure was the cause of comet tails pointing away from the Sun. Both theory and the discovery of the real mechanism [the solar wind] showed that radiation pressure was not effective.

Kev-in-Uk says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:21 am
changes in solar output can and will likely result in a change to our climate. (I do largely subscribe to the ‘it’s the sun stupid’ meme, because, in the end, even if TSI only varies by 1% – 1% of a lot of energy
Such changes do occur and do affect the temperature of the order or 0.1 degree. TSI does not vary 1%, but only about 0.1%, ten times less. All the other solar variations involve a lot less energy than TSI, so have a harder time in being effective.

26. DAV says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:40 am
“One may wonder how effective peer-review of this paper has been. “Received 17 Mai 2011 Accepted 17 Mai 2011″. Usually, such instant acceptance is reserved for climate papers from the “Team”.”
Not to mention they reference a 2012 paper presumably prior to 17 Mai 2011:
Steinhilber, F., Abreu, J. A., Beer, J., et al. 2012, PNAS, 109, 5967

It is not unusual that such references be added during the actual publication copy-editing.
But it does not seem plausible that the paper could be submitted and reviewed and accepted on the same day. The authors’ even say in the acknowledgement session that “We would like to thank the anonymous referee for valuable and constructive suggestions”, indicating that a referee was also involved. The date of ‘May 2011’ is also interesting, because they submitted their paper to Nature [where it was rejected by several referees for a variety of reasons] in July of 2011. Something is not quite right. Even if the year 2011 is wrong, that still makes the acceptance implausibly quick.

27. Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:14 am
dynamo models may be moving to a shallow dynamo rather than the deep one needed for the torque mechanism to work.

Breaking news: Leif Svalgaard throws fifty years of mainstream solar physics under the bus in order to keep the solar-planetary theory at bay.

28. Dan in Nevada says:

This is pretty interesting. To the extent this pans out it would appear to bolster Svensmark’s GCR cloud hypothesis if I’m understanding correctly. Leif pointed out the extent to which this would be a “butterfly effect” if true (my paraphrase, apologies if I misunderstood). It’s kind of mind-boggling to imagine planetary influences contributing to perturbations in the sun’s output, which in turn influence temperature and climate on those planets.

29. Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:48 am
TSI does not vary 1%, but only about 0.1%, ten times less. All the other solar variations involve a lot less energy than TSI, so have a harder time in being effective.

Earth’s average surface temperature has only increased around 0.5% since the end of the little ice age. The increase in solar activity and TSI over the same period could easily account for global warming, because the ocean builds up, retains and dissipates heat on centennial timescales as Leif himself pointed out recently.

The other solar variations affect upper atmospheric chemistry in poorly understood ways, and may have an effect well beyond the variation of their energies in raw W/m^2 terms.

30. Kev-in-Uk says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:48 am

re your comment – I fully accept that may well be the case. However, we still have a large number of Earth events to ‘explain’ – e.g. Ice Ages, etc. It is not logical to consider that in a ‘generically’ static climate system (over periods of millenia, say) relatively sudden changes occur to cause things like Ice Ages, WITHOUT some form of external influence. As I said, given that the biosphere and climate is primarily driven by solar energy – it would logically follow that such events may be derived as a result of changes in solar activity. The issue then becomes – is it possible for solar activity to change significantly, and along with other changes, (such as biospheric derived albedo changes)? – could this lead to sufficient loss of incoming solar energy to result in Ice Ages?
Whether its a direct cause and effect issue is of course, difficult to derive without clear mechanisms and feedbakc effects, etc – but the summary idea that solar changes do occur would suggest these will most likely be the prime ‘initiator’ of major climatic changes…..

31. CRS, Dr.P.H. says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:42 am
Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:04 am
The AM ‘mechanism’ would not have worked anyway because the Sun is in free fall.

Thank you for this, Leif, it is a critical distinction to make.

I’ve never found planetary tidal arguments very plausible, you’ve always enlightened us on the facts.

The Sun is not in perfect freefall because of the quadrupolar moments which arise due to it’s irregular shape. However, The hybrid Tidal-Torque theory of Ian Wilson and Abreu et al seems to be ascendant at the moment. Mechanism is ultimately important, but we shouldn’t let consideration of it over-ride the quality of the correlations on display in this paper.

Plenty of scientific theories are well developed and of practical use long before mechanism is finally satisfactorily explained.

32. richardscourtney says:

Friends:

I agree the excellent review – with all its doubts and caveats – of rgbatduke at November 10, 2012 at 10:13 am, and I commend everyone to read all of it.

However, I am concerned by the observation of Leif Svalgaard at November 10, 2012 at 9:42 am which says

One may wonder how effective peer-review of this paper has been. “Received 17 Mai 2011 Accepted 17 Mai 2011″. Usually, such instant acceptance is reserved for climate papers from the “Team”.

And the addendum to it from DAV at November 10, 2012 at 10:40 am which says

Not to mention they reference a 2012 paper presumably prior to 17 Mai 2011:
Steinhilber, F., Abreu, J. A., Beer, J., et al. 2012, PNAS, 109, 5967

These observations imply there may have been an ‘agenda’ for rushing publication. And history indicates that such ‘rushed’ publications often contain significant – but not immediately obvious – flaws.

Richard

33. tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 11:01 am
Breaking news: Leif Svalgaard throws fifty years of mainstream solar physics under the bus in order to keep the solar-planetary theory at bay.
One might have hoped that the discussion could be on a scientific and civil level, but apparently that is not going to happen.

The ‘conveyor belt’ goes under the bus because of recent observations of the Meridional Circulation, so theories depending on a deep circulation go under the bus as well. And theories that depend on a torque on the tachocline as well.

tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 11:14 am
Earth’s average surface temperature has only increased around 0.5% since the end of the little ice age. The increase in solar activity and TSI over the same period could easily account for global warming
A 0.5% increase in temperature requires a four times as large increase in TSI, 2%, and that has not happened.

Kev-in-Uk says:
November 10, 2012 at 11:14 am
However, we still have a large number of Earth events to ‘explain’ – e.g. Ice Ages, etc
Ice Ages are not caused by solar activity, but by changes in the Earth’s orbit, mainly caused by Jupiter, so in a sense planets do control the climate.

tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 11:19 am
The Sun is not in perfect freefall because of the quadrupolar moments which arise due to it’s irregular shape.
The quadrupole moment is exceedingly small and does not make the sun deviate from free fall. An astronaut in orbit has a very irregular shape and is still in free fall.

but we shouldn’t let consideration of it over-ride the quality of the correlations on display in this paper.
Correlations are just that

34. Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 9:42 am
One may wonder how effective peer-review of this paper has been. “Received 17 Mai 2011 Accepted 17 Mai 2011″. Usually, such instant acceptance is reserved for climate papers from the “Team”.

Different journals work in different ways. It might have been accepted in May 2011 on submission, but it wasn’t published until October 2012. Plenty of time for peer review and suggested alterations and various to-ing and fro-ing. Those of us who have been aware of the progress of this paper throughout that time know how rigorously it has been vetted prior to publication.

35. richardscourtney says:
November 10, 2012 at 11:35 am
And the addendum to it from DAV at November 10, 2012 at 10:40 am which says
Not to mention they reference a 2012 paper presumably prior to 17 Mai 2011:
Steinhilber, F., Abreu, J. A., Beer, J., et al. 2012, PNAS, 109, 5967

These observations imply there may have been an ‘agenda’ for rushing publication.

On the contrary it indicates there has been a year and a half long process of re-iteration culminating in successful publication in October 2012.

17 months between submission and publication hardly looks like an
“‘agenda’ for rushing publication”

36. Hoser says:

Ed_B says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:19 am

I backed up my position by asking for a prediction. My opinion is the proposed mechanism is rubbish, and the results are simply coincidence. Just because you happen to get a correlation, it doesn’t mean you have anything understood or otherwise of value. Show us the beef by making predictions. I’ve seen plenty of data having been a lab rat for over 25 years. After a while, you develop a BS detector. I now deal with billions of DB records, building analysis tools. Data management and analysis is the rate limiting step in many fields of science these days.

From the paper, it is hard to have confidence in the statistical analysis performed to support their conclusions. They mention ‘monte carlo tests’ and tell us “the probablilty of finding the same five spectral lines by chance is is about 10^-7 to 10^-11”. They don’t tell us how these numbers are calculated, perhaps something like: make 4 to 25 year bins across the 600 year period, and see if 5 peaks randomly fall into them, so (25/600)^5 = 1.3×10^-7 and (4/600)^5 = 1.3×10^-11. Wow, I’m impressed. We already expect the solar activity represented by Φ to correlate with cosmogenic 14C and 10Be. If one fourier analysis matches the torque produced by the planets, they all will.

What wasn’t tested was whether the observed real data can be matched by different sets of hypothetical planets producing different torques. Looking at Fig 5, it seems likely a set of five peaks will line up easily. Furthermore, although the amplitudes are shown, do the phases match? That is critically important for the analysis. And will the results hold up for longer than the 9400 year period studied? Will it work with cosmogenic 26Al?

Until questions like these are answered, I’m going to remain very skeptical.

37. tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 11:46 am
Different journals work in different ways. It might have been accepted in May 2011 on submission, but it wasn’t published until October 2012.
No papers are ‘accepted on submission’.

38. phlogiston says:

They adopted a different view by regarding the planets and the solar dynamo as two weakly coupled non-linear systems.

The people walking in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness
a light has dawned.

Isaiah 9: 2

39. kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:

Dear Moderators:

Title error: Is there is a…

Freudian slippage, thinking about a statement instead of a question?

[Thanks, fixed. — mod.]

40. The paper by Abreu et al. is surely interesting and important.

The only complain is that they do not reference most of the litterature on the issue that has already found related and similar resuts (eg the works of Charvatova, Landscheidt, Fairbridge etc.).

More issues are discussed in my two papers

1) Scafetta N., 2012. Does the Sun work as a nuclear fusion amplifier of planetary tidal forcing? A proposal for a physical mechanism based on the mass-luminosity relation. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 81-82, 27-40.

2) Scafetta N., 2012. 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. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 80, 296-311.

In particular in (2) I study explicitly Steinhilber TSI proxy model (fig. 4B) and as well as other solar proxy models (Bard, Bond) and paleoclimatic records during the holocene.

About Steinhilber TSI proxy model I noted the same major cycles (e.g. ~87 yr and ~207 yr) which in Ref. (1) and they are associated to the Jupiter/Saturn/Uranus system. As I write inmy papers, it is easy to get these cycles:

 ~60 year is the great conjunction cycle of Jupiter and Saturn (which is made of three J/S conjunction periods);  ~85-year is the 1/7 resonance of Jupiter and Uranus; and  ~205 year is the beat resonance between the 60-year and the 85-year cycles.

The physical issue remains the same and not addressed in the paper. The tides are too weak to influence solar dynamo. The only way the mechanism may work is through a solar nuclear fusion amplification mechanism, which is actually calculated in my paper (1) above. The things work well.

And in my paper I built the major solar cycles from the 11-year to the millennial oscillation.

Hoping that Anthony realizes that Leif’s comments are based only on his prejudices, not on real science, and his past behavior is highly unprofessional. As all solar scientists who reject the planetary theory of solar variation, Leif too has no idea of what causes the solar dynamics to behave as it behaves, beginning with the origin of the 11-year solar cycle.

Only the planetary theory of solar variation has the potentiality to explain solar dynamics, and also climate change as argued in my papers.

41. Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 11:45 am
The ‘conveyor belt’ goes under the bus because of recent observations of the Meridional Circulation, so theories depending on a deep circulation go under the bus as well.

Fine with me. It’s bout tie we hd a fundamental paradigm shift in solar physics.

So, what have you got to offer us in the way of a “well grounded in solid physics” shallow dynamo theory? Who has been publishing a broad overview we can read?

tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 11:14 am
Earth’s average surface temperature has only increased around 0.5% since the end of the little ice age. The increase in solar activity and TSI over the same period could easily account for global warming

Leif responds:
A 0.5% increase in temperature requires a four times as large increase in TSI, 2%, and that has not happened.

The answer to this apparent conundrum was already published in JGR several years ago.
http://sciencebits.com/calorimeter

42. Bart says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:48 am

That limb is very thin.

I do not claim it isn’t.

“Solar radiation pressure does have an effect on minute dust particles [basically cleans them out], but is MUCH [too weak] to have any influence on planets or even comets. It was once speculated that radiation pressure was the cause of comet tails pointing away from the Sun. Both theory and the discovery of the real mechanism [the solar wind] showed that radiation pressure was not effective.”

Solar radiation momentum flux is up to three orders of magnitude greater than that of the solar wind. I agree it appears a stretch that, e.g., the orbit of Jupiter could be significantly affected as the flux density falls off as 1/R^2 but, on the other hand, Jupiter presents a LOT of area to intercept the momentum flux. I have not done any calculations, and so can only speculate that it might prove significant. It does have a very significant effect on Earth-bound satellites, so I would not blithely discount the possibility.

Comet tails require a differential force, which results from ionization and magnetism. As the solar radiation pressure is largely uniform in the neighborhood of the comet, it cannot do that job. But, that does not mean it does not have a significant effect on the orbit of the overall mass.

43. Hoser says:
November 10, 2012 at 11:55 am
Ed_B says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:19 am
I backed up my position by asking for a prediction.

And because the authors didn’t comply with your demands within 15 minutes:

My opinion is the proposed mechanism is rubbish, and the results are simply coincidence.

Your opinion is noted, even though I think it’s rubbish. ;-)

What wasn’t tested was whether the observed real data can be matched by different sets of hypothetical planets producing different torques. Looking at Fig 5, it seems likely a set of five peaks will line up easily.

Seems likely? Is this a scientific approach? Maybe if you want to rebut what these scientists have successfully published, you need to do this test yourself and present the results. At the moment, they are the ones with a published result, and you are standing around waving your arms while you badmouth them.

44. With Dr RGB and Dr. LS both around, perhaps it might be wise to stay on the sidelines….er, for time being, unless I hear …. or could be this a polite prompt for rgbatduke .

45. Martin Lewitt says:

No extended body is in “free fall” under general relativity (even a human is a space suit), however this paper is only using Newtonian tidal quadrature effects. Has anyone figured out what this projects for the Sun’s immediate future, a Dalton or Maunder type minimum?

46. Carsten Arnholm, Norway says:

Re Figure A.1: It isn’t “Drowning Maud Land” unless you believe the Antarctica is melting. The name is “Dronning Maud Land”, which is Norwegian for “Queen Maud Land”.

Reply: Fixed. Thanks. -ModE

47. kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:

From tallbloke on November 10, 2012 at 12:35 pm:

Maybe if you want to rebut what these scientists have successfully published, you need to do this test yourself and present the results. At the moment, they are the ones with a published result, and you are standing around waving your arms while you badmouth them.

Ah, if I had a nickel for every time a minion of the (C)AGW-pushers said that to climate skeptics, whether it was a published paper by Hansen, Menne, Mann… “If you have any proof then write up a paper and submit it for peer-review! Until you do and it gets published, you got nothing! You’re just harassing honest scientists who did great work and got published!”

I await the claims of Leif and his cronies being paid shills of Big Solar…

48. Martin Lewitt says:
November 10, 2012 at 12:42 pm
No extended body is in “free fall” under general relativity (even a human is a space suit), however this paper is only using Newtonian tidal quadrature effects. Has anyone figured out what this projects for the Sun’s immediate future, a Dalton or Maunder type minimum?

The theory put forward in this paper doesn’t really cover the grand minima. My own research (following on from work originally done by Theodor L in the 1980’s indicates that deep minima events are precipitated by a non-linear reaction to a set of possible planetary positions which make the barycentre of the system coincide with the solar surface within 0.1 solar radii for several years.

This occurred just before the onset of the Dalton minimum, and more briefly at other times when there has then been been an anomalously low solar cycle following the event. It is happening again now, 206 years (De Vries cycle) after the Dalton event.

49. One of the profound ironies of the “environmentalist” belief that Co2 drives planetary warming, while the activities of the Sun, and in turn the possibility that that solar cycles are themselves partly a product of influences of other planetary bodies in our solar system, are considered anathema. The entire concept of real “environmental” or “ecological” thinking is that all entities exist within larger frameworks of influence.

The moon causes tidal cycles on earth. Why is it so difficult for so many to see that the possibility that planetary bodies create similar effects on, e.g., the sun, is one that deserves serious consideration and has a prima facie claim to plausibility based on the lunar-tidal analogy?

Kev-in-Uk says:
November 10, 2012 at 11:14 am
However, we still have a large number of Earth events to ‘explain’ – e.g. Ice Ages, etc

Dr. Leif replies

Ice Ages are not caused by solar activity, but by changes in the Earth’s orbit, mainly caused by Jupiter, so in a sense planets do control the climate.

Good. At least some of us agree on at least the second part of that.

50. With top authors such as Steinhilber, McCracken and Beer joining the lead author Abreu attributing a planetary influence on solar activity is a large leap forward in the solar/planetary theory arena. With many papers of this realm now appearing, the balance is now shifting to other causes of a solar driver outside of the Babcock/Leighton theories. The solar dynamo is still intact but perhaps it is modulated by planetary forces?

In regards to the Abreu et al paper there are some points that need to be fleshed out. A full understanding of how the torque values are calculated in perhaps layman’s terms would be useful. Is the torque produced only from the rocky planets and Jupiter (tidal mechanism) or is there a solar torque contribution incorporated. The main diagram shows a SSB vector that is there for a reason.

A major contribution to this paper would be a timeline plot of the torque calculations. I imagine this would represent a sine wave of sorts that should allow hindcasting of the Holocene and future forecasting of grand minima events not unlike my own research. How this graph compares with Carl Smith’s AM graph would be interesting.

I have a small article dealing with this paper last month that also questions the viability of FFT type analysis in regard to solar proxy records.

http://tinyurl.com/2dg9u22/?q=node/290

It would be helpful to receive informed comment from qualified reviewers other than Leif to get a more balanced perspective.

Thanks David for promoting this paper to Anthony.

51. kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
November 10, 2012 at 1:10 pm
I await the claims of Leif and his cronies being paid shills of Big Solar…

We’re here to discuss Abreu et al’s interesting paper. Leif’s …interesting historical connections… with lead IPCC authors can wait for another day.

52. tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 1:24 pm

My own research (following on from work originally done by Theodor L in the 1980′s indicates that deep minima events are precipitated by a non-linear reaction to a set of possible planetary positions which make the barycentre of the system coincide with the solar surface within 0.1 solar radii for several years.

Solar radius, solar torque and solar angular momentum are pretty much all the same with your graph imitating Carl’s original work. As pointed out previously Landscheid*s work in this area had nothing to do with solar output or grand minima.

http://tinyurl.com/2dg9u22/?q=node/243

There is also a new method of identifying solar AM perturbations that slightly enhances the perturbations shown on Carl’s graph. The method is to simply take the solar/Jupiter distance away from the SSB/Jupiter distance.

53. David Archibald says:

tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 1:24 pm
For what its worth, after reading this paper I have decided to not call the current minimum a de Vries cycle event. It has come exactly 208 years after the Dalton Minimum and may be largely a de Vries cycle event but for it to be abrupt it must be coinciding with one or more of the shorter period cycles. That begs the question of where are we at with respect to the cycles, that is what are the years of the peaks of the Gleissberg, de Vries cycles. Like cracking a safe, it should be easy enough to find the alignment of cycles that matches the Be10 record.

54. Kev-in-Uk says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 11:45 am

so if Ice Ages are a result of orbital changes – what is the net result of orbital changes on solar ‘incoming’ radiation? – obviously, it changes. Ergo, Ice Ages are related to solar activity changes? Yes?
These may seem like trivial points – but they are crucial in deciding where to start to look for climate changes. It is all very well trying to state that natural solar variation changes are small – but in truth, we only have limited valid observational evidence for that when compared to real geological timescales. And thence to discuss solar activity ‘mechanisms’ and ‘processes’ which are largely speculative (the last I heard, nobody or no probe has visited the internal bits of the sun and provided answers!) is somewhat clouding the issue when, in a nutshell, the primary biospheric and hence climatic energy source – is the suns energy.
Sure, this is simplistic – but it is fact, is it not? The fact that recent solar observations do not appear to suggest massive solar variation (i.e. TSI) does not automatically discount that it has not happened in the past.
I appreciate that yourself and others are working on other ‘effects’ – but they sum to the same thing – a change in incoming/outgoing radiation/reradiation, whether caused by magnetospheric, cosmic rays, planetary movements, solar flares, CME’s, etc, etc – the NET result is the same – a change in the incoming/outgoing radiative ‘budget’ with resultant climatic changes.
The net signal of any one of these individual effects will likely be difficult to isolate. And then when we look at actual biosphere measurements (temp and the like) we are thus measuring ‘lagged’ effects too, of a multi-affected ‘subject’, with combined positive and negative feedback effects, all masking or countering the supposed ‘external’ cause of change. The temp/co2 lag issue from ice cores is a classic example – and in terms of not knowing where we are in any cause and effect timelagged signal – finding that was a scientific eye-opener. The earth is like a big pan of water, with a net ‘average’ temperature that takes a definite time to change, either from increased energy or decreased energy. That change may occur centuries down the line, from a cumulative effect of a very minor (almost indetectable?) change in some parameter or other!
In a climatic sense, they call it climate sensitivity – but assigning values to it is complete BS (IMHO) because we have no way of knowing the lag effects of previous ‘changes’ given our paucity of actual measurements. Modelling individual or even suites of cause/effect paramteres, is just guessing on a grand scale.
As a geologist, for example, we know that in order to lay down coal measures, the seas went through different depositional stages as a result of tectonic and climatic changes over millions of years. What caused them? or more accurately, what are they the net result of? Obviously, it has to be at least partially due to climate (and thus possibly solar) changes?

55. J Martin says:

Leif Svalgaard

said “Ice Ages are not caused by solar activity, but by changes in the Earth’s orbit, mainly caused by Jupiter, so in a sense planets do control the climate.”

And a couple of weeks ago you also said that you think that temperatures are going to go down, possibly approaching a Maunder, or words to that effect. I haven’t looked it up. You also said that this would not be caused by the Sun but by Jupiter. Sadly you didn’t elaborate.

But now finally, you reveal why. So it is clear that you have some thoughts and no doubt also some figures on Jupiter altering the orbit of Earth to influence even control climate.

I am very interested indeed on anything you have to offer on this subject. Is there a paper pending perhaps ?

Presumably the influence of Jupiter is to move Earth’s orbit further out. Would this not produce a measurable influence on TSI ? or is there some other mechanism or consequence at play as a result, perhaps a step change of some sort…? Obliquity ?

I can see how a wider orbit would bring on a glaciation, the step change out of glaciation is trickier.
And I’m not sure where the variable 100,000 year timing can come from, unless the outer giants are at play here. Or does Jupiter have some 100,000 year ish orbital eccentricity that takes Earth with it.?

A new theory is just awesome.

Please tell me / us more. I need to know more.

56. Geoff Sharp says:
November 10, 2012 at 1:58 pm
Landscheid*s work in this area had nothing to do with solar output or grand minima.

We can respect our differences in interpretation on that issue.

There is also a new method of identifying solar AM perturbations that slightly enhances the perturbations shown on Carl’s graph. The method is to simply take the solar/Jupiter distance away from the SSB/Jupiter distance.

http://tinyurl.com/2dg9u22/images/jup_dist_diff.png

Nice.

Also of interest is the plot Vukcevic made of successive Jupiter – Saturn alignments along the Parker Spiral at solar minimum.

http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/03/22/how-can-jupiter-and-saturn-affect-solar-cycles-brief-review/

There’s more to all this than just gravity and gravitationally induced tides in my opinion.

57. gary gulrud says:

So we’re making progress, good to see considering current events.

58. David Archibald says:
November 10, 2012 at 2:15 pm
tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 1:24 pm
For what its worth, after reading this paper I have decided to not call the current minimum a de Vries cycle event. It has come exactly 208 years after the Dalton Minimum and may be largely a de Vries cycle event but for it to be abrupt it must be coinciding with one or more of the shorter period cycles. That begs the question of where are we at with respect to the cycles, that is what are the years of the peaks of the Gleissberg, de Vries cycles. Like cracking a safe, it should be easy enough to find the alignment of cycles that matches the Be10 record.

Hi David, and thanks again for writing this article for consideration on WUWT.
This plot made by Tim Channon might help:

59. Hoser says:

tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 12:35 pm

What? We supposed to believe anything peer reviewed? Your reputation precedes you, Mann’s Best Friend. They do need to do more work, I don’t. They are making claims, I am not. I’m just poking holes in their work, and it’s pretty easy to do.

60. tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 2:50 pm

Geoff Sharp says:
November 10, 2012 at 1:58 pm
Landscheid*s work in this area had nothing to do with solar output or grand minima.
————————————-
We can respect our differences in interpretation on that issue.

As long as the differences are pointed out. I am taking all of the information from his book whereby you are taking a paragraph or two out of context.

I still think you have a duty to clarify this to your readers.

61. Sparks says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:04 am

“If the Abreu torque-mechanism is working, Geoff’s Angular Momentum [AM] ideas are moot. The AM ‘mechanism’ would not have worked anyway because the Sun is in free fall.”

Leif, the Sun is not in free fall by itself. It’s accompanied in it’s free fall by the mass of our solar system, therefor the sun will still be under the influence of this orbital mass, so your argument here is inaccurate.

62. Here is the comparison with the original data:

And the Spectral analysis of the data and the model:

63. Kev-in-Uk says:
The earth is like a big pan of water, with a net ‘average’ temperature that takes a definite time to change, either from increased energy or decreased energy.

Er…, yes
Lets assume that the pan of water has reached certain temperature, and the heat source is an infrared lamp somewhere from above (warmer water at the surface, cooler below) supplying constant amount of energy, as Dr.S suggests sun does, and surprisingly I do agree with.
If we measure surface and the air temperature above, not withstanding any other changes, it can be assumed that at two locations temperatures will be different but more or less constant.
Now if we stir the uppermost warmest layer, it could be expected that the both temperatures (water surface and the immediate air above) would change. What implement can be used for stirring? If water has a degree of salinity (good conductor of electricity), then a pulsing magnetic field would do.
So we have achieved temperature change of water surface and the air above with a constant thermal input.
Translating to : sun, earth, oceans and atmosphere gives the natural decadal and multidecadal oscillations at least in the N. Atlantic and looks like in the whole of the n. hemisphere.
vukcevic in UK too.

64. P. Solar says:

Bart says: “It does have a very significant effect on Earth-bound satellites, so I would not blithely discount the possibility.”

I would do those calculations, if I were you. You may have to consider surface to mass ratio when comparing Jupiter to and orbiting satellite. ;)

65. Hoser says:
November 10, 2012 at 3:02 pm
I’m just poking holes in their work, and it’s pretty easy to do.

Pretty easy to do if you think a wave of the arm and the incantation of “Seems likely” is sufficient to dismiss their work.

66. tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 11:46 am
Those of us who have been aware of the progress of this paper throughout that time know how rigorously it has been vetted prior to publication.
It is not credible that you have been aware of this.

tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 12:19 pm
So, what have you got to offer us in the way of a “well grounded in solid physics” shallow dynamo theory? Who has been publishing a broad overview we can read?
Hathaway has something on the observations http://www.leif.org/EOS/20111212_NSO-Hathaway.pdf
The theory may be over your head. Try http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0512637v1.pdf or

Bart says:
November 10, 2012 at 12:26 pm
I would not blithely discount the possibility.
But you blithely put it forward. The solar radiation momentum flux is TSI/c and [although much larger than the solar wind’s] is too minute to affect the planets at all and varies as little as TSI does. The flux is always in the same direction so the planets are always pushed out [never in]. Comet tails are not due to solar wind pressure, but to ions picked up by the magnetic field in the wind.

Martin Lewitt says:
November 10, 2012 at 12:42 pm
No extended body is in “free fall” under general
I don’t think anybody will claim that planetary effects are General Relativity effects.

Geoff Sharp says:
November 10, 2012 at 1:45 pm
Is the torque produced only from the rocky planets and Jupiter (tidal mechanism) or is there a solar torque contribution incorporated. The main diagram shows a SSB vector that is there for a reason.
The torque depends on the mass, not on the composition and Saturn is also involved. The SSB vector is there for the sole reason of providing the reference coordinate system [which they immediately transform to a sun centered one]

A major contribution to this paper would be a timeline plot of the torque calculations.
I asked them to do that, and they did, but the result was so poor that they did not want to publish it.

Kev-in-Uk says:
November 10, 2012 at 2:15 pm
so if Ice Ages are a result of orbital changes – what is the net result of orbital changes on solar ‘incoming’ radiation?
Almost none, but the orbital changes determine where on the Earth and when that radiation falls, and that makes the difference.

J Martin says:
And a couple of weeks ago you also said that you think that temperatures are going to go down, possibly approaching a Maunder
No, nothing like that, no mention of temperatures. What I said was that the number of visible sunspots will go down [it has already gone some of the way]

figures on Jupiter altering the orbit of Earth to influence even control climate. I am very interested indeed on anything you have to offer on this subject
This is standard ice-age theory that has around for decades.

Presumably the influence of Jupiter is to move Earth’s orbit further out.
It can’t. The influence is the change the eccentricity and when during the year the Earth is farthest from the sun.
I need to know more.
Standard theory. Try google it.

67. Manfred says:

This is not “just” correlation.

If these would be 2 terrestrial parameters A and B, there are 4 possibilities:
1. A causes B
2. B causes A
3. Third variable C causes A and B
4. correlation is incidental

But as A is the sun and B an effect on earth, only 1 and 4 are plausible. This is a huge increase in information.

Again correlation with a solar variable is so good, that it should blows doubts about mechanisms out of the water as well as doubts about measurements of the 2 variables. It also tells you a lot about the Nature Journal.

68. David Archibald says:

tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 2:56 pm
Well, well, well. That graph is very interesting. The correlation between the de Vries cycle and what I presume to be the Be10 record is very good a lot of the time. It is evident that the last de Vries cycle cooling event was the unnamed cooling event associated with the Be10 spike centred on 1890. So the Dalton minimum was not a de Vries cycle event, and the peak of the next de Vries cycle cooling will be in 2100. Therefore the current minimum must be a combination of some of the other cycles. But which ones?

69. Bob in Castlemaine says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 11:45 am
Ice Ages are not caused by solar activity, but by changes in the Earth’s orbit, mainly caused by Jupiter, so in a sense planets do control the climate.

Leif is it glacial cycles that are caused by changes in Earth’s orbit, or is it Ice Ages or is it both?

Carsten Arnholm, Norway says:
November 10, 2012 at 1:01 pm
Re Figure A.1: It isn’t “Drowning Maud Land” unless you believe the Antarctica is melting. The name is “Dronning Maud Land”, which is Norwegian for “Queen Maud Land”.

Thanks Carsten, that had me a bit worried there for a moment – visions of Australia’s Climate Change Minister Greg Combet delivering one of his “fire and brimstone” performances come to mind.

It might be interesting to hear what Prof. Nir Shaviv has to say in his presentation “The cosmic ray climate link – evidence and implications to the understanding of climate change” at ICCC-8 in Munich Nov 30 – Dec1.

70. Sparks says:
November 10, 2012 at 3:32 pm
Leif, the Sun is not in free fall by itself. It’s accompanied in it’s free fall by the mass of our solar system
And of the mass of the Galaxy and that of the Virgo Cluster. All the masses in the solar system, the galaxy, the universe determine the local curvature of space-time where the Sun is. The Sun moves freely such that time goes the slowest. That is free fall. Experiments show that all objects in free fall accelerate at the same rate, as noted by Galileo, is the basis of the Equivalence Principle, on which Einstein’s theory of general relativity relies.

71. Ninderthana says:

Leif said:
November 10, 2012 at 10:14 am

“BTW, Abreu et al. accepts that a dynamo is creating the solar cycle.”

All my postings since my 2008 paper (based on research that we did in 2005-2006):

http://www.publish.csiro.au/paper/AS06018.htm
Does a Spin–Orbit Coupling Between the Sun and the Jovian Planets Govern the Solar Cycle?
I. R. G. Wilson, B. D. Carter, and I. A. Waite

have been based upon the premise that planetary tides and forces were only operating as a modulator of the underlying solar dynamo.

If you go to blog site and look at my posting from March 2012:

You will see that I have been proposing this type of model (i.e. a spin-orbit coupling – which is achieved through a process of tidal torquing) since at least 2008.

Oh, Leif, you may want to watch this space as there is [much] more to come from the likes of Abreu et al….. Sit back an enjoy the show.

72. David Archibald says:
November 10, 2012 at 4:03 pm
the unnamed cooling event associated with the Be10 spike centred on 1890.
The 1890 10Be spike is probably an artifact [McCracken, personal communication] as the signal was very noisy and uncertain around that time.

73. Ninderthana says:
November 10, 2012 at 4:34 pm
Sit back an enjoy the show.
It is, indeed, somewhat enjoyable to watch all the contortions the enthusiasts go through, try to say “I said it all along”. Abreu et al. [if correct] effectively demolish all the magnetic waves, angular momentum, spin orbit-coupling, and beating oscillator, and the like theories. To save all the kooky theories you might begin to support the notion that the dynamo is shallow [which demolishes Abreu et al.]

74. Caleb says:

Yesterday Joe D’Aleo had an interesting post on his weatherBELL site called, “Two schools of thought – science vs science fiction?” I urged him to submit it to WUWT because it shows the extremes, in terms of what sort of future we might face. Another Little Ice Age vs. Global Warming.

The Little Ice Age theory was in a Russian work called, “Bicentennial Decrease of the Total Solar Irradiance Leads to Unbalanced Thermal Budget of the Earth” Habibullo I. Abdussamatov, Pulkovo Observatory of the RAS

Hopefully it will not annoy Leif too much, but the Russian paper does seem to suggest that a small change in TSI can make a big difference.

I don’t want the north any colder than it already is. However there is always a silver lining to any cloud, (even a cold Little-Ice-Age cloud,) and I have read that such a chill would be good for sugar maples and would increase the production of maple syrup, and also it might even lead to an increase in the population of codfish. (Buy stock in companies that make winter clothing? Might be a boom there, too.)

75. David Archibald says:
November 10, 2012 at 4:03 pm
tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 2:56 pm
Well, well, well. That graph is very interesting. The correlation between the de Vries cycle and what I presume to be the Be10 record is very good a lot of the time. It is evident that the last de Vries cycle cooling event was the unnamed cooling event associated with the Be10 spike centred on 1890. So the Dalton minimum was not a de Vries cycle event, and the peak of the next de Vries cycle cooling will be in 2100. Therefore the current minimum must be a combination of some of the other cycles. But which ones?

David: Take your pick, They’re all heading downwards about now. We had the big C20th ‘highest in 8000 years’ solar max. Now the party is over, and the bill is presented.

76. Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 3:53 pm

The torque depends on the mass, not on the composition and Saturn is also involved. The SSB vector is there for the sole reason of providing the reference coordinate system [which they immediately transform to a sun centered one]

If that is the case then the paper is indeed a different theory to my own, but if so not mutually exclusive. Just as we have multiple drivers of climate there is no monopoly on the Sun. Perhaps Ian WIlson could confirm or deny any SSB xyz funtion included in the planetary torque values of this paper and also which planets are included.

I am aware composition is not important. Mass and distance for tidal forces is all that is required.

A major contribution to this paper would be a timeline plot of the torque calculations.
———————————————————-
I asked them to do that, and they did, but the result was so poor that they did not want to publish it.

If you can provide the data or detailed graph that would save a lot of time. I also take it you were involved in the review process?

77. Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 3:53 pm
Martin Lewitt says:
November 10, 2012 at 12:42 pm
No extended body is in “free fall” under general
I don’t think anybody will claim that planetary effects are General Relativity effects.

There is a solar-planetary hypothesis based on relativistic effects. We are still working on it. R^2 against solar data from 1749 is only 0.6 t the moment, but there’s room for improvement.

78. Geoff Sharp says:
November 10, 2012 at 5:19 pm
Just as we have multiple drivers of climate there is no monopoly on the Sun.
Yeah, everybody’s theory is correct, they all contribute. Dream on…

If you can provide the data or detailed graph that would save a lot of time. I also take it you were involved in the review process?
I’m not at liberty to deny or affirm…

79. Caleb says:
November 10, 2012 at 5:04 pm
Hopefully it will not annoy Leif too much, but the Russian paper does seem to suggest that a small change in TSI can make a big difference.
That Russian paper is based on silly extrapolation of a trend that doesn’t exist. http://www.leif.org/research/Abdussa2.png and the extrapolation looks like wishful thinking http://www.leif.org/research/Abdussa2.png

tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 5:05 pm
We had the big C20th ‘highest in 8000 years’ solar max
No we didn’t. C20th was not much different from the previous two centuries

80. Sparks says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 4:19 pm

“And of the mass of the Galaxy and that of the Virgo Cluster. All the masses in the solar system, the galaxy, the universe determine the local curvature of space-time where the Sun is. The Sun moves freely such that time goes the slowest. That is free fall. Experiments show that all objects in free fall accelerate at the same rate, as noted by Galileo, is the basis of the Equivalence Principle, on which Einstein’s theory of general relativity relies.”

Leif, of-course this is true to a degree, to be specific as to why your argument is inaccurate, is in the exchange of gravitational forces of bodies in “free fall” simply put, the potential of object [A] can interact and exchange it’s potential with the potential of object [B] in free fall and vise-versa.

I found a somewhat quick and basic example of what I mean here.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/grav.html

81. Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 4:42 pm
To save all the kooky theories you might begin to support the notion that the dynamo is shallow [which demolishes Abreu et al.]

Well now you’ve abandoned 50 years of deep dynamo theory, and headed out into the brave new world of untested hypothesis, you’re hardly in a position to describe other people’s hypotheses as “kooky”. Maybe you should be supporting the notion that the dynamo is modulated by planetary positions like Ian says. It’ll make your shallow dynamo that much easier to reboot following grand minima.

82. Geoff Sharp says:
November 10, 2012 at 5:19 pm
If you can provide the data or detailed graph that would save a lot of time
The best I can do is to use the graphs [not exactly what you want, but that is what we have to work with] from the published paper. Here is a comparison of the wavelet analyses of the solar modulation [at left] and of the calculated torque [at right] http://www.leif.org/research/Abreu-Wavelet-Comparison.png . I’m not impressed. Perhaps you will be convinced.

tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 11:46 am
Those of us who have been aware of the progress of this paper throughout that time know how rigorously it has been vetted prior to publication.
It is not credible that you have been aware of this.
And you have produced no evidence to back that claim up. Conclusion: you are a bit economical with the truth, perhaps.

83. Sparks says:
November 10, 2012 at 5:33 pm
I found a somewhat quick and basic example of what I mean here.
Gravity is geometry, not exchange of particles or forces. You can describe gravity as if there is an exchange, but that does not have anything to do with free fall. Imagine an empty universe except for a binary star of perfectly symmetric shape. They orbit each other in perfect free fall and can be said to ‘exchange’ gravitons, if one wants to use that picture.

tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 5:37 pm
Well now you’ve abandoned 50 years of deep dynamo theory
Well, you may notice that I have been pushing the shallow dynamo for several years. Did you understand the links I gave you? If not, try again. And it is not 50 years. Babcock’s model was a shallow dynamo. The deep dynamo was a later ‘panic’ proposal when it was discovered that the postulated strong flux tubes would rise in a month if placed anywhere in the convection zone, so would have to be put under the zone in the stable interior.

84. Edwin says:

Climate is complex but surely any influence on solar activity will finally be reflected on our weather.
The irony is that astrology might have some scientific basis afterall. Alignment of planets causing sever weather ! Druids would have said I told you so but morden mann wouldnt listen and finds his own doom.

85. Sparks says:

Leif, these currents could be affected by other process, I’m going with “the third option” where every piece of the puzzle is needed to build a bigger picture.

86. Bart says:

P. Solar says:
November 10, 2012 at 3:39 pm

“You may have to consider surface to mass ratio when comparing Jupiter to and orbiting satellite.”

True enough. However, consider also the much longer orbit period, and what might happen on a similarly scaled time interval.

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 3:53 pm

“But you blithely put it forward.”

And, quite clearly indicated it as such. This is bad?

“The flux is always in the same direction so the planets are always pushed out [never in].”

Effectively a modulation of the radially directed gravity. Orbit prediction is exquisitely sensitive to the gravitational parameter, as every OA worth his salt knows.

“Comet tails are not due to solar wind pressure, but to ions picked up by the magnetic field in the wind.”

You might even say it “…results from ionization and magnetism.” I’m pretty sure somebody said that previously.

Sparks says:
November 10, 2012 at 5:33 pm

If you are talking about tidal forces, nobody will have any disagreement. Point masses are in free fall. Bodies of measurable extent will experience tidal forces. If you search for “tidal” on this page, that is what almost everyone is talking about.

87. Sparks says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 6:08 pm

“Gravity is geometry, not exchange of particles or forces. You can describe gravity as if there is an exchange, but that does not have anything to do with free fall. Imagine an empty universe except for a binary star of perfectly symmetric shape. They orbit each other in perfect free fall and can be said to ‘exchange’ gravitons, if one wants to use that picture.”

Leif, it is an inverse square law, force which depends upon the product of the two interacting sources. This is also called potential, Whether or not the the sources are in free fall a property of space-time geometry is included as a gravitational constant.

88. Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 5:49 pm

The best I can do is to use the graphs [not exactly what you want, but that is what we have to work with] from the published paper. Here is a comparison of the wavelet analyses of the solar modulation [at left] and of the calculated torque [at right] http://www.leif.org/research/Abreu-Wavelet-Comparison.png . I’m not impressed. Perhaps you will be convinced.

The only thing I am convinced about is that they might be onto something, but perhaps only at a high level. This would be confirmed if I could see a detailed planet torque graph and compare known grand minima. The detail would need to be at the level produced by the Carl Smith graph I use.

89. Sparks says:

Its interesting that Neptune has an orbital eccentricity of 0.0086 in relation to the persistent period and phase of the 88-year solar cycle oscillation. Neptune has the most Circular orbit of all the larger outer planets. It’s also not a gas giant like Jupiter and Saturn, it is a large planet tugging on the sun and interacting with the potential of other planetary mass in the solar system.

90. Sparks says:

Bart says:
November 10, 2012 at 6:28 pm

“…nobody will have any disagreement. Point masses are in free fall.”

Bart, I haven’t stated in anyway that the Sun is not in free fall. I was elaborating upon this in regard to what Leif said. I’m thinking out loud, I hope it’s constructive and not seen otherwise.

91. Ninderthana says:

Leif,
I know that you are educated enough to understand the following.argument. I am sure that most of those reading this blog will also understand it as well. The reason that I am giving it is to make sure that others on this list are aware that you have no pseudo-scientific hole in which Leif can “safely” hide.

If you start out with the hypothesis that: Changes in the relative rotation rate of layers in the convective layers of the Sun can influence the long-term strength of the solar dynamo (think of it as a Gedankenexperiment or thought experiment) {N.B. the following arguments are independent of the depth of the dynamo in the Sun’s convective layer}.

Ask yourself the question, is it possible for the planets to affect the relative rotation rate of layers in the convective layers of the Sun? .

Given the incredibly weak nature of gravitational and tidal forces between the Sun and the planets, the only feasible way to accomplish this is to:

a) produce an asymmetry in the spherical shape of layers in the convective zone of the Sun
b) have a tangential planetary gravitational force (i.e. a torque) acting upon these layers
c) assume that it is possible for these layers to slide over each other, allowing the layers to change in their relative rotation rates.

These three requirements logically leads to following TIDAL-TORQUING MODEL:

You need to use the strongest planetary tangential gravitational force to maximize b). This means that b) must be produced by the planet that acts on the Sun with the strongest gravitational force i.e. Jupiter.

You need to use the strongest planetary tidal forces in order to produce a)..Given that Jupiter is being used in this model to provide the tangential gravitational force, this leads to the choice of the alignments of Venus and the Earth, since they produce the greatest tidal distortions of the Sun’s convective layers, if you exclude Jupiter.

This model has the potential of producing the changes in the relative rotation rate of layers in the convective layers of the Sun that are required, however, it has two significant problems:

1) The combined tidal forces Venus and the Earth must be amplified by resonances between the orbital periods of these two planets and the layers in the convective layers of the Sun. [There is some evidence that this does in fact take place]

2) It assumes that it is possible for layers in the Sun’s convective zone to slide over each other, allowing the layers to change in their relative rotation rates..

If either of these problems are not overcome then the TIDAL-TORQUING MODEL fails.

The reason why I believe that these two problems are [in fact] overcome is justified by figure 8 on page 90 of our 2008 paper:

Does a Spin–Orbit Coupling Between the Sun and the Jovian Planets Govern the Solar Cycle?
I. R. G. Wilson, B. D. Carter, and I. A. Waite

Figure 8 shows that there is an observable correlation between equatorial rotation rate of the Sun and its motion about the Barycentre of the Solar system. A correlation of this nature is telling you that there must be a TIDAL-TORQUING interaction between the planets and the Sun i.e. the dominant gravitational force of Jupiter must be acting tangentially on tidal distortions in the out layers of the Sun.

92. Ninderthana says:

Leif Svalgaard said
November 10, 2012 at 4:42 pm

Abreu et al. [if correct] effectively demolish all the magnetic waves, angular momentum, spin orbit-coupling, and beating oscillator, and the like theories.”

Abreu et al. is a spin-orbit coupling model!

A tidal torquing model is exactly the same as a spin-orbital coupling model in the case of the planets and the Sun.

Tidal torquing takes place between two astronomical bodies if the gravity of one body acts upon tidal bulges induced in the other body e.g. the Earth-Moon system.

A spin-orbit coupling model for the Sun means that the rotation rate of the Sun varies with the orbit of the Sun about the Solar System’s Barycentre. This will occur naturally if there is tidal-torquing taking place between the Jovian/Terrestrial planets and the Sun.

93. Stephen Wilde says:

Regardless of why solar behaviour is variable it seems clear to me that such variability changes the size of the polar air masses, the behaviour and / or positioning of the jets, global cloudiness and thus the amount of energy getting into the oceans to fuel the climate system.

Active sun gives less clouds, more energy in and an increase in energy flow through the system.
Quiet sun gives more clouds, less energy in and a decrease in energy flow through the system.

The timing of any climate consequences then being modulated by internal ocean cycling which can either oppose or supplement the solar effects for as long as it takes the thermohaline circulation to run a complete circuit.

Leif’s position seems to depend on the following propositions:

i) That where bodies are in free fall there is no interaction between them.

ii) That the changes in solar behaviour are negligible.

iii) That the frequent correlations between climate and solar activity are entirely coincidental.

iv) That there is no plausible mechanism whereby small changes in TSI or any other solar feature could affect the climate system from above.

I find his position to be implausible on each count. I see little evidence in support of any of those propositions.

94. Sparks says:

Seesaw effect?

95. Ninderthana says:
November 10, 2012 at 9:11 pm
Given the incredibly weak nature of gravitational and tidal forces between the Sun and the planets, the only feasible way to accomplish this is to:
a) produce an asymmetry in the spherical shape of layers in the convective zone of the Sun

Abreu’s mechanism does not produce an asymmetry, but assumes that there is a permanent asymmetry from the beginning.

Stephen Wilde says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:04 pm
i) That where bodies are in free fall there is no interaction between them. …
I find his position to be implausible on each count.

So, why is this particular count implausible?

96. pochas says:

All that is required is an oscillating stressor that causes the tension in the wrapped up magnetic flux tubes to vary so that as the tension increases to near rupture only a small additional stress is needed to cause many flux tubes to reconnect at once. The paper seems to posit that the core is a rigid structure and the convective zone is a rigid structure so that the shear concentrates across the tachocline. As already mentioned this is questionable because the tachocline is deep inside the sun and it would take too long for the reconnected flux tubes to rise to the surface. More likely the shear maximizes at some point in the convective zone relatively near the surface.
If the flux tubes reconnect at a relatively shallow depth the argument really doesn’t change. It is shear between differentially rotating layers that causes the flux tube reconnection. It is known that the meridional differential rotation rate of the photosphere varies with the solar cycle. This is strong evidence of the presence of an oscillating shear stress near the surface.

97. Agile Aspect says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:04 am

[snip]

The AM ‘mechanism’ would not have worked anyway because the Sun is in free fall.
;———————————————————————-

In the 2 body gravitational approximation (or the free fall model) of the Moon and the Earth (the simplest integrable problem in solar system dynamics) the Moon is in free fall about the Earth.

It should be clear if there are more than 2 bodies, then the “free fall” model breaks down.

Also, the direction of the angular momentum of the Moon-Earth system in the free fall model is perpendicular to the plane of motion – and is a constant of the motion.

If you’re suggesting the angular momentum coupling of the Earth and Moon is invalid by virtual of Moon being in “free fall” about the Earth, then you don’t understand angular momentum (not to mention gravity.)

98. Ninderthana says:
November 10, 2012 at 9:11 pm
If you start out with the hypothesis that: Changes in the relative rotation rate of layers in the convective layers of the Sun can influence the long-term strength of the solar dynamo
I think it is the other way around: that solar activity via Maxwell stresses control the rotation rate: http://www.leif.org/research/ast10867.pdf
“A dependence of the solar rotation velocity measured by magnetic tracers and solar activity and interplanetary magnetic ﬁeld was found. An interplay between the Reynolds and the Maxwell stresses is proposed for the interpretation. As stated by Ruediger & Hollerbach (2004), the more magnetic the Sun is, more rigid is its rotation”

99. Sparks says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:34 pm

What do you think?

100. Mike Jonas says:

Leif Svalgaard – You say to tallbloke “It is not credible that you have been aware of this.“. Looking back through my records, I see that I have been aware of this paper since at least March 2011, two months before its submission to A and A. It has been a long wait to see it finally published. Given that I have no involvement in solar physics etc, it is entirely credible that many others, such as tallbloke, would have known about it too.

101. Spector says:

As a matter of curiosity, is there any appreciable net magnetic influence between the sun and the planets? By appreciable, I mean comparable to gravitational tidal forces.

102. pochas says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:18 pm

All that is required is an oscillating stressor that causes the tension in the wrapped up magnetic flux tubes to vary so that as the tension increases to near rupture only a small additional stress is needed to cause many flux tubes to reconnect at once. The paper seems to posit that the core is a rigid structure and the convective zone is a rigid structure so that the shear concentrates across the tachocline. As already mentioned this is questionable because the tachocline is deep inside the sun and it would take too long for the reconnected flux tubes to rise to the surface. More likely the shear maximizes at some point in the convective zone relatively near the surface.
If the flux tubes reconnect at a relatively shallow depth the argument really doesn’t change. It is shear between differentially rotating layers that causes the flux tube reconnection. It is known that the meridional differential rotation rate of the photosphere varies with the solar cycle. This is strong evidence of the presence of an oscillating shear stress near the surface.

Howe & Hill have shown recently through helioseismology that the torsional ossification bands look to be generated at the Tachocline and take about 2 years to reach the surface. These bands are thought to carry sunspots.

103. I will try again….

pochas says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:18 pm

All that is required is an oscillating stressor that causes the tension in the wrapped up magnetic flux tubes to vary so that as the tension increases to near rupture only a small additional stress is needed to cause many flux tubes to reconnect at once. The paper seems to posit that the core is a rigid structure and the convective zone is a rigid structure so that the shear concentrates across the tachocline. As already mentioned this is questionable because the tachocline is deep inside the sun and it would take too long for the reconnected flux tubes to rise to the surface. More likely the shear maximizes at some point in the convective zone relatively near the surface.
If the flux tubes reconnect at a relatively shallow depth the argument really doesn’t change. It is shear between differentially rotating layers that causes the flux tube reconnection. It is known that the meridional differential rotation rate of the photosphere varies with the solar cycle. This is strong evidence of the presence of an oscillating shear stress near the surface.

Howe & Hill have shown recently through helioseismology that the torsional oscillation bands look to be generated at the Tachocline and take about 2 years to reach the surface. These bands are thought to carry sunspots.

104. Sunspots are electro and magnetic artifacts.
Is the activity result of a closed loop meridional motion of ‘magnetic entities’ with regular amplification(Babcock-Leighton) ?
or
Is the activity a less regular process but synchronized by an electro and magnetic feedback?
Surprisingly both of the above produce almost identical output
Results of research by:
Y.-M. Wang , J. Lean , and N. R. Sheeley, Jr. from Center for Space Research, Naval Research Laboratory, USA
and
S. K. Solanki – I. Baumann – D. Schmitt – M. Schüssler from Max-Planck-Institut, Germany
are compared here
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC17.htm

105. Martin Lewitt says:

Leif,

“Imagine an empty universe except for a binary star of perfectly symmetric shape. They orbit each other in perfect free fall and can be said to ‘exchange’ gravitons, if one wants to use that picture.”

The orbital system would be generating gravity waves. Neither star could be rotating, and they could have no relative motion to each other, a situation which would obviously have to be temporary. Tidal forces would be creating a tidal bulge, spherical symmetry and lack of quadrupole moment would be lost, different parts of each start would be experiencing different space curvature. In GR only point test particles with zero extension are in free fall. Any extended body would have to be represented by multiple test particles and they would have different paths, resulting in torques.

Representing extended bodies as point masses in free fall is only an approximation, which breaks down, even in newtonian gravity when quadrupole and higher moments are present. The approximations can be good for many uses, and the GR effects orders of magnitude smaller.

106. Bart says:

Agile Aspect says:
November 10, 2012 at 10:20 pm

“It should be clear if there are more than 2 bodies, then the “free fall” model breaks down.”

It doesn’t break down for more than 2 bodies. The number of bodies is immaterial.

The only way the presence of a neighboring gravitational body or bodies can be detected by another body is by differential stresses induced across the latter by the former, due to fact that the gravitational attraction is not constant across the physical volume. To the extent that the gravitational attraction is not constant, there is a divergence of geodesic paths for neighboring molecules.

This divergence gives rise to what we call “tidal forces”, and that is the only manner in which the “free fall model” can be said to “break down”. It does not matter if the path taken by a particular body appears to be a series of wild curlicues relative to a distant observer. If the motion is induced by gravitation, the body does not “feel” the motion, except and exclusively to the extent that neighboring differential volumes are being tugged in different directions.

This is precisely what makes gravity so special as a force of nature – it acts on all masses within its sphere of influence exactly the same, with no shielding of its influence possible. If you are thinking, e.g., of an analogy with the “forces” one feels on an amusement park ride like this, that is a completely inappropriate analogy. You feel those forces because your body wants to move in a straight line, while the teacup constrains you to move with it. The differential between the acceleration of the parts of your body in contact with the teacup versus those which are not in contact is what makes you sense the motion. In a gravitational field, to the extent that the field is constant throughout your body, every part of your body is being accelerated exactly the same amount. Ergo, you feel nothing.

107. Mike Jonas says:
November 11, 2012 at 12:01 am
Leif Svalgaard – You say to tallbloke “It is not credible that you have been aware of this.“. Looking back through my records, I see that I have been aware of this paper since at least March 2011, two months before its submission to A and A. It has been a long wait to see it finally published. Given that I have no involvement in solar physics etc, it is entirely credible that many others, such as tallbloke, would have known about it too.

As Leif Svalgaard says when asked if he was a peer reviewer of the paper:
“I’m not at liberty to deny or affirm….”

Yet he casts aspersions on me because:
“you have produced no evidence to back that claim up. Conclusion: you are a bit economical with the truth, perhaps.”

You can have a look at the Steinhilber et al model reconstruction my co-blogger Tim C was working on before March 2011 and draw your own conclusions though. note the 2011/02 datestamps in these URL’s.

Here is the comparison with the original data:

And the Spectral analysis of the data and the model:

Anyway, as you can see from Leif’s attempt to cast aspersions on the Abreu et al paper in his very first comment on this thread, he evidently believes that because the paper was received and accepted on the 17th May 2011 it therefore received no peer review at all, so how could he by his own account have been a reviewer for it, and why would he leave this as an open question? (Even though it was pointed out that the finally published paper contains reference to a 2012 paper, demonstrating that it underwent a series of revisions prior to publication 17 months later in Oct 2012).

I’m not the one with the credibility issue here. We have been working on the solar-planetary theory for the last four years and put up with the constant abuse, misrepresentation and all round ignorant behaviour from the man who successfully brought about the demise of the forums at solarcycle24.com before doing his best to wreck WUWT. Many of the people who enjoy “discussion on a civil and scientific level” have already left.

It’s a sunny day, I’m going for a walk.

108. tallbloke says: November 10, 2012 at 2:50 pm
…………….
Also of interest is the plot Vukcevic made of successive Jupiter – Saturn alignments along the Parker Spiral at solar minimum.

the above mentioned graph direct link is:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/J-S-angle.htm
This would suggest that the solar meridional circulation is a primary process with the secondary electro/magnetic feedback regulated modulation/synchronization
Hence the Babcock-Leighton hypothesis may be partially correct if the magic ‘amplification’ (that no one can explain how it works) is rejected in favor of the feedback synchronization as proposed by Vukcevic.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC17.htm

109. NaturalCyclist says:

The evidence of planetary affects on climate has been around for years. We can see a ~1,000 year cycle (previously mentioned in WUWT posts) and a 60 year cycle which was rising for 30 years prior to 1998, but is now declining, offset in part by slight rising in the 1,000 year cycle as it approaches a maximum. .

Hence the last 14 years of world climate records clearly indicate that there has been no net warming since this time in 1998. That is, there has been no net accumulation of energy in the Earth system – probably a slight loss in fact. So net radiative imbalance at TOA must also have been in accord with a cooling climate, not a warming one.

But all those energy diagrams and models “predicted” carbon dioxide would cause extra warming. If this fails to happen in 14 years, it can also fail to happen in the next 600 years, by which time I predict the world will be back at a minimum similar to the Little Ice Age.

The reason the energy diagrams are wrong is because they assume (and clearly indicate) dual heat flows between the surface and the atmosphere. They imply that radiation always transfers heat in the same direction. They assume that, if the net heat transfer is from hot to cold, then all is OK. But the two processes they assume happen are independent. A heat flow by radiation from the cooler atmosphere to the warmer surface does not force a greater flow of radiation out of the surface which is due to the surface being warmed more. Any such preliminary warming, no matter how infinitesimal, would be a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The only possible correct physical explanation is that which I have summarised starting on p.47 of Joseph Postma’s October 2012 paper. My reasons for such are also therein.

Unless and until scientists understand when and by how much radiation transfers heat, they will continue to fumble with hypothetical, invalid concepts which mislead the world with their carbon dioxide hoax.

110. wayne Job says:

In my house I have two heaters, a reverse cycle A/C and a French parlour stove that runs on wood. Both of these are ultimately powered by the sun. The Earth has but one ultimate heat source the sun, anything that affects dear old sol will change our heat source in some way.

That our climate tends to cycle in overlaying sine waves some times adding and some times subtracting, giving us variations, can only possibly be cosmological, as nothing on earth has these frequencies. The harmony of the spheres is coming back to haunt to catastrophists.
It is good to see Tallbloke here, for it is clear thinkers like he that may solve some of the deeper mysteries of our sun god without the need of sacrificing virgins.

111. J Martin says:

tallbloke said: on November 10, 2012 at 5:05 pm

My favourite graph of the moment. If only it went to 2100. But looking at it, that would produce an all too controversial result which I guess is why Tim Channon didn’t extend it to 2100.

A graph that upsets both the “co2 is everything” brigade and the “TSI isn’t strong enough” brigade. Fine by me.

112. DWR54 says:

For David Archibald,

What, if any, impact does this paper have on your 2008 prediction re the US and other mid latitude regions? In your March 2008 presentation “Solar Cycle 24: Implications for the United States” for the International Conference on Climate Change (available from your website), you stated:

“2008 is the tenth anniversary of the recent peak on global temperature in 1998. The world has been cooling at 0.06 degrees per annum since then. My prediction is that this rate of cooling will accelerate to 0.2 degrees per annum following the month of solar minimum sometime in 2009.”

I think the month of solar minimum in 2009 was January? Clearly the predicted cooling hasn’t happened. In fact the US in particular has warmed at a rate of +0.27C per annum since Jan 2009 (UAH). Globally, the temperature trend since the peak that occurred in April 1998 is currently slightly positive, at +0.01C per annum (UAH), well up from the cooling trend you reported in March 2008.

I just wondered if anything you’ve found in this paper might have influenced your predictions in 2008, and perhaps improved their performance? Thanks.

113. tallbloke says:
November 11, 2012 at 1:08 am
You can have a look at the Steinhilber et al model reconstruction
The Steinhilber data has been around for a while [and published several years ago]. It is not credible that you have been aware of the A&A paper and the details of its peer review cycles. Abreu et al. have kept this very close to the vest.

Anyway, as you can see from Leif’s attempt to cast aspersions on the Abreu et al paper in his very first comment on this thread, he evidently believes that because the paper was received and accepted on the 17th May 2011 it therefore received no peer review at all, so how could he by his own account have been a reviewer for it, and why would he leave this as an open question?

The paper has been submitted to other journals and rejected there. The particular A&A paper was submitted on May 17 and accepted the same day. That does not leave much room for serious review. Adding a reference after acceptance during copy-editing is not unusual. Often the reference in the submission is labelled as ‘paper submitted’ or ‘in press’. The Journal then on its own fills in the final reference when it becomes available.

114. J Martin says:

Leif said

“This is standard ice-age theory that has been around for decades.”

I was hoping you had a new slant on the standard theory as the standard theory in it’s current form does not adequately account for the timing of the onset of glacial periods and cannot be used to predict the timing of the next glacial period and perhaps more importantly the rate at which it will progress.

We do therefore need some innovative thinking and research on this subject as the implications for society exceed even the most extreme scenarios posited by the co2 brethren.

It is inevitable that any hypothesis or theory leading to an improvement in this situation will attract criticism, but,

“if the match is good enough”…

that’s a Leif quote, is it not ?

115. J Martin says:
November 11, 2012 at 3:49 am
the standard theory in it’s current form does not adequately account for the timing of the onset of glacial periods and cannot be used to predict the timing of the next glacial period and perhaps more importantly the rate at which it will progress.
This is a popular myth, that is dispelled here http://www.leif.org/EOS/2006GL027817-Milankovitch.pdf
“The available evidence supports the essence of the original idea of Koeppen, Wegner, and Milankovitch as expressed in their classic papers [Milankovitch, 1941; Koeppen and Wegener, 1924], and its consequence: (1) the strong expectation on physical grounds that summertime insolation is the key player in the mass balance of great Northern Hemisphere continental ice sheets of the ice ages; and (2) the rate of change of global ice volume is in antiphase with variations in summertime insolation in the northern high latitudes that, in turn, are due to the changing orbit of the Earth.”

“if the match is good enough”…that’s a Leif quote, is it not ?
I don’t think the match is good: http://www.leif.org/research/Abreu-Wavelet-Comparison.png

116. J Martin says:

J Martin says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
November 11, 2012 at 3:01 am

The controversial result being a deeper minimum at about 2100 than the Maunder minimum.

That’s based on noticing that the graph delivers a pretty good match for the Maunder minimum with both the two largest curves going low during that period but not getting anywhere near coinciding.

BUT, it looks as if the two largest curves will virtually coincide at about 2100 thus producing a deeper low than the Maunder minimum. I can’t work out what effect the other smaller curves may have then just by looking at it, so it would be nice to see the author extend it to 2100 so we can see.

117. jim2 says:

Angular momentum is conserved. Over time, the Earth’s rotation slows. To compensate for that loss of AM, the Moon moves further out. So AM CAN affect bodies distant from each other. Free fall has nothing to do with it.

118. J Martin says:

Leif, Thankyou for the Gerard Roe paper;

This is a popular myth, that is dispelled here http://www.leif.org/EOS/2006GL027817-Milankovitch.pdf

had he projected forward a hundred or a thousand or a hundred thousand years or so I might be tempted to describe it as a seminal paper.

But without a forward projection, what use is it ?

Though doing such a thing would bring the risk of loss of funding from the “co2 causes everything” administration.

I shall read it thoroughly nonetheless.

119. markx says:

I have a feeling here (in this article) lie the secrets:

Possible mechanisms?:
1. Alterations to the sun’s dynamo, hence magnetosphere.
2. Subsequent effects on solar output, or at least radiation reaching earth
3. Alterations to the sun’s core, effects of reactions output
4. Alterations to the earth’s dynamo (sometimes the core moves faster, sometimes slower) effect on radiation reaching earth.
5.Alterations to the processes of the earth’s core, reactions, heat output.
6. All or any combination of the above.
7. Others…?

Can’t grasp Leif’s idea there is no gravitational tidal effect due to freefall state – this effect is clearly illustrated by the effect of the moon on the earth.

Here lie the secrets, watch this space.

120. markx says:

Bart says: November 11, 2012 at 1:04 am

Agile Aspect says:November 10, 2012 at 10:20 pm

“……The only way the presence of a neighboring gravitational body or bodies can be detected by another body is by differential stresses induced across the latter by the former, due to fact that the gravitational attraction is not constant across the physical volume. ……….

This divergence gives rise to what we call “tidal forces”, …….
………the body does not “feel” the motion, except and exclusively to the extent that neighboring differential volumes are being tugged in different directions.”

All sensible acceptable and understandable.

Surely it is conceivable that these effects could be of huge import where you have vast molten cores (theoretically?) producing dynamo effects and magnetospheres, and at least one molten core which is a gigantic thermonuclear reactor?

121. Tom in Florida says:

Just wondering how many times Leif and Tallbloke have been reviewers of submitted papers. That would give me an indication of who would have a better understanding of the actual process.

122. Ninderthana says:

Leif Svalgaard said:
November 10, 2012 at 10:34 pm

“I think it is the other way around: that solar activity via Maxwell stresses control the rotation rate: http://www.leif.org/research/ast10867.pdf

Thanks Leif, a constructive comment and an interesting idea.

I may upset some om allies hear but I support Leif’s contention that according to
current Physics principles the Sun is in free-fall about the Barycentre. Is always
possible that this claim may be wrong but it is up to those who disagree with the
Equivalence Principle to show why it is wrong [and yes, I know that good-faith
attempts have been made].

123. Ninderthana says:

Correction for typos – sorry,

Leif Svalgaard said:
November 10, 2012 at 10:34 pm

“I think it is the other way around: that solar activity via Maxwell stresses control the rotation rate: http://www.leif.org/research/ast10867.pdf”

Thanks Leif,, a constructive comment and an interesting idea.

I may upset some of my allies hear but I support Leif’s contention that according to
current Physics principles the Sun is in free-fall about the Barycentre. It is always
possible that this claim may be wrong but it is up to those who disagree with the
Equivalence Principle to show why it is wrong [and yes, I know that good-faith
attempts have been made].

124. Robert of Ottawa says:

Interesting.. Problem is we are only guessing how the Sun works internally. I still don’t understand why Sunspots look dark.

125. J Martin says:
November 11, 2012 at 3:01 am
tallbloke said: on November 10, 2012 at 5:05 pm

My favourite graph of the moment. If only it went to 2100. But looking at it, that would produce an all too controversial result which I guess is why Tim Channon didn’t extend it to 2100.

We didn’t extend it further because it is a tentative and provisional result. The further out you go, the less accurate it will be, due to the imperfection of Lean’s TSI reconstruction and the strong possibility that the true cycles aren’t nice neat sinusoid shapes anyway. As Leif says, the Sun is a messy place.

Another unsatisfactory aspect is that although many of the periods in the seven cycles are close to observed planetary and planet pair periods, they are not exactly at those frequencies. This will be due to the imperfection of the Lean TSI reconstruction and to non-linear solar responses to planetary modulation. Once we have completed other studies which approach the problem from different angles, better constrained the non-linearities and found the relevant periodicities which are common to different approaches, we hope to offer an updated and improved forecast.

As it stands, I think the forecast is reasonable for the timeframe we have offered. Treat it as having +/-15% error bars.

Time will tell. In the meantime, I have a cunning plan for improvement.

126. beng says:

****
Nicola Scafetta says:
November 10, 2012 at 12:16 pm

Hoping that Anthony realizes that Leif’s comments are based only on his prejudices, not on real science, and his past behavior is highly unprofessional. As all solar scientists who reject the planetary theory of solar variation, Leif too has no idea of what causes the solar dynamics to behave as it behaves, beginning with the origin of the 11-year solar cycle.
****

I find his physics to be impeccable, well explained and relatively easy to understand. And tho Anthony makes an effort to present alternative views, I see no indication he thinks Dr S is prejudiced. Nor do I.

REPLY: I agree. Nicola’s arguments are often more rooted in emotion than they should be. – Anthony

127. Jason Wilkins says:

This actually makes a great deal of sense when you think about it. What would cause such reliable periodic changes in the output of the sun? Chaos was never really a satisfactory explanation. There’s only really one force on the sun that varies, which is gravity, and there’s only only one periodically changing source of that, which is the orbit of the planets.

Fascinating stuff, thanks for posting.

128. markx says:

Re: Extra Terrestial Influences on Nature’s Risks. Brent Walker 2012 http://www.actuaries.org/HongKong2012/Papers/WBR9_Walker.pdf

The paper is a masterpiece of clear concise communication of scientific knowledge.

If you doubt that, read the above paper first, then try to do a very quick read of Hansen’s work: Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change James E. Hansen and Makiko Sato
(here at: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110118_MilankovicPaper.pdf)
(In my opinion Hansen and Sato is a masterpiece as an example of modern scientific obfuscation. If there were Nobel prizes for obscuring your meanings, methods and messages, these authors should win it. Anything authored by Michael Mann would be a close second).

The historical background at the beginning is fascinating enough, then the author goes on to discuss in detail:

Summary of our solar system
Sunspots and solar activity
Solar activity vs atmospheric effects
Covering Solar system barycentre (SSB)
Gravity, Tidal Forces, Tidal Heating
Effects of photons on the thermosphere and exosphere
Atmospheric temperatures and geomagnetic effects
ENSO/PDO interactions vs Solar cycles
Sun’s magnetosphere
Subatomic particles

An example of the clear communicative writing style, and the interesting information discussed is below:

The Sun dominates the solar system and contains 99.85% of its mass. The planets contain 0.135% of its mass of which Jupiter has more than 2/3rds. The planets’ satellites (moons) contain 0.0005% of the mass of the solar system…..

……The Sun is a gaseous body comprised primarily of hydrogen (71%) and helium (27.1%) and has a mass of some 333,000 times the mass of Earth. Sun’s tremendous gravitational forces give it an average specific density of 1.4 (times that of water) so most of it is in the form of plasma, which is subject to magnetic and gravitational influences. It has a thermo-nuclear core exploding the equivalent of around 700,000 hydrogen bombs per second. Though extremely hot at the core, the surface is only approximately 5,500deg C. But the actual surface temperature varies significantly and above the surface it can be higher than 1 million deg…….

…..The Sun has an additional peculiarity in that it does not spin at a constant speed. One revolution takes around 34 days near the poles and around 25 days at the equator. It is believed that its core does spin evenly – presumably at the same rate as near its poles……

…..The Sun’s diameter is approximately 1,391,000 kilometers but this also varies with it being slightly smaller at the beginning or end of a sunspot cycle and slightly larger in the middle of a sunspot cycle when it is also slightly hotter. This variation in diameter is of the order of 260 kilometers. There is also greater size variation between solar grand minima when it is smaller and the very active periods when it is larger. This variation is of the order of 600 kilometers……

It is mindboggling that there should have been any difficulty publishing a detailed readable, fascinating paper such as this which lays out all (most?) of the physical forces and cycles involved in our solar system, especially so the sun/earth interactions.

129. markx says:

Ninderthana says: November 11, 2012 at 5:53 am

“….I may upset some of my allies hear but I support Leif’s contention that according to
current Physics principles the Sun is in free-fall about the Barycentre….”

Interesting discussion.

Taking into account the relative masses involved I presume it is the SSBC which moves about the sun, although all (?) the published diagrams seem to show the sun moving in relation to the solar system barycenter.

Quote from Walker’s paper: The Sun dominates the solar system and contains 99.85% of its mass. The planets contain 0.135% of its mass of which Jupiter has more than 2/3rds. The planets’ satellites (moons) contain 0.0005% of the mass of the solar system…..

But that detail would not alter all of those little tidal surges at all.

130. markx says:
November 11, 2012 at 5:29 am
Can’t grasp Leif’s idea there is no gravitational tidal effect due to freefall state – this effect is clearly illustrated by the effect of the moon on the earth.
There are always tidal effects. The issue is if there are other effects besides.

131. Robert of Ottawa says:
November 11, 2012 at 5:58 am
I still don’t understand why Sunspots look dark.
They are not dark at all. They are more that white-hot. If you took the smallest sunspot we can see and remove all of the rest of the Sun, leaving just that tiny, tiny spot ‘hanging’ in the sky, it would shine brighter than the full moon. Sunspots look dark because of the contrast to their even brighter surroundings. Sunspots are slightly cooler than the surrounding photosphere and therefore radiate 5 times less per square meter. They are cooler because the strong magnetic field in the spots interferes with the free convection of heat from below.

132. Stephen Wilde says:

Leif kindly referred us to the following:

“The available evidence supports the essence of the original idea of Koeppen, Wegner, and Milankovitch as expressed in their classic papers [Milankovitch, 1941; Koeppen and Wegener, 1924], and its consequence: (1) the strong expectation on physical grounds that summertime insolation is the key player in the mass balance of great Northern Hemisphere continental ice sheets of the ice ages; and (2) the rate of change of global ice volume is in antiphase with variations in summertime insolation in the northern high latitudes that, in turn, are due to the changing orbit of the Earth.”

What if summertime insolation (reaching the surface) can also be altered by solar induced cloudiness changes other than from orbital influences ?

That would produce the temperature variations observed within glacial epochs and interglacials would it not ?

One of the ‘problems’ we have is that significant temperature swings occur periodically during both glacial epochs and interglacials and they are apparently most severe during glacial epochs.

See here for a discussion of Bond events (during interglacials) and Dansgaard-Oeschger events (during glacial epochs).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger_event

We need something other than orbital changes to explain that and I think that solar induced cloudiness changes would be quite sufficient for the purpose.

133. Sparks says:
November 10, 2012 at 11:57 pm
What do you think?
I am a coauthor of that paper…

134. Stephen Wilde says:
November 11, 2012 at 8:02 am
We need something other than orbital changes to explain that
From your Wiki reference:
“D-O cycles may set their own timescale. Maslin et al.. (2001) suggested that each ice sheet had its own conditions of stability, but that on melting, the influx of freshwater was enough to reconfigure ocean currents – causing melting elsewhere. More specifically, D-O cold events, and their associated influx of meltwater, reduce the strength of the North Atlantic Deep Water current (NADW), weakening the northern hemisphere circulation and therefore resulting in an increased transfer of heat polewards in the southern hemisphere. This warmer water results in melting of Antarctic ice, thereby reducing density stratification and the strength of the Antarctic Bottom Water current (AABW). This allows the NADW to return to its previous strength, driving northern hemisphere melting – and another D-O cold event. This theory may also explain Heinrich events’ apparent connection to the D-O cycle; when the accumulation of meltwater in the oceans reaches a threshold, it may have raised sea level enough to undercut the Laurentide ice sheet – causing a Heinrich event and resetting the cycle”.

135. Tom in Florida says:
November 11, 2012 at 5:47 am
Just wondering how many times Leif and Tallbloke have been reviewers of submitted papers. That would give me an indication of who would have a better understanding of the actual process.
For years I have reviewed a dozen+ of papers per year…

136. J Martin says:

tallbloke said: on November 11, 2012 at 5:59 am

We didn’t extend it further because it is a tentative and provisional result. The further out you go, the less accurate it will be, due to the imperfection of Lean’s TSI reconstruction and the strong possibility that the true cycles aren’t nice neat sinusoid shapes anyway.

Fair enough, but it delivers a reasonably close approximation to both the Dalton and the Maunder which was some 400 years ago, so I would argue that extending it 100 years into the future is not unreasonable and not stretching the model too far.

Another unsatisfactory aspect is that although many of the periods in the seven cycles are close to observed planetary and planet pair periods, they are not exactly at those frequencies.

Wouldn’t it be tempting to generate a graph using the nearest planetary and planet pair periods ?

This will be due to the imperfection of the Lean TSI reconstruction and to non-linear solar responses to planetary modulation. Once we have completed other studies which approach the problem from different angles, better constrained the non-linearities and found the relevant periodicities which are common to different approaches, we hope to offer an updated and improved forecast.

That’s a lifetimes work just there. I look forward to the “updated and improved forecast”, but worry that you still won’t extend it to the obvious point of interest, the year 2100.

137. Leif Svalgaard says:
November 11, 2012 at 4:38 am
J Martin says:
November 11, 2012 at 3:01 am

My favourite graph of the moment.
Not even Lean believes in that old, obsolete reconstruction.

Well, the lower amplitude one she produced later is still pretty much the same shape as regards the proportions and timings, Just the amplitude of the individual cycles changes in relation to the long term variation, so the obsolescence of the older one doesn’t affect our cycles analysis much because we can just bump up the amplitudes of the cycles producing the 11 year cycle. Because the timings don’t change much, the prediction doesn’t change much either.

Is this SORCE/TIM reconstruction the latest word Leif?

138. Ninderthana says:
November 11, 2012 at 5:53 am
Leif Svalgaard said:
November 10, 2012 at 10:34 pm

“I think it is the other way around: that solar activity via Maxwell stresses control the rotation rate: http://www.leif.org/research/ast10867.pdf”

Thanks Leif,, a constructive comment and an interesting idea.

I may upset some of my allies here but I support Leif’s contention that according to
current Physics principles the Sun is in free-fall about the Barycentre. It is always
possible that this claim may be wrong but it is up to those who disagree with the
Equivalence Principle to show why it is wrong [and yes, I know that good-faith
attempts have been made].

As Martin Lewitt pointed out, there is no freefall under current physics (relativity).
According to the hypothesis I’m working on with Ray Tomes, relativistic effects due to gravity changes produced by the motion of the planets above and below the solar equatorial plane as they orbit and the velocity of the energy moving from solar core to solar surface will produce an internal N-S oscillatory motion of the core relative to the surface layers of around 140 metres at the decadal timescale . This doesn’t sound like ,much, but will affect the radiant output of the Sun by something like 4*20/56000 or 0.14%. Due to pressure differences, it would also strongly affect meridional flows under the surface layer, which will in turn affect the surface rotation rates at various latitudes. The timing and amplitude of these meridional variations is similar to those which are observed. See for example A&A 509, A30 (2010) Long-term variations in the mean meridional motion of the sunspot groups J. Javaraiah.

There’s still some way to go with this one, but it’s looking good.

139. Stephen Wilde says:

Leif,

It may be that D-O cycles and/or Bond events could be reset internally as proposed but I suggest that in fact they are set and reset by cloudiness/albedo changes induced by solar variability.

I think that the authors in proposing ‘internal’ system resetting would have been unaware of the extent to which solar changes can affect global cloudiness and thus surface insolation.

For me, the decreasing cloudiness (and more zonal jets) of the late 20th century when the sun was active and the increasing cloudiness (and more meridional jets) since the sun became less active after the peak of cycle 23 has been an eye opener.

That should have been an eye opener for AGW proponents too because their theory proposes more humidity leading to more clouds and a greater insulating effect.

In fact. cloudiness decreased during the warming spell which is the opposite of their proposition. Now, cloudiness has increased and warming has ceased with maybe cooling to come despite still increasing CO2.

Either I will be proved right or wrong in due course but at present a lot of new papers are fitting that scenario.

I am pretty confident that all the climate changes we have observed are the result of changing solar effects on global cloudiness caused not by the Svensmark effect but by changes in jetstream behaviour and the length of the lines of air mass mixing.

Zonal jets give less global cloudiness and more energy into the oceans. Meridional jets give more global cloudiness and less energy into the oceans.

And, as tallbloke says, your revised solar data only affects amplitude and not the basic shape of the pattern of solar variability. I told you that a couple of years ago.

As long as the pattern remains the amplitude is of little significance so much of your recent effort in reducing the amplitude of solar variability may well be in vain as far as climate consequences are concerned.

140. tallbloke says:
November 11, 2012 at 8:37 am
Well, the lower amplitude one she produced later is still pretty much the same shape as regards the proportions and timings, Just the amplitude of the individual cycles changes in relation to the long term variation
It is not about the amplitudes of the individual cycles, but about the long term background. In her work with Wang in 2005, they produced a much smaller background variation:

Is this SORCE/TIM reconstruction the latest word Leif?
No. And it is not a SORCE/TIM reconstruction. It is Greg Kopp’s. The problem with this and similar ones is the [unwarranted and unsupported] assumption that there is a background level given by the cycle average of the Group Sunspot Number [which itself is flawed]: http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-Background-Not.png
The assumption has failed in the last decade.
As one can represent almost any function by the sum of a number of sine waves, I’m sure you can reproduce any TSI reconstruction equally well, even my guess http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-Guess.xls
Try it.

141. Stephen Wilde says:
November 11, 2012 at 9:09 am
And, as tallbloke says, your revised solar data only affects amplitude and not the basic shape of the pattern of solar variability.
Wrong. You should not spread such misinformation.The amplitude is irrelevant [for curve fitting]. The basic shape [the background] is the all important issue and that is very different.

142. Bart says:

markx says:
November 11, 2012 at 5:44 am

“Surely it is conceivable that these effects could be of huge import where you have vast molten cores (theoretically?) producing dynamo effects and magnetospheres, and at least one molten core which is a gigantic thermonuclear reactor?”

Personally, I don’t see it. The tidal forces stretch or compress the bonds between molecules, atoms, what have you, which make up the substance being distorted. But, the bonds in molten cores, etc… are quite strong, and the tidal forces are very weak. I think you have to look at constituents which are not so tightly bound, gases and plasmas and such. And, the bulk orbital parameters themselves which can be accelerated by forces other than gravitation, e.g., from the radiation pressure I tossed out above. Even then, these things are long shots, but not, I think, impossible.

Ninderthana says:
November 11, 2012 at 5:53 am

“It is always possible that this claim may be wrong…”

Any “wrongness” is necessarily infinitesimal, even smaller than the tidal forces, which are already tiny.

Jason Wilkins says:
November 11, 2012 at 6:17 am

“Chaos was never really a satisfactory explanation.”

“Satisfactory” is a subjective judgment. Chaotic dynamics creating wideband, effectively random disturbances, feeding into a high Q resonance, is entirely satisfactory from my viewpoint.

143. Krishna Gans says:

@Stephen Wilde

I am pretty confident that all the climate changes we have observed are the result of changing solar effects on global cloudiness caused not by the Svensmark effect but by changes in jetstream behaviour and the length of the lines of air mass mixing.

More a mix of both

144. Stephen Wilde says:

“More a mix of both”

Probably. But I think the component relating to the Svensmark effect is very much the smaller. We shall find out in due course.

145. Stephen Wilde says:

Leif said:

“The basic shape [the background] is the all important issue and that is very different.”

I seem to have missed that. Please could you elaborate.

146. Stephen Wilde says:

Ah, just noticed this:

http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-Guess.xls

Actually I think it is helpful to me because it shows the ups and down so solar activity and temperature in finer detail than previous renditions.

In particular it shows the Victorian cold spell very nicely.

Thanks Leif, but it supports my proposals better than yours :)

147. Stephen Wilde says:

Actually Leif it shows:

i) The late 20th century warming.

ii) The mid century cooling.

iii) The early 20th century warming.

iv) the cold spell during Victorian times.

v) A mid 19th century warmer spell

vi) The cold spell around 1812 which defeated the Napoleonic armies.

etc. etc.

In fact the shape of your latest iteration is better than ever from my point of view. The amplitude being pretty much irrelevant.

If you carry on as you are you might well produce an even more accurate mirror of past warming and cooling periods.

148. Matt G says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 11, 2012 at 8:13 am

The D/0 cycles or bonds events are the best idea why the Arctic and Antarctic behave in opposite steps. Much milder versions/mechanisms of these events before the threshold is reached probably explains why the poles even now show signs of opposite behavior.

149. Matt G says:

Should have added to my above post. (Nov 11, 2012 at 11:11 am)

I would have thought the best explanation for what causes these d/o cycles or bonds events rely on the solar variance over thousands of years. Changing the amount of energy reaching above 65N and below 65S affecting global ice and cloud albedo over the planet.

150. Steven Mosher says:

Wilde.
Since you have never produced a single quantified hypothesis or statement, that is, sicne you have never said or written anything that is testable or falsifiable, I find it hilarious that you argue that data agrees with your position. You have no position. No theory. No quantified account of anything. There isnt any data anyone could trot out that would prove you right or wrong. In fact, all data agrees with your position because your position is vacuous and un quantifed. And no data agree with your position for the same reason.

151. Steven Mosher says:

Leif
“As one can represent almost any function by the sum of a number of sine waves, ”

dont expose their dirty little secret.

152. Doug Proctor says:

The Central England temps vs Dye 3Be10 graph looks like an Excel. You can colour-code your data by date of data. You may well see a circularity in the data, ie. an internal, “swirling” pattern that reflects a change of process with a time-dependent variable

If this variable is present, your linear interpretation is incomplete except as a second or third level effect.

Not saying it is. But the data distribution needs to be analyzed further.

153. It is regrettable that the Spanish/Swiss authors of this paper do not see fit to discuss or reference the work by DeJager and Duhau on the tachocline

http://www.cdejager.com/sun-earth-publications/

which shows a cyclic system of transition points between the poloidal and toroidal magnetic fields, nor do they include any mention of the work of Charvatova and several other, with its emphasis on orbital SIM movements.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/59135553/Charvatova-Brazil%208-%2710.ppt

The interesting and challenging coincidence of the 178.7 year cycle of both should warrant some attention and research.
I am not an admirer of this sort of research myopia.

154. Matt G says:

Leif,

Shouldn’t TSI that is shaded from the Earth also be measured above the poles because long term cycles affect the amount that reach them. This is another variable that does change, but can’t be detected by the current position where TSI is recorded.

155. D Böehm says:

Steven Mosher says:

“There isnt any data anyone could trot out that would prove you right or wrong. In fact, all data agrees with your position because your position is vacuous and un quantifed. And no data agree with your position for the same reason.”

Funny, you could say exactly the same thing about AGW. If I’m wrong, then ‘trot out’ your empirical evidence showing conclusively that AGW exists.

156. UK John says:

Its nice to see we are all playing nicely!

157. P. Solar says:

“Taking into account the relative masses involved I presume it is the SSBC which moves about the sun, although all (?) the published diagrams seem to show the sun moving in relation to the solar system barycenter. ”

The barycentre calculation _includes_ the sun. It’s all of the solar system, not just the planets.

Having said that I don’t see why anything in a system more complex than a two body system would rotate about the barycentre (centre of mass). Planetary movements are determined by gravity , not mass. Centre of mass is determined by distance and gravity by the square of separation.

The centre of mass is not the centre of gravitational attraction.

As Steve Goddard pointed out recently the Earth-Moon system rotates around the Sun not the SS barycentre.

In fact it would be more accurate to work out where the centre of gravitational attraction of all other bodies on the Earth_Moon is, as that will be the point about which we rotate. What he showed is that this is much nearer to the centre of the sun than it is to the barycentre.

The centre of gravitational attraction is different for every object, not just because its own mass has to be taken out of the calculation but because it depends on its relative position to all the other bodies.

I’m not sure what the barycentre is useful for, but working out orbits is not it.

158. Philip Mulholland says:

NaturalCyclist @ November 11, 2012 at 2:16 am

Thanks for posting the link to Joseph Postma’s paper A Discussion on the Absence of a Measurable Greenhouse Effect. It is rare in my experience to find an author who writes mathematical equations in understandable English.
From page 16
This heat energy will then conduct its way down into the subsurface until it merges with the
geothermal temperature at a depth of somewhere around, say, 5 to 10 meters and temperature of
approximately 5C to 10C (the author has not been able to find reliable data to reference these values.)
The following temperature data set from Dome A in Antarctica measures ice temperatures in the sub-surface down to 10 metres. The annual effect of thermal lag can be clearly seen in these data.

159. P. Solar says:

Albert Jacobs says: “The interesting and challenging coincidence of the 178.7 year cycle of both should warrant some attention and research.”

It is interesting to note that if one looks at the difference between hadSST3 and ICOADS from which it is derived, the main component of what is removed is a cycle of 184 years.

Just one of those odd coincidences, I suppose.

That is also somewhat shorter than the circa 220y “principal component” that Thomson , Denis et al found in the Gomez ice core at the base of the Antarctic peninsula.

160. rgbatduke says:

tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 11:19 am
The Sun is not in perfect freefall because of the quadrupolar moments which arise due to it’s irregular shape.
The quadrupole moment is exceedingly small and does not make the sun deviate from free fall. An astronaut in orbit has a very irregular shape and is still in free fall.

I’m afraid I don’t get the point of this entire sequence. No extended object in the gravitational field of another is in “perfect freefall”. Hence the tides. In the specific case of the Sun, the center of mass of the solar system, about which the Sun orbits, moves around from the center two within around 2 solar radii, spending almost all of its time not particularly close to the center.. There are some lovely pictures (and other considerations discussed) here:

http://www.timingsolution.com/TS/Study/cm/

It should be pretty clear from the motion of the solar system CM through the sun that all of the sun is not in freefall about the CM. In fact, quite a lot of the time (when the CM is inside of the sun and the sun is rotation) most of the sun is not “in freefall”. If I recall from reading stuff a very long time ago, the Gleissberg cycle is fairly closely tied to aspects of the solar orbit around the CM of the solar system, which fluctuates significantly according to the “beats” in the orbits of (principally) Jupiter, Saturn and the other planets. However, the orbit and motion is nearly chaotic, occasionally going retrograde!

This site also shows full well the peril of post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning. Note well the lovely correlation between the mean radius of the SSCM and the rate of inflation!

So unless I have completely lost my mind, almost no part of the Sun is ever in freefall any more than most of the Earth, Moon, Jupiter, etc are in freefall. Tidal forces are indeed the pseudoforces caused by the near impossibility of an extended body all being in freefall when moving in the influence of other gravitational bodies.

rgb

161. Sparks says:

It would be great as an experiment to find two similar stars, one with planets and one without planets and have the ability to observe the difference of activity on those stars.

We can detect whether a star has planets, how would we detect a sun spot cycle on a nearby star without observing the spots? Radio?

162. Leif Svalgaard says:
November 11, 2012 at 9:26 am
Is this SORCE/TIM reconstruction the latest word Leif?

No. And it is not a SORCE/TIM reconstruction. It is Greg Kopp’s. The problem with this and similar ones is the [unwarranted and unsupported] assumption that there is a background level given by the cycle average of the Group Sunspot Number [which itself is flawed]: http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-Background-Not.png

Their plot is dated 2012 so it’s unlikely they didn’t get the memo yet. Maybe *SHOCK HORROR* they just don’t agree with your ironing flat of the solar data.

Thanks for the Not-plot, very interesting. Can the L&P effect be ruled out as a contributing factor to the reduction in group sunspot numbers?

163. Sparks says:
November 11, 2012 at 1:12 pm
It would be great as an experiment to find two similar stars, one with planets and one without planets and have the ability to observe the difference of activity on those stars.
There a lots of stars with planets in all kinds of distances. So far, no star has been found with activity with periods matching planets outside of the sonic point: http://www.leif.org/research/AGU%20Fall%202011%20SH34B-08.pdf slide 19

rgbatduke says:
November 11, 2012 at 12:59 pm
No extended object in the gravitational field of another is in “perfect freefall”. Hence the tides.
The word ‘perfect’ has no place in science. It is always a matter of degree. What counts is the deviation from free fall [and that is exceedingly small]. Tides have nothing to do with this.

164. DirkH says:

Dan in Nevada says:
November 10, 2012 at 11:10 am
“This is pretty interesting. To the extent this pans out it would appear to bolster Svensmark’s GCR cloud hypothesis if I’m understanding correctly. Leif pointed out the extent to which this would be a “butterfly effect” if true (my paraphrase, apologies if I misunderstood). ”

“Butterfly effect” means the amplification of disturbances in a chaotic system. It would not be the right term for the Svensmark mechanism. The Svensmark mechanism can be described as such:

The chaotic weather system of the Earth is synchronized by the outside influence of GCR strength. So, it would no longer be a freely oscillating chaotic system but a synchronized chaotic oscillator. – a coupled system.

If the influencing system is highly regular, this could allow long term predictions of average temperature. The IPCC models assume that the Earth’s climate is NOT synchronized by an outside system and therefore they cannot make predictions (yet they behave as if their scenarios were predictions. They are not, and cannot be for the chaotic nature of their models. It is not possible to do long range predictions of the state of a chaotic system with a model with finite precision, especially not when you start with a random state – which they do.).

165. tallbloke says:
November 11, 2012 at 1:44 pm
Their plot is dated 2012 so it’s unlikely they didn’t get the memo yet. Maybe *SHOCK HORROR* they just don’t agree with your ironing flat of the solar data.
They just splice the recent TIM to the obsolete Lean 2000 reconstruction. This is wrong no matter how you cut it.

Thanks for the Not-plot, very interesting. Can the L&P effect be ruled out as a contributing factor to the reduction in group sunspot numbers?
The L&P effect has nothing to do with why the Group sunspot number is too low before 1882. The reason for that is that Hoyt and Schatten got the k-factors wrong. Even Schatten now agrees with that. Here is an analysis of what is wrong the GSN [and how to fix it]: http://www.leif.org/research/What-is-Wrong-with-GSN.pdf
It is the opinion of the SSN-workshop that GSN is wrong and should not be used anymore. It will take some time before that filters out to our user community, because the conclusion invalidates many correlations and presumed causations, to wit: your own silly resistance.

166. Stephen Wilde says:

Mosher.

I have previously listed for the benefit of Leif a large number of real world events that could falsify my hypothesis.

None of them has happened thus far.

Some examples:

Decreasing global cloudiness whilst the sun remains relatively quiet.

More zonal / poleward jets whilst the sun remains relatively quiet.

A resumption of stratospheric cooling without a return to a more active sun.

A resumption of tropospheric warming without a decrease in global cloudiness.

A warming mesosphere with a cooling stratosphere.

etc. etc.

There are lots of combinations of real world events that could render my hypothesis unlikely to be true and I await any one of them.

In contrast your AGW theory is completely unfalsifiable due to the twists and turns of the proponents.

What would discredit AGW theory for you ?

Put up or shut up.

167. Leif Svalgaard says:
November 11, 2012 at 2:08 pm
tallbloke says:
Thanks for the Not-plot, very interesting. Can the L&P effect be ruled out as a contributing factor to the reduction in group sunspot numbers?

The L&P effect has nothing to do with why the Group sunspot number is too low

Well, that’s interesting, because you’d think that with the smaller spots disappearing, that would reduce the number of groups.

What data analysis are you relying on to make your assertion that the L&P effect hasn’t affected group sunspot number?

168. rgbatduke says:
November 11, 2012 at 12:59 pm
So unless I have completely lost my mind, almost no part of the Sun is ever in freefall any more than most of the Earth, Moon, Jupiter, etc are in freefall. Tidal forces are indeed the pseudoforces caused by the near impossibility of an extended body all being in freefall when moving in the influence of other gravitational bodies.

rgb

One way to consider it would be to say all parts of the sun are in freefall, but they’re all wanting to be freefalling along slightly different geodesics. Because they are forced to cohere by the local force of gravity of the sun itself, differentiation arises. Then there are the relativistic consequences of the transitions between matter and energy going on as the Sun converts matter to energy and shifts that energy from the core to the surface. The Sun is a messy place, as Leif constantly reminds us, except when it doesn’t suit his argument.

And he has used the phrase ‘perfect freefall’ many times on this blog. I’ll google up a few instances.

169. Leif Svalgaard:
The AM ‘mechanism’ would not have worked anyway because the Sun is in free fall.

Rgbatduke:
So unless I have completely lost my mind, almost no part of the Sun is ever in freefall …No extended object in the gravitational field of another is in “perfect freefall”.

Leif Svalgaard:
The word ‘perfect’ has no place in science.
…………..
I thought the Newtonian mechanics is very clear; it has to be one way or another; no apple tree climbing for the Heisenberg’s kitten in the Newton’s orchard.

Thus all pronouncements about solar magnetic feedback being impossible will be taken with even larger pinch of salt.
Thank you gentlemen

170. P. Solar says:

Stephen Wilde says: “Put up or shut up”.

Now now children , please play nicely.

171. Stephen Wilde says:

As I pointed out above, even if we accept all of Leif’s attempts to iron solar variability flat (a nice image) the latest version of the results of his efforts still shows a solar pattern coinciding with climate variations.

His latest revision still shows cool spells correlating with low solar activity. If anything the match is even better than before.

Can’t we move on now in light of that ?

172. Stephen Wilde says:

rgbatduke said:

“So unless I have completely lost my mind, almost no part of the Sun is ever in freefall any more than most of the Earth, Moon, Jupiter, etc are in freefall. Tidal forces are indeed the pseudoforces caused by the near impossibility of an extended body all being in freefall when moving in the influence of other gravitational bodies”

So can we please now move on from Leif’s daft assertion that there is no gravitational interaction between multiple bodies that are in free fall together ?

173. tallbloke says:
November 11, 2012 at 2:18 pm
Well, that’s interesting, because you’d think that with the smaller spots disappearing, that would reduce the number of groups.
It will and does, but that works for both the Group and Zurich sunspot numbers. The disappearance of small groups has been going on for some time [but is now becoming more obvious]. Groups are classified by letters: ‘A’ consisting of spots with no penumbra, ‘B’ as ‘A’ but with a clear bipolar nature, ‘C’ smaller spots with penumbra, ‘D’ and up with larger and larger spots. Here is a plot of the fraction [percentage] of small groups [A and B] of all groups: http://www.leif.org/research/Frequency-Small-Groups.png

What data analysis are you relying on to make your assertion that the L&P effect hasn’t affected group sunspot number?
You have not read my links. Here is a more extensive analysis: http://www.leif.org/research/Reconstruction%20of%20Sunspot%20Number.pdf

The basic argument is that the difference between the Group and Zurich SSNs stems from a discontinuity around 1885. That jump is totally understood now to be due to wrong k-factors used by Hoyt and Schatten [how they got them wrong is not yet clear. One factor is that H&S did not realize that Wolf changed from his larger telescope to a much smaller one in the 1860s]. Adjusting for that singular jump makes the two series equal [to within their noise], so we don’t need to invoke any other explanations.

174. rgbatduke says:

The word ‘perfect’ has no place in science. It is always a matter of degree. What counts is the deviation from free fall [and that is exceedingly small]. Tides have nothing to do with this.

Excuse me? The “tidal” pseudoforce is the deviation from free fall, the consequence of an accelerated frame. As in the near side and far side of the moon aren’t in orbit (free fall) around the Earth; only a roughly spherical surface through the center of mass is.

Drop a rod straight down at a star, and the leading and trailing edges experience a tidal force because the near side experiences more force than the far side, but the center of mass has to accelerate according to the total force. If the SSCM is dancing through the sun all of the time (as it is) then the CM of the sun is bouncing around like an erratic yo-yo compared to the CM of the Solar System, and almost none of the sun is in free fall and experiences some degree of accelerated frame tidal force.

I agree that this force is probably very, very small, especially compared to the Sun’s own gravitational field, but then, it has a very long time to drive any wave modes that might be handy and resonant in the thermocline, or for that matter elsewhere in the Sun. Also, the sun is quite large, and the tidal forces are related to the difference between near side and far side relative to the CM.

I don’t know offhand how these forces compare, or the plausibility of the argument in the top article. That’s why I said in the very first reply/comment above that a numerical computation/simulation with reasonable parameters for the Sun and the solar system tides would significantly increase my degree of belief in the conclusion (which is currently very likely almost as low as yours is).

rgb

175. Stephen Wilde says:
November 11, 2012 at 2:16 pm
I have previously listed for the benefit of Leif a large number of real world events that could falsify my hypothesis.
As long as you have not quantified those, they are useless for testing

His latest revision still shows cool spells correlating with low solar activity. If anything the match is even better than before.
Solar activity now is very low [as in 1900], but there is no cool spell now.

176. Leif Svalgaard says: November 11, 2012 at 2:08 pm
Group sunspot number is too low before 1882. The reason for that is that Hoyt and Schatten got the k-factors wrong. Even Schatten now agrees with that.

May be Schatten is wrong to agree that he was wrong in the first place (is that a circular argument?)
Geologic records of the far North Atlantic, to a possible ‘consternation’ of science is settled theorists, show close correlation to the solar activity and particularly to the Group Sunspot Number – GSN
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GSN-NAP.htm
If solid earth’s crust does that, why not the oceans and the climate?
Science is far from settled.

177. This paper seems to go along side Nicola Scafetta’s paper in ‘Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics’, “Empirical evidence for a celestial origin of the climate oscillations and its implications”

178. rgbatduke says:
November 11, 2012 at 2:45 pm
Excuse me? The “tidal” pseudoforce is the deviation from free fall, the consequence of an accelerated frame
Tidal forces are always present, but the deviations from free fall are extremely small. The argument is not about tides, but about exchange of angular momentum [other than through tides]. The barycenter has no tidal effect as it has no mass. The tidal effects come from distant planets.

vukcevic says:
November 11, 2012 at 2:50 pm
If solid earth’s crust does that
As we have discussed so many times, it does not. If there is a correlation with the Group sunspot number, then that shows that the correlation is spurious, as the GSN is just wrong. You comments show extreme confirmation bias.

179. Sparks says:

Leif,

in slide 4
The Tidal Bulges Raised by Planets

Why are the other moons not calculated such as the four other moons larger than ours Ganymede, Titan, Callisto and Io? and other mass such as the asteroid belt. can you add this mass?

Also it says,
“For comparison, The tidal bulge that the Sunraises on Jupiter is 87 mm and on Earth 248 mm
The extreme smallness of the tidal bulges at the tachocline (rc) (≤ 0.2 millimeter) is usually taken as a strong argument against the hypothesis that solar activity is generated or significantly modulated by tidal forces.
Smallness of the forces is a general problem with all proposed mechanisms”

Wouldn’t you have to add all this mass together and divide it by it’s self to find the maximum force exerted on the sun. Which is substantially larger than the force the sun exerts on individual planetary bodies?

http://www.leif.org/research/AGU%20Fall%202011%20SH34B-08.pdf slide 4
The Tidal Bulges Raised by Planets

180. Leif Svalgaard says:
November 11, 2012 at 2:42 pm
tallbloke says:
November 11, 2012 at 2:18 pm
Well, that’s interesting, because you’d think that with the smaller spots disappearing, that would reduce the number of groups.
It will and does, but that works for both the Group and Zurich sunspot numbers. The disappearance of small groups has been going on for some time [but is now becoming more obvious]. Groups are classified by letters: ‘A’ consisting of spots with no penumbra, ‘B’ as ‘A’ but with a clear bipolar nature, ‘C’ smaller spots with penumbra, ‘D’ and up with larger and larger spots. Here is a plot of the fraction [percentage] of small groups [A and B] of all groups: http://www.leif.org/research/Frequency-Small-Groups.png

Thanks. Looks to me like the SIDC number has been inflated by speck and pore miscounting by as much as the GSN has fallen.

181. Matt G says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 11, 2012 at 2:49 pm

“Solar activity now is very low [as in 1900], but there is no cool spell now.”

Not as cool as then based on the very few long term global data sets, but cooling is already on it’s way. I see a offset from the 1930’s compared to the 2000’s for both HADCRUT and GISS, with around 0.3c – 0.4c warm bias. The Arctic temperatures comparing that period show very little difference using the only available long term 31 stations around the Arctic circle. (64N+) Yet these little differences involve a much bigger decrease and increase around that period of 4c.

Only weather I know, but the UK had the coldest December (2010) and wettest summer (2012) since around that period (1900’s), just recently. I am waiting for next weather event there to break records since that period. Co-incidence I don’t think so because there is some evidence that low solar activity changes the behavior of the jet stream and therefore the AO and NAO. With the solar activity as you say similar to the 1900’s we are getting weather similar to it too.

182. Sparks says:
November 11, 2012 at 3:24 pm
Why are the other moons not calculated
Because their masses are so small.

tallbloke says:
November 11, 2012 at 3:26 pm
Thanks. Looks to me like the SIDC number has been inflated by speck and pore miscounting by as much as the GSN has fallen.
The SIDC miscounting is not due to specks, quite the contrary: to the overcount af large spots being counted more than once. That makes a jump in 1945, which we take care of already.
But you have not grasped the whole analysis: Wolf discovered that the diurnal variation of the ‘magnetic needle’ is a sensitive proxy for the sunspot number [actually for Far UltraViolet]. Our modern understanding of that relationship is firm and can be used to validate the SIDC [Wolf] numbers as far back as the 1780s. This shows that the GSN is the one at fault. Again, this is not really necessary because the Group numbers themselves show that H&S’s calibration went wrong in the 1880s. There is really no wiggle room left.

183. You (Anthony) mentioned Landscheidt’s work on March 21. This seems similar…

184. Sparks says:
November 11, 2012 at 3:24 pm
find the maximum force exerted on the sun. Which is substantially larger than the force the sun exerts on individual planetary bodies?
Actually NO. The latter is far larger because the Sun is far larger. E.g. the diameter of the Sun is only ten times that of Jupiter, but its mass is 1000 times larger.

185. P. Solar says:

Thanks Vuc’ , I have that data but it only runs to 1995

What I meant was what was the source of the data shown in Leif’s graph:

186. Manfred says:

Matt G,

Stephen Wilde explained that very nicely at November 10, 2012 at 10:04 pm

“…The timing of any climate consequences then being modulated by internal ocean cycling which can either oppose or supplement the solar effects for as long as it takes the thermohaline circulation to run a complete circuit…:

The thermohaline circulation today has to digest a hundered years of warming, while in 1900 the little ice age had ended only about 50 years before..

187. Pamela Gray says:

Steven, post your new correlation graph and show that your solar proposal and mechanism hind casts and leads cooling based on standard statistical analysis. Then please provide a forecast with both the mechanism, lag and degrees cooling. It’s your proposal. Post it using standard scientific methods.

188. Manfred says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 11, 2012 at 3:52 pm
Sparks says:
November 11, 2012 at 3:24 pm
find the maximum force exerted on the sun. Which is substantially larger than the force the sun exerts on individual planetary bodies?
Actually NO. The latter is far larger because the Sun is far larger. E.g. the diameter of the Sun is only ten times that of Jupiter, but its mass is 1000 times larger.
———————————
Acutally, the gravitational force the sun exerts on a planet is exactly equal to the force the planet exerts on the sun. Actio = reactio.

189. P. Solar says:
November 11, 2012 at 4:00 pm
What I meant was what was the source of the data shown in Leif’s graph:
The best estimate of the sunspot number derived from our discussions at the SSN workshop
http://ssnworkshop.wikia.com/wiki/Home

Manfred says:
November 11, 2012 at 4:09 pm
Actually, the gravitational force the sun exerts on a planet is exactly equal to the force the planet exerts on the sun.
Actually, the discussion was about the tidal forces which are not equal.

190. Matt G says:
November 11, 2012 at 4:05 pm
Shows a slight cooling over recent years, like the majority below
Try from 1999 instead…

191. As usual, the discussion has degraded to the pushing of personal pet theories and assorted nonsense and misunderstandings and the original topic is largely forgotten.

192. Mike Jonas says:

Leif – Sorry to have to disabuse you of your notion that “It is not credible that you have been aware of the A&A paper and the details of its peer review cycles. Abreu et al. have kept this very close to the vest.“, but that is incorrect. As I said, I have known about it since March 2011, including its review process. Unfortunately I can’t give you concrete information without permission, so you will just have to take my word for it (or not, as you please).

193. Mike Jonas says:
November 11, 2012 at 4:38 pm
I have known about it since March 2011, including its review process.
Including the process that in its whole took place in a single day in May 2011?
An almost identical paper was submitted some months later to another journal. All journals take a dim view on duplicate publication. One of the questions asked is if ‘the paper is considered for publication elsewhere’. The situation with the A&A is highly irregular, to say the least.

194. P. Solar says:

Leif Svalgaard says:

P. Solar says:
November 11, 2012 at 4:00 pm
What I meant was what was the source of the data shown in Leif’s graph:
The best estimate of the sunspot number derived from our discussions at the SSN workshop
http://ssnworkshop.wikia.com/wiki/Home

Thanks Leif, I’ve seen you discussion papers and I’ve seen the pics. What I meant is “where can I get the data?”

I don’t see any data on that Wiki.

Is the data available or not? Thanks.

195. Matt G says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 11, 2012 at 4:26 pm

Unfair comparison don’t you think? La Nina compared with recent neutral ENSO.

I could had compared with the peak warming in 1998 to how the majority showing that have changed since.

I compared a neutral ENSO period with one now, very fair.

196. Leif Svalgaard says:
November 11, 2012 at 4:28 pm

As usual, the discussion has degraded to the pushing of personal pet theories and assorted nonsense and misunderstandings and the original topic is largely forgotten.

Oh I don’t know about that. I find the discussion enlightening. Healthy banter like this allow the lesser informed (such as myself) to see first hand what some of the issues are. I could give a rat’s arse whose ox is gored as long as information is freely flowing back and forth.

197. Steven Mosher says:

Tallboke.

Its so weird of you to link to a comment that is supposed to contain some frank admissions, when it in fact does not contain any such thing

“We didn’t extend it further because it is a tentative and provisional result. The further out you go, the less accurate it will be, due to the imperfection of Lean’s TSI reconstruction and the strong possibility that the true cycles aren’t nice neat sinusoid shapes anyway. As Leif says, the Sun is a messy place.

Another unsatisfactory aspect is that although many of the periods in the seven cycles are close to observed planetary and planet pair periods, they are not exactly at those frequencies. This will be due to the imperfection of the Lean TSI reconstruction and to non-linear solar responses to planetary modulation. Once we have completed other studies which approach the problem from different angles, better constrained the non-linearities and found the relevant periodicities which are common to different approaches, we hope to offer an updated and improved forecast.

As it stands, I think the forecast is reasonable for the timeframe we have offered. Treat it as having +/-15% error bars.
Time will tell. In the meantime, I have a cunning plan for improvement.

What I see you doing here is trying to throw Lean under the bus, except when you need her. Then you trot her chart out as if there was nothing wrong with it.
I see no admission of the fundamental problem which Leif, myself and others have pointed out to you guys repeatedly..
I will say, however, that you have one step up on Wilde who is allergic to numbers. he cant even rise to the level of numerology or cyclemania.

198. Matt G says:
November 11, 2012 at 4:53 pm
Unfair comparison don’t you think?
It shows how sensitive this is to starting points. In any case the data since about 2000 is too short to establish a trend, which was my point.

P. Solar says:
November 11, 2012 at 4:53 pm
Is the data available or not? Thanks.
The TSI Guess is constructed from the best guess of the sunspot number, normalized to match the recent SORCE-TSI. It is a bit tricky to convert back to a sunspot number, but if you must here are my guesses: http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SSN-Guess.xls
Use at own risk [this is NOT official in any way and is for entertainment only]

199. GeoLurking says:
November 11, 2012 at 5:23 pm
I could give a rat’s arse whose ox is gored as long as information is freely flowing back and forth
Fair enough, but you have to have a healthy BS filter [as not all is ‘information’] and that is often hard to come by..It could be cause of my training and profession, but scientific discussion is not ‘banter’ in my book. But if you enjoy the exchanges, good for you.

200. kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:

From P. Solar on November 11, 2012 at 4:53 pm:

Leif Svalgaard says:
Thanks Leif, I’ve seen you discussion papers and I’ve seen the pics. What I meant is “where can I get the data?”

NOAA National Geophysical Data Center
Solar Indices Data
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/nndc/struts/results?t=102827&s=1&d=8,4,9

Sunspot Numbers, select International. Multiply anything before 1946 by 1.2 (20% increase).

If shoving into a spreadsheet, I recommend “Monthly plot data” available at bottom, if not using “Yearly plot data”. It is recommended to use smoothed data. “Smoothed plot data” is monthly, but lacks the 20% correction. So use a 12 month centered running average of corrected monthly.

201. tallbloke says:
November 11, 2012 at 3:26 pm
Thanks. Looks to me like the SIDC number has been inflated by speck and pore miscounting by as much as the GSN has fallen.
If you want to do some REAL research, you could try to duplicate my work on what is wrong with the GSN. All the data used is on the internet, start with the GSN dataset.

202. This comment is off topic but the persistent claims from Leif re the GSN need to be addressed.

Leif is claiming the pre Wolfer GSN records are wrong because H&S did not correctly apply the correct k factor to Wolf who counted less groups. Schatten seems to have had a memory loss on the method used but there are two k factor columns against each observer that are not explained.

Of more importance is that H&S were 100% aware of the Wolf and Wolfer method of counting groups as can be seen in the data notes associated with Wolf’s BIBLIOGRAPHY notes that form the base data of the GSN.

1. Johann Rudolf Wolf (1816-1893).
2. Wolf was a poor observer, missing smaller groups. On
hazy days his group counts would drop markedly.

Nonetheless, he is the primary observer used by Wolf
for 1848-1893.

Leif is in the business of ironing the record flat, agenda driven science should be accepted for what it is and more heavily scrutinized. My own opinion on the pre 1840 sunspot numbers is that the Zurich values need to be re evaluated as they have a heavy geomagnetic component (proxy records) that have more inconsistencies than the older sunspot recordings. The Zurich numbers may well be the data series that need to adjusted down before 1840, as Wolfer showed for SC5 once more data became available.

203. Geoff Sharp says:
November 11, 2012 at 6:26 pm
Leif is in the business of ironing the record flat, agenda driven science should be accepted for what it is
That statement is highly offensive. As I said to tallbloke, all the data I use is on the internet. If you think that there is something wrong with my method, you can duplicate my analysis. The majority of the 65 scientists involved in the SSN workshops have no problems with the reassessment of the sunspot number. There is no agendas here.

204. P. Solar says:

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says: “So use a 12 month centered running average of corrected monthly.”

Thanks for the link (and the correction tip) but as I posted earlier I already have that data, I was looking for Leif’s data as used in this graph.

The one thing I certainly won’t be doing with it is screwing it up by using runny mean filter.

205. Geoff Sharp says:
November 11, 2012 at 6:26 pm
2. Wolf was a poor observer, missing smaller groups. On hazy days his group counts would drop markedly
Yet H&S has a k-factor for Wolf of 1.117 while that for Wolfer is 1.094 [statistically indistinguishably from Wolf’s]. Furthermore Wolf would not include data taken when seeing was poor.
I urge you to educate yourself on this topic. E.g. to repeat my simple comparison on slide 11 of http://www.leif.org/research/What-is-Wrong-with-GSN.pdf before making any further unsubstantiated comments.

206. P. Solar says:

Leif says:” It is a bit tricky to convert back to a sunspot number, but if you must here are my guesses: http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-SSN-Guess.xls
Use at own risk ”

I don’t quite understand this comment. are you saying that the GSN data here: http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-Background-Not.png are “converted back” from your TSI guess data? Which itself is constructed from the best guess of the sunspot number.

could you clarify? I’m not sure what I’m looking at here.

207. kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:

From Geoff Sharp on November 11, 2012 at 6:26 pm:
2. Wolf was a poor observer, missing smaller groups. On hazy days his group counts would drop markedly.

From what I’ve read, Wolf simply didn’t count the smallest spots.

208. November 11, 2012 at 6:04 am
REPLY: I agree. Nicola’s arguments are often more rooted in emotion than they should be. – Anthony

Not really Anthony. My arguments are based on science. It is a fact that the theory of an isolated sun has been unable to explain any form of solar variation. For example the solar dynamo theory predicts a cycle but does not say that for the sun this cycle must be around 11 years, it could be 6 or 20 yr or any other number you want. The theory contains some free parameters that are actually “chosen” to reproduce something that looks like 11-year cycle for our sun.

In front of this failure, and on the other side in front of the fact that a planetary theory of solar variation gets patterns that are in good correlations with solar activity, it is those who a-priory reject the theory of solar variation who act “only” emotionally, like Leif and in part yourself.

Leif plays a lot with the emotion of the people by taking advantage of the fact that they may not know details and mislead them.

So, consider the facts with an open mind. At the end, it is Nature that decides which theory is correct. Scientists are only observers and propose theories which may be found erroneous or correct. And scientific debate is also made of respect and fairness which must be reciprocal. Things get humanly wrong when somebody thinks that it is ok to not respect others.

Do not try to cover your “errors” by stating “you are emotional”, which is by itself an emotional response.

209. P. Solar says:
November 11, 2012 at 6:45 pm
are you saying that the GSN data here: http://www.leif.org/research/TSI-Background-Not.png are “converted back” from your TSI guess data? Which itself is constructed from the best guess of the sunspot number.
As the GSN is flawed and should not used, the SSN values are back-derived from TSI [which was constructed from SSN] before 1946. Missing data was filled in by linear interpolation. Data after 1945 are the official SIDC numbers. Data before 1826 are heavily influenced by the ‘corrected’ group sunspot numbers. Thus the data is not homogeneous but neither are the original data.

210. I am not going to get into an off topic argument with Leif, but I urge all readers to look beyond the hand waving.

I will wait for the published paper that address any GSN AND SIDC issues, which, if ever published will be forensically inspected. Until the evidence is properly produced Leif should drop his claims that the GSN is rubbish, there are still too many questions not answered to be making claims.

Back on topic, it seems there are no major issues with the paper in question, and no appearance of Willis yet?

211. Nicola Scafetta says:
November 11, 2012 at 6:52 pm
Leif plays a lot with the emotion of the people
I think the folks here are fully capable to make up their own minds and would resent the insinuation that their emotions are being ‘played’ with..

212. Geoff Sharp says:
November 11, 2012 at 7:22 pm
I will wait for the published paper that address any GSN AND SIDC issues, which, if ever published will be forensically inspected. Until the evidence is properly produced Leif should drop his claims that the GSN is rubbish, there are still too many questions not answered to be making claims.
That ‘argument’ would also apply to your specific claims of your ideas. But here are no valid and relevant questions not answered. The analysis of the GSN is clear and can be reproduced by anybody. The same is the case with the weighting of sunspots at Locarno.At the end of the workshops everything will be duly published for the record. In the meantime you get a heads-up on the progress we are making.

213. RACookPE1978 says:

A few open-ended questions for assembled writers to correct or extend.

1) Do all agree that sunspots themselves (the size, quantity, or lack of) do NOT affect the earth’s climate themselves, but rather they could be a “symptom” or a “result” of elector-magnetic circulation patterns within the sun that in turn may (or may not!) affect the earth’s climate through other first/second/third order effects.

For example, the moon and sun’s positions with respect to the earth directly cause the tides.

But if somebody tries to claim that the moon’s phase (what side is lit by the sun and how much is lit by the sun) causes tides, they could probably present plots showing just that effect. The claim might look good, but it would be wrong. They’d be wrong the same way somebody says that sunspots cause the earth to heat up or cool down is wrong.

Note closely, however, that Their charts WOULD accurately predict tides and the height of tides as it changes through the year!

2) If sunspots are a visible “symptom” of the sun’s changing magnetic fields and internal circulating loops of plasma, then has any one looked for “changes” in the sunspot cycles over time?

Just looking visually at the sunspot counts implies a pattern that might be important, trivial, or an artifact of my eye: 1 rising (increasing number) even cycle, a relatively high odd cycle, a falling (lower count) even cycle, a lower odd cycle, a very low even cycle, a slightly higher odd cycle, etc.

The sunspt “period” itself might show clues to any pattern: Do the small changes in cycle length change regularly over time? If somebody separates the even and odd cycles apart, do either even or odd cycle “length” change over time?

Do any such changes vary, but vary with the same period that any planetary or barycentric change?

3) Sunspots appear “immediately,” stay a few days or a few orbits, then go away. The red Spot on Jupiter has stayed visible for centuries: Does IT change with Jupiter’s orbit or the orbit of any other planet?

The Red Spot is a variable, rotating “storm-like” feature – so if planetary or barycentric changes are assumed to affect the sun’s circulation patterns, then would they not affect Jupiter’s visible orbiting patterns? Consider the number of bands in Jupiter’s atmosphere, the Red Spot’s density, its diameter, its relative color, etc. Have they changes periodically over time since first drawn several centuries ago?

214. Lightrain says:

Look up Gleissberg in Wiki and read the total BS about CAGW. They say that correlation with Sun Spots isn’t causation, yet they insist the non-correlative CO2 is causitive. There’s a lot more BS in there, probably edited by our favourite CAGW editor. These guys are idiots!

215. The agreement between SSN proxy and planetary forces spectra is very impressive. What puzzles me is that there are no planetary motions that give rise to a 208 year cycle, so how does that appear in the planetary forces?

216. Ray Tomes says:
November 11, 2012 at 8:07 pm

The agreement between SSN proxy and planetary forces spectra is very impressive. What puzzles me is that there are no planetary motions that give rise to a 208 year cycle, so how does that appear in the planetary forces?

Yes there is, but as stated before it is an artifact of another cycle, namely the 172 year avg cycle. Think of the 3 prongs on the hour hand.

217. L A P Wilson says:

The preceding is fascinating debate indeed. To this sometimes struggling amateur a couple of observations are prompted. First, in virtually all of the solar based analyses which have appeared over recent years (the number/frequency of which has certainly accelerated – and that’s good to see) there seems to be steadily emerging better defined correlations which justify the declaration of plausible solar origin hypotheses.

But as several contributions have reminded, correlation is not causation, and the basis of sound supporting observational/experimental evidence is still awaited as far as I can see, with the solar origin hypotheses referenced in this string of postings and elsewhere. (Of course our friends at IPCC have dispensation granted by themselves whereby in their case correlation alone is enough.)

The referenced correlations all seem to centre around planetary and solar dynamics/solar/sunspot cycles sometimes intertwined with the claimed cosmic ray/cloud factors – and perhaps CERN activity might in time shed more light on the latter. What seems to me to be missing still is the mechanism which translates from these correlations, as strong as they might be, into the energy gain/loss which must eventually arrive at Earth to prompt the cycles (of the various durations).

The mechanism/s which as I recall, people like Shaviv and Scaffeta have referred to as the ‘missing amplification mechanism’. It seems to me the hypotheses which have been defined are like the loaded gun, but that necessary whisp of smoke from the gun is still missing.

Whilst there seems to be much effort at refining the correlations, apart from CERN and its possibilities, it is not apparent to me where the research is going on which might otherwise find links to the smoking gun.
LAPW

218. Mike Jonas says:

There may be a typo where it says “Received 17 Mai 2011 Accepted 17 Mai 2011“.
In http://www.aanda.org/index.php?option=com_article&access=doi&doi=10.1051/0004-6361/201219997&Itemid=129 it says:
Title: Is there a planetary influence on solar activity?
Author(s): J. A. Abreu, J. Beer, A. Ferriz-Mas, K. G. McCracken, F. Steinhilber
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201219997
Accepted: 09/24/12
A&A – Year: 2012
[PDF (3.726 MB)]

[my bold]

Even in CAGW-land, completion of reviews in a single day would surely be rather unusual.

219. Steven Mosher says:
November 11, 2012 at 5:41 pm
Tallboke.
Another unsatisfactory aspect is that although many of the periods in the seven cycles are close to observed planetary and planet pair periods, they are not exactly at those frequencies. This will be due to the imperfection of the Lean TSI reconstruction and to non-linear solar responses to planetary modulation. Once we have completed other studies which approach the problem from different angles, better constrained the non-linearities and found the relevant periodicities which are common to different approaches, we hope to offer an updated and improved forecast.

What I see you doing here is trying to throw Lean under the bus, except when you need her. Then you trot her chart out as if there was nothing wrong with it.

The shape of Lean’s curves (ooer missus!) wouldn’t have to change very much at all for the periodicities to drop into place and align with planetary frequencies. So we’re not ‘throwing her under the bus’, but adopting the realistic viewpoint that since all proxies are affected by multiple factors, it is unlikely that Lean’s TSI reconstruction is not contaminated by non-solar factors.

I see no admission of the fundamental problem which Leif, myself and others have pointed out to you guys repeatedly..

Yours and Leif’s and Willis’ fundamental problem is that if you don’t have an explanation for something then you just sweep it under the carpet and pretend it doesn’t exist.

The every 45 year (inner planets return) beach ridges which line Hudson bay and northern Siberia are really there, we have the photos. Every second one is higher (Gleissberg cycle) and every fourth higher still (Jose cycle – Gas giants return). You can’t explain them with co2 and volcanos.

I will say, however, that you have one step up on Wilde who is allergic to numbers. he cant even rise to the level of numerology or cyclemania.

Stephen’s qualitative analysis is valid, and has plenty of falsifiable content, as he laid out for you. As for the slur words, I never had much respect for your ability to think scientifically. Now I just don’t have much respect for you full stop.

220. Mike Jonas says:
November 11, 2012 at 10:08 pm
Even in CAGW-land, completion of reviews in a single day would surely be rather unusual.
A long review period from May 2011 to Sept. 2012 is also rather unusual. And the parallel submission to another Journal is not normal either. If I had to guess, the paper was first submitted to A&A, rejected there, then submitted elsewhere, also rejected, then revised and resubmitted to A&A. But since you know all about it and tallbloke has followed the whole process and presumably read all the reviews as necessary to make his claim, perhaps some light may be shone on this story. Review seemed to have been quite a struggle [as is proper].

221. Mike Jonas says:
November 11, 2012 at 10:08 pm
There may be a typo where it says “Received 17 Mai 2011 Accepted 17 Mai 2011“.
In http://www.aanda.org/index.php?option=com_article&access=doi&doi=10.1051/0004-6361/201219997&Itemid=129 it says:
“Title: Is there a planetary influence on solar activity?
Author(s): J. A. Abreu, J. Beer, A. Ferriz-Mas, K. G. McCracken, F. Steinhilber
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201219997
Accepted: 09/24/12
A&A – Year: 2012
[PDF (3.726 MB)] ”
[my bold]

Thanks Mike. We’ll now be treated to the fulsome apology being made by Leif to the authors and Astronomy and Astrophysics for the slurs he has cast against them from his very first comment on this thread onwards.

It’s coming along just now,

I can sense it…..

Leif??

222. Mike Jonas says:
November 11, 2012 at 10:08 pm

Well done Mike. If correct that would suggest many many months of review. I hope there has been no deception involved here.

223. tallbloke says:
November 11, 2012 at 10:20 pm
the slurs he has cast against them from his very first comment on this thread onwards.
what slurs? I simply pointed out that as published there could not have been much review done in that single day. I doubted [and still do] that you would have been privy to the whole review process as that would have been highly irregular.

224. Leif Svalgaard says:
November 11, 2012 at 10:20 pm
Mike Jonas says:
November 11, 2012 at 10:08 pm
Even in CAGW-land, completion of reviews in a single day would surely be rather unusual.
A long review period from May 2011 to Sept. 2012 is also rather unusual.

So what is the Goldilocks review period in la-la land Leif?

And when are you going to apologize for your accusations of “irregularities”?

Ethically minded people want to know. Who runs the Stanford board of ethics? What’s their email address?

225. tallbloke says:
November 11, 2012 at 10:50 pm
So what is the Goldilocks review period in la-la land Leif?
Typically a few months

And when are you going to apologize for your accusations of “irregularities”?
I do not accuse, I discover and report.

Ethically minded people want to know
Who are they? They don’t seem much in evidence here.

226. Edwin says:

The sun is not a stationary object, it is traveling at tremendous speed in a galactic soup of dust, flux, gravitational waves, dark matter (assumed), pseudo particles,etc, in varying density and forever cutting across the wake of its orbiting planets. It would be prudent not to model the mechanics of the Sun as if its in a closed system.

227. Leif Svalgaard says:
November 11, 2012 at 10:48 pm
tallbloke says:
November 11, 2012 at 10:20 pm
the slurs he has cast against them from his very first comment on this thread onwards.
what slurs? I simply pointed out that as published there could not have been much review done in that single day.

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 11, 2012 at 4:47 pm
Mike Jonas says:
November 11, 2012 at 4:38 pm
I have known about it since March 2011, including its review process.
Including the process that in its whole took place in a single day in May 2011?
An almost identical paper was submitted some months later to another journal. All journals take a dim view on duplicate publication. One of the questions asked is if ‘the paper is considered for publication elsewhere’. The situation with the A&A is highly irregular, to say the least.

There are several explanations which might account for this which don’t involve “irregularities”. You choose to put the most negative possible spin on it as a slur against Abreu et al.

I doubted [and still do] that you would have been privy to the whole review process as that would have been highly irregular.

I never said I was, that’s just your straw man. I said:

“Those of us who have been aware of the progress of this paper throughout that time know how rigorously it has been vetted prior to publication.”

I didn’t claim I was one of them. You trying to make out I claimed I was is just another of your [many] false arguments.

228. tallbloke says:
November 11, 2012 at 10:50 pm

If Leif was ethical he would apologize for his accusations and he would also refrain from making any more comments about the accuracy of the GSN until all data is in.

229. Edwin says:
November 11, 2012 at 10:59 pm
The sun is not a stationary object, it is traveling at tremendous speed in a galactic soup of dust, flux, gravitational waves, dark matter (assumed), pseudo particles,etc, in varying density and forever cutting across the wake of its orbiting planets. It would be prudent not to model the mechanics of the Sun as if its in a closed system.

Well said. I concur.

230. Leif Svalgaard says:
November 11, 2012 at 10:56 pm
tallbloke says:
Ethically minded people want to know

Who are they? They don’t seem much in evidence here.

Don’t judge others by your own standards.

231. Geoff Sharp says (November 11, 2012 at 8:51 pm):

Ray Tomes says: … What puzzles me is that there are no planetary motions that give rise to a 208 year cycle, so how does that appear in the planetary forces?

Geoff: Yes there is, but as stated before it is an artifact of another cycle, namely the 172 year avg cycle.

Ray: How do you get from 172 years (U-N synodic cycle) to 208 years? These two cycles make beats every ~1000 years which is also not a meaningful planetary cycle.

Geoff: Think of the 3 prongs on the hour hand.

Ray: Sorry Geof, I have a digital watch. You will need to explain this in a bit more detail please.

232. Stephen Wilde says:

tallbloke said:

“Stephen’s qualitative analysis is valid, and has plenty of falsifiable content, as he laid out for you. As for the slur words, I never had much respect for your ability to think scientifically. Now I just don’t have much respect for you full stop”.

Thanks tallbloke.

It’s not that I’m allergic to numbers but rather that the numbers I need do not yet exist so I am limited to interpreting the scale and timings of changes of trend in multiple climate parameters.

Those changes of trend lend themselves well enough to the creation of an over arching concept which fits both the observations and basic physics.

That is what I have endeavoured to put forward and with so many possibilities for falsification it should not be long before it is either rebutted or enough new (or recent) changes in trend become more clearly apparent for its coherence and applicability to be confirmed.

233. P. Solar says:

“Sunspot Numbers, select International. Multiply anything before 1946 by 1.2 (20% increase).”

Ah, I just realised you were saying this is how to recreate the SSN that Leif uses. Thanks.

234. P. Solar says:

Comparing Leif’s version of SSN counting ‘corrected’ and current GSN metric:

Leif’s data already has 12m runny mean “smoother” applied , so I filtered both with a slightly longer gaussian to get comparable time series.

The bottom line is that Leif is proposing that group count “should not” be used and should be replaced by new adjusted version of SSN. A change which progressively doubles the variation in the earlier data effectively removing most of the long term signal variation over that period.

So it would seem that the step change of +20% adjustment to SSN is not the key factor in the discussion though it does contribute to the same effect.

The key question would seem to be is SSN or GSN the better metric.

while science has the right to correction and revision , I’m always sceptical of attempts to rewrite the data record.

235. Ray Tomes says:
November 11, 2012 at 11:47 pm

Ray: How do you get from 172 years (U-N synodic cycle) to 208 years? These two cycles make beats every ~1000 years which is also not a meaningful planetary cycle.

Geoff: Think of the 3 prongs on the hour hand.

Ray: Sorry Geof, I have a digital watch. You will need to explain this in a bit more detail please.

I will try to explain.

Look at the altered path of the Sun drawn in green on the following diagram.

The altered path coincides with ALL grand minima events through the Holocene, but they differ in intensity. The next diagram shows the only planetary position that can cause the altered path.

Now the important bit, that I am sure you will understand. The planetary position displayed previously which I call the AMP event can happen 3 times (most common) every time N/U are together. The strength of each AMP event is what determines the length and depth of the grand minimum of that particular cycle (N/U cycle). This is the 3 prongs on the hour hand of the 172 year clock, each prong is separated by around 40 years. Because most of the Holocene has weaker forms of grand minima and by using other methods we can determine that most of the time all three prongs are NOT strong. This gives the gaps between grand minima like witnessed with today’s oncoming grand minimum and the Dalton that is most common. The 3 chances to invoke solar slowdown is the key and why FFT analysis will not see the complete picture because of the multiple options involved. There are no precise cycles when it comes to grand minima.

This should be an eye opening revelation if understood.

236. This is quite funny. several years ago, before he died, I had a wonderful email exchange with James P Hogan over climate change hysteria, and the idea that there would be a link found between the Earth and the Sun (in that causal direction) and that the alarmists would then claim that it’s not that the Sun causes changes in the Earth’s climate having nothing to do with CO2 concentration, but that it’s the CO2 here causing the Sun’s output to increase, causing warming.

It was meant to be snark …

237. markx says:

Leif Svalgaard says: November 11, 2012 at 3:09 pm

“….The barycenter has no tidal effect as it has no mass….The tidal effects come from distant planets….”

Surely the relative position of the barycenter is entirely dependent upon the positions of the planets relative to the sun.

So there could quite conceivably be additive and cyclical tidal effects which could be directly related to barycenter cycles and positions.

238. P. Solar says:
November 12, 2012 at 2:59 am

Ah, good explanatory post by Leif has appeared :

yes, if you read it carefully, his plans to manipulate and homogenise the datasets to his preferred flatness are quite clear.

239. rgbatduke says:

Tidal forces are always present, but the deviations from free fall are extremely small. The argument is not about tides, but about exchange of angular momentum [other than through tides]. The barycenter has no tidal effect as it has no mass. The tidal effects come from distant planets.

The first is not entirely clear to me without doing the computations, largely because the sun is so — well, large. Tides are funny — the Earth is much larger than the Moon but the Lunar tidal “force” (differential) on the Earth is much larger than that of the Earthal tidal force on the Moon, because it scales like the same basic term but with $(\Delta R/R)^3$ in it. The Sun has an radius that is on the order of 0.01-1% the orbital radius of the planets from Saturn on in — from the Sun’s point of view these planets are not all that “distant” (about the ratio of my size to the size of a football field to the nearer planets, a few times that to Jupiter and Saturn). The ratio of the Earth’s radius to an AU is rather small, yet the effect of solar tide is easily discernible — the ratio of the Sun’s radius to that orbit is many orders of magnitude larger, and the tidal force differential of the Earth on the Sun is hence those many orders of magnitude larger, cubed. Jupiter is 300 times more massive that the Earth, 5 times more distant, base gravitational force on the Sun around twelve or thirteen times as great — and then again, one can start to trade off the cubic term.

I’m certain that these forces are small relative to Solar gravity, but they are not exactly small in absolute terms and the Sun is a fluid body capable of sustaining driven tidal waves. The tidal force on Earth is also small compared to the absolute gravitational force on its surface, so small that one can hardly measure it with direct instrumentation, yet it does just fine at driving an easily observed surface wave even in a medium with considerable damping. Hence my wish to see computations, not claims made either way that aren’t backed up by actual arithmetic done by somebody that is trying to see whether or not they are true. I don’t think one can just say “this is small, therefore we can ignore it” in this context, just as I don’t think one can say “this exists and isn’t zero, therefore it is a proximate cause of… (fill in the blank). Is this so unreasonable? So references that show the results of magnetohydrodynamic simulations including tidal effects would be greatly appreciated — either way.

But what bothers me in this reply is the following statement: “The argument is not about tides, but about exchange of angular momentum [other than through tides].”

It was my understanding that the process that exchanges orbital angular momentum between planets, and between planets and the sun, between the earth and the moon, is the torque caused by the tidal bulge lagging the direct line connecting the centers of the orbiting, rotating objects. There is a nice picture, along with a very simple version of the argument (sadly without the not terribly difficult computation of the force difference in a binomial expansion) here:

http://www.themcdonalds.net/richard/astro/papers/602-tides-web.pdf

that shows how tidal forces exerted on rotating fluids exert torques, torques that long ago tidally locked the moon (and is still exchanging angular momentum with the Earth today as the Earth’s rotation slows and the Moon’s orbit rises).

So what other interactions enable the exchange of angular momentum? Not the direct gravitational force, surely, as it exerts no torque. Is there some other force of which I am not aware?

240. Question for Leif?

Are these correlations rigged or coincidence?

If they are real, meaning they point to something causative, what is the explanation?

241. rgbatduke says:
November 12, 2012 at 6:25 am
Hence my wish to see computations,
Slides 21 and 4 of http://www.leif.org/research/AGU%20Fall%202011%20SH34B-08.pdf

So what other interactions enable the exchange of angular momentum? Not the direct gravitational force, surely, as it exerts no torque. Is there some other force of which I am not aware?
There are no other forces, but the proponents of the ‘Angular Momentum’ planetary ‘theory’ claim that there is a mysterious ‘spin-orbit coupling’ that exchanges angular momentum between the Sun and the Planets.

James Cross says:
November 12, 2012 at 6:46 am
Are these correlations rigged or coincidence?
I think they are coincidences and need no ‘explanation’.

242. Jim G says:

Leif Svalgaard says:

“There are no other forces, but the proponents of the ‘Angular Momentum’ planetary ‘theory’ claim that there is a mysterious ‘spin-orbit coupling’ that exchanges angular momentum between the Sun and the Planets.”

Not familiar with the “angular momentum” planetary theory, but if one forgets for a moment about defining gravitational “forces” and the long distance depletion of the effects of those forces, but thinks instead in terms of general relativity and the curvature of space/time around the mass of the sun and each of the planets, and that all are traveling in straight lines through curved space while curving the space around themselves relative to their mass, long distance interactions seem decidedly more feasible. Those long distance curvatures are enough to keep Jupiter in its orbit and Jupiter’s influence to change the shape of the Earth’s orbit around the sun in a fairly predictable way per the Milankovich cycles. The more mass, the more that space is curved and the slower that times passes relative to other frames of reference. Gravity as a fundamental “force” may well be misnamed and the search for the “graviton” a fools errand for , it is geometry that is fundamental in gravity, as you said, that is of course, if one buys general relativity.

243. Jim G says:
November 12, 2012 at 10:47 am
Not familiar with the “angular momentum” planetary theory
Not that it is coherently explained, but this seems to be the gist of it:
http://www.landscheidt.info/?q=node/5

it is geometry that is fundamental in gravity, as you said, that is of course, if one buys general relativity
GR has passed every test it has been put to, so that is easy.

244. rgbatduke says:

Slides 21 and 4 of http://www.leif.org/research/AGU%20Fall%202011%20SH34B-08.pdf

So what other interactions enable the exchange of angular momentum? Not the direct gravitational force, surely, as it exerts no torque. Is there some other force of which I am not aware?
There are no other forces, but the proponents of the ‘Angular Momentum’ planetary ‘theory’ claim that there is a mysterious ‘spin-orbit coupling’ that exchanges angular momentum between the Sun and the Planets.

Thank you, the former was indeed very instructive, and the latter explains a lot as well. In particular I was struck by the differences between your FTs and the FTs in the top article above (both sets). Yours actually look a lot more reasonable (although enquiring minds still want to know the length of the interval being transformed in order to know how seriously to take the long period peaks).

In addition I agree with your conclusion almost exactly (and agreed with them from the beginning, even without this summary. It seems unlikely that the torque/tide explanations are correct, moderate coincidence the data notwithstanding. There are moderate coincidences in tidal data for the Earth and inflation rates, after all:-). That doesn’t mean that these explanations are wrong, only that there is a strong burden of proof on those that advance them to quantitatively explain them and show that computations based on they hypothesis have good predictive value.

This leaves them with some hope, some lines of attack, but with some serious work to do beyondI’m not sure that there isn’t a way of deriving the so-called barycentric effect, or torque in a set of reduced variables, that works out to be a modified collective tidal force that varies more strongly than the two body torques. But then, I’m not willing to take the time to try to derive them myself, and surely working out the detailed physics of this would be the very first step of somebody advancing this sort of hypothesis.

A few other comments on places that might leave room for some effect (or at least might patch up some of the objections).

a) A lot of the Sun’s internal motion is nonlinear and chaotic. Phenomena such as the phase inversion “catastrophe” visible in the data aren’t all that unexpected in a chaotic system with multiple locally stable attractors, and in as complex a system as the solar system and solar interior collectively are, complexity in this space could also explain why Wolf’s semi-heuristic fit/explanation works decently locally but not globally. All it takes is other dynamics introducing phase drift, nonlinearities, non-random noise, in a causal space of sufficiently high dimensionality, and what we see is no longer a neat fourier sum of perfectly periodic orbital influences but something much more complex where those influences are only a source of signal that can be nonlinearly amplified — or not — depending on details of the state of the rest of the system.

b) Along the same lines, the Earth’s tides are hardly uniform — the neat parameter “T” that you introduce as the “tidal bulge” (I’m assuming the deviation of the equipotential from spherical at the surface) is amplified many times on Earth by continental structures and resonances in some places, and are much smaller in others. It is certainly not the case that the Great Lakes (for example) go up and down by a quarter of a meter (lunar and solar combined) — a millimeter might be more like it– where in the Bay of Fundy tides are routinely 5 meters. The bulge in the lithosphere, on the other hand, is of this order.

The bulge in the atmosphere, on the third (gripping) hand, is orders of magnitude larger than the tides in the Bay of Fundy. These bulges cause fluctuations in the surface atmospheric pressure of order of 0.01% (100 microbars) making them difficult to resolve from weather “noise”. Solar atmospheric tides are a perfect example of how two effects with similar periodicities can heterodyne, as they are much larger than lunar tides even though the solar tidal force is much smaller. They combine with the similarly driven cycle of heating and thermal expansion and cooling, to greatly increase the size of the solar bulge through resonance.

Note well that solar and lunar atmospheric tides are actually rather huge compared to T from your formula, because even a small change in the gravitational field causes expansion over a very long distance and has a long ways to add up in a gaseous (compressible) fluid. Even for a relatively incompressible fluid with a surface, the standing waves can grow well beyond T if there is any “structure” to channel the surface waves.

How does all of this apply to the Sun? I don’t know. I’m guessing that the convective zone is the place where the Sun stops being “incompressible” and approximately rigid, so that tidal bulges at the thermocline itself would be very small unless they encountered some sort of positive feedback, a resonance with some other process (e.g. core fusion rates that are slightly modulated by pressure, producing chuffing, with the possibility of favorably driving chuffing frequencies that match tidal frequencies). Up above that, however, they could be a lot more like atmospheric bulge — even a small expansion per meter has a lot of meters to add up in as one rises through half a million meters, and I can thereby imagine a much more substantial tidal bulge than 2 mm in the upper reaches of the Sun.

This leaves me back at the beginning — the top article is suggestive, but hardly (as it claims) conclusive, with a lot of work to be done. Your talk/article strongly reinforces the latter (and nibbles at the former). The real question is: Given that all of the work you outline in your survey has been done, why didn’t the article work through it and provide a concrete model that — perhaps — answers some of the well-known objections? Until this is done, I have to continue to doubt it, just as I similar continue to doubt similar results based on Fourier/Wolf analysis. Suggestive yes (since the time of Wolf, yet). Predictive? Not so much. Explanatory? Not without filling in a lot of missing pieces quantitatively, not with “and then a miracle happens and it is the cause anyway” where data does not fit. Even if a miracle DOES happen (due e.g. to chaos and strange attractors) one needs to show SOME chaotic model that exhibits at least SOME behavior like that observed, surely.

So again, thank you very much, Lief, for patiently attending to my education in this.

rgb

245. Nick Kermode says:

Tallbloke, you admit saying…

“There are those of US…….”

then you write…..

“I didn’t say I was one of them.”

Definition of “us”….

” Used by a speaker to refer to himself or herself and one or more other people.”

What is Leif supposed to think?

246. feral physicist says:

Some facts. The Abreu et alia paper was submitted to AA on 12 July, 2012. As Mike Jonas says, it was accepted by AA on 24 September 2012. The proofs were corrected on or about 6 November 2012. A perfectly normal process. The 17Mai 2011 (TWICE- in French) ) was clealy a misprint, which was corrected in the proof stage.

247. rgbatduke says:
November 12, 2012 at 12:08 pm
Thank you, the former was indeed very instructive, and the latter explains a lot as well.
Just some more on the solar atmosphere:
1) Gravity is 27 times stronger than in the Earth’s atmosphere
2) The temperature of the Sun in ‘quiet’ areas [away from sunspots and other strong magnetic fields] is very constant. Livingston has measured the temperature using temperature-sensitive spectral lines over almost 40 years and finds no variation at all [not even with the solar cycle] larger than about 3 degrees [out of 6000]: http://www.leif.org/EOS/2005ASPC-Livingston-Temp.pdf

248. feral physicist says:
November 12, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Some facts. The Abreu et alia paper was submitted to AA on 12 July, 2012. As Mike Jonas says, it was accepted by AA on 24 September 2012.

Sounds more reasonable, but sort of does put this to shame:
tallbloke says:
November 10, 2012 at 11:46 am
“It might have been accepted in May 2011 on submission, but it wasn’t published until October 2012. Plenty of time for peer review and suggested alterations and various to-ing and fro-ing. Those of us who have been aware of the progress of this paper throughout that time know how rigorously it has been vetted prior to publication”

249. Jim G says:

it is geometry that is fundamental in gravity, as you said, that is of course, if one buys general relativity
“GR has passed every test it has been put to, so that is easy.”

So, considering the difference between thinking of gravity as simply a force which diminishes rapidly with the square of the distance visa vi a geometric consequence of the presence of mass, which also affects time, does this not open up other possibilities for the degree of long distance influence interacting gavity “wells” might have upon a variety of factors both solar and planetary?

250. markx says:

rgbatduke says: November 12, 2012 at 6:25 am

“…. Hence my wish to see computations…”
rgbatduke: All of this is well above my pay-grade but the following may be relevant:

The Sun has an additional peculiarity in that it does not spin at a constant speed. One revolution takes around 34 days near the poles and around 25 days at the equator.

It is believed that its core does spin evenly – presumably at the same rate as near its poles. The difference in the rotation of various components of this plasma body creates turbulent magnetic forces which contribute to sunspot activity.

The Sun’s magnetic field extends to well beyond Pluto. The objective of the Voyager 2 space mission was to find out what is happening at the outer limits of the Sun’s influence (refer section 7 to learn how the magnetosphere changes beyond Pluto).

The Sun’s diameter is approximately 1,391,000 kilometers but this also varies with it being slightly smaller at the beginning or end of a sunspot cycle and slightly larger in the middle of a sunspot cycle when it is also slightly hotter. This variation in diameter is of the order of 260 kilometers. There is also greater size variation between solar grand minima when it is smaller and the very active periods when it is larger. This variation is of the order of 600 kilometers…….

………The paper by Wilson, Education Dept., Qld, Carter & Waite, Centre for Astronomy, Solar Radiation and Climate – University of Southern Queensland, measured the transfers that occur from just Jupiter and Saturn and these are of the order of 3 – 5 x1040 Newton meters and the amount that gets transferred to the equatorial plasma rotation of the Sun is of the order of 4.5×1037 Newton meters and would change the velocity of the surface plasma by around 4.3 meter/second, which is of the order of 2/3rds of that observed by direct satellite measurements.

(Note the influences of the other Jovian planets and the closer rocky planets were ignored in this exercise.)

I. R. G. Wilson, B. D. Carter, I. A. Waite; Does a Spin-Orbit Coupling Between the Sun and the Jovian Planets Govern the Solar Cycle, Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, 2008. http://www.publish.csiro.au/?act=view_file&file_id=AS06018.pdf

All from : Extra Terrestial Influences on Nature’s Risks. Brent Walker 2012 http://www.actuaries.org/HongKong2012/Papers/WBR9_Walker.pdf

251. Jim G says:
November 12, 2012 at 1:53 pm
does this not open up other possibilities for the degree of long distance influence interacting gravity “wells” might have upon a variety of factors both solar and planetary?
If you have some specific possibility in mind and can quantify it, then it can be tested. Otherwise it is just wishful thinking.

252. PJF says:

Leif Svalgaard wrote:
As usual, the discussion has degraded to the pushing of personal pet theories and assorted nonsense and misunderstandings and the original topic is largely forgotten.

Indeed. The original topic, it seems to me at least, is the title question “Is there a planetary influence on solar activity?”

I find it interesting that the claimed correlation in the paper isn’t greatly disputed here. It is seen either as an indicator of causation or as a complete coincidence, but not dismissed as non-existent. Since the supposed correlation is the reason this particular planetary influence theory exists at all, that seems the first place to look.

Is the correlation real, as in specific to events and persistent with time? Or is it selectively imagined or even cynically fabricated as in astrology?

If it is real, can this correlation (not some other) also be easily shown to be specific to events and persistent with time in some unrelated arena, such as the frequency of the occurrence of the letter L in a Shakespeare play (the more absurdly disconnected the better). If a similar match can be shown then this correlation based planetary influence theory can be reasonably said to be baseless.

If the correlation is real and stubbornly unique to this apparent relationship, then it will remain an interesting little elephant in the room for the solar physicists to stub their toes on as they explore the dark looking for the light.

By the way, today’s Bing image (UK page anyway) is superb and strangely topical. Just at the epoch where, on the Moon’s steady tidal driven ride away from the Earth it happens to appear, on average, the same size as the Sun, a species suddenly evolves that happens to find such a correlation rather cool. What a coincidence!

Some nifty solar physics on display. And is that Jupiter just off to the right? ;-)

253. PJF says:

Abreu et al wrote:
Figure 5 from the paper shows the 10Be record, shown as modulation potential, and planetary torque in the frequency domain:

Panel a is the Fourier spectrum of the solar activity quantified by the solar modulation potential. Panel b is the Fourier spectrum of the annually averaged torque modulus. The spectra display significant peaks with very similar periodicities: The 88 year Gleissberg and the 208 year de Vries cycles are the most prominent, but periodicities around 104 years, 150 years, and 506 years are also seen.

I have a fairly normal human ability to see imaginary patterns in randomness (face on mars, etc) but I have to say I’m struggling with Figure 5. Take away the grey bars pointing out particular matches, and I see mostly mismatches. The grey bars supposedly indicate known periodicities in solar activitiy, but there isn’t much evidence in the 10Be graph of repeat peaks on the multiples.

Hmmm… is this – statistics?

254. PJF says:
November 12, 2012 at 7:16 pm
I have a fairly normal human ability to see imaginary patterns in randomness (face on mars, etc) but I have to say I’m struggling with Figure 5. Take away the grey bars pointing out particular matches, and I see mostly mismatches.
I compared Figures 1 and 4 and find peaks that come and go: http://www.leif.org/research/Abreu-Wavelet-Comparison.png sometimes in the ‘right’ places, sometimes not.

255. NaturalCyclist says:

Maybe Leif you can imagine a pattern here.

And does that trend line (representing the rate of change) appear to be rising, or is it just my imagination that it is falling?

256. NaturalCyclist says:
November 12, 2012 at 9:45 pm
And does that trend line (representing the rate of change) appear to be rising, or is it just my imagination that it is falling?
Trend lines have error bars or uncertainties, so you have to plot those too, in order to assess the change.

257. phlogiston says:

The authors start this paper – promisingly – by stating that: “We adopt a di erent view by regarding the planets and the solar dynamo as two weakly coupled non–linear systems. In this paper we suggest that this coupling is not negligible and show that this hypothesis is able to explain the observed long–term cycles of solar activity.”

However there does not appear to be a real grasp of what is meant by a weakly forced nonlinear oscillator. A good example of a paper that studies a weakly forced nonlinear oscillator is here:

http://wwwold.nioz.nl/public/fys/staff/leo_maas/publications/dkm.pdf

Doelman et al take the case of a bay connected to the sea by a narrow inlet, and analyse the tidal movements within the bay as the consequence of tidal forcing from both solar and lunar tidal components. It turns out to operate as a nonlinear weakly forced oscillator with a complex set of forcing frequencies. To quote:

“The external forcing term ζext (t) is not an exactly periodic function of time. The tide at sea consists of lunar and solar components, and may contain annual, diurnal, semi-diurnal and, as a result of nonlinearity, all kinds of harmonic combination frequencies.”

Thus the system is a reasonable analogy of earths climate under a range of Milankovich and other astrophysical forcings, in terms of nonlinear system dynamics. The analysis involves the derivation of a Melnikov function, and – as can be seen by quickly looking through the paper – it involves some quite heavy-duty maths. In fact six alternative Melnikov functions are derived.

This is the kind of analysis required in the Abrieu et al paper. It is not enough just to mention the term “weakly forced nonlinear” and then in the rest of the paper just carry our wiggle-matching in a purely linear manner.

The authors conclude:

Finally, we note that the approach developed in this paper, and in particular the construction and evaluation of the mixed Melnikov function, can also be used to study general nonlinear oscillators with similar ‘almost resonant’ quasi-periodic forcing terms (see also [15,26,27]). In the case of small amplitude oscillations, the only ‘essential information’ on the oscillator is T2, the leading order quantity that describes the nonlinear character of the period of the periodic orbits of the nonlinear oscillator near the center point (2.8). This quantity can, of course, be determined for any nonlinear oscillator.

258. Jim G says:

Leif Svalgaard says:

“If you have some specific possibility in mind and can quantify it, then it can be tested. Otherwise it is just wishful thinking.”

No, just trying to activate your creative thinking in the event you might have an outside the box idea on this. I’m just an old engineer who likes to question any type of dogmatic thinking. Seems to me there are already more than a few theories of long distance gravitational interaction out there however they treat gravity more as just another force than the geometric space/time situation descibed in GR.

259. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Does anyone get what’s going on in this one, which more clearly shows how the 3 prong cycle is the controller of grand minima? and that FFT type analysis misses the detail?

right Geoff
Here is my hypothesis: without Uranus-Neptun you woluld have a ~20 year cycle (from top to top), or we can identify it as a ~10 year cycle of change (10 years rising, 10 years sinking).
But Uranus-Neptun create these disturbances that “cancels the effect of Saturn”. So we get a period of low change, as if the Sun only was feeling Jupiter.

Now, the beatcycle of 10/11 years suggest a Gleissberg cycle of 96 years. So if we have a Gleissberg low, and disturbances from Uranus+Neptun, and the beat-cycle of 168 years of tidal cycles 11/12-years is “unfavorable”, we can get a severe Gleissberg slowdown that lowers the solar activity below a threshold, and thus triggers the grand minima. Of some reason the solar activity fails to “start up” again, and get caught in a different state… until it escapes and enters normal activity-phase

JAn :)

261. Geoff Sharp says:

Hi Jan, yes without N/U there would be no grand minima and also no cycle variation
. Every cycle would be the same. Your observation of N/U canceling out S (or at least trying) is correct and this is where the orbit of the Sun changes. Normally the 20 year pattern is 10 years of the sun going on the outer loop and moving away from the SSB and then returning towards the SSB (inner loop). When the disordered inner loop occurs because N/U fights S the inner loop actually tries to be an outer loop for several years (this is a new type of retrograde orbit). The path of the disordered inner loop can go outside the distance of the radius of the Sun measured from the SSB, the further it moves away the greater the disturbance and the deeper the grand minimum. this is where the 3 prongs now come in, 3 strong orbit movements give sporer type minima etc.Throughout the Holocene this pattern holds up. My theory is that the highly disordered inner loop orbit reduces solar activity to a point where the affected cycle has a failure of the Hale cycle whereby one of the poles does not change polarity or stays neutral which then disrupts the next cycle. If another strong disruption to the inner loop follows after then you get a maunder type situation etc. Disruptions as shown via the graphs can occur multiple times within a 80-90 year window, the mix of these disruptions controls that epoch and because of the multiple options there can never be repeating cycles, but there can be an occurrence of the most common gap between grand minima which is the 208 year timeframe.
I see this function as outside of what controls cycle length, so the timing of the inner loop change can also be important. If the disturbance happens around cycle max it is wasted as seen in 1830.

The Gleissberg cycle is the modulation caused by N/U. The high point is always the N/U conjunction. At this point the outer loop is furthest from the SSB and the inner loop is closest to the SSB (SC19). You will never see high cycles when AM is low.

The following diagram displays all of the data mentioned above.

262. Geoff Sharp says:
November 14, 2012 at 2:27 pm
Hi Jan, yes without N/U there would be no grand minima and also no cycle variation. Every cycle would be the same.
I think you have lost it now…

Hi Geoff
We have some similar views, and some different :)
This is my hypothesis simplyfied:
First we leave out Ur+Ne and look at the 10 year cycle (10 years up, 10 years down in the AM/barycentre graph). The sunspot cycle wants to correlate with this one, but there is another cycle messing it up: the tidal cycle of 11 years.
This causes drifting in the 10 year cycle, until a phase-failure occurs (Gleissberg low). We then see a couple weak solar cycles, and then it gets back in phase with the 10 year cycle.
So in this simplyfied version there is much room for variation in the sunspot cycle.
Here you can see the drifting
[video src="http://www.sibet.org/solar/jusa02.wmv" /]

But I seem to agree that Ur+Ne is needed to explain the grand minima. And this is how:
When the sunspot cycle has experienced a phase-failure (Gleissberg low), it would normally come back in phase and start up the stronger cycles again.
BUT if the startup-cycle finds a disrupted AM/barycenter bu Uranus+Neptun, it doesnt “get any energy”. In the stockmarket I would call this a “bottom-or-edge-of-cliff”… and in this case the edge of a cliff.

So the “solar dynamo” experiences a severe slowdown (a “trap”), that cant be reversed before decades later (grand minimum).
In the Maunder minimum this was the case at sunspotcycle -9 (around year 1646)
However after the Dalton we saw SC7 being able to start just soon enough before the Ur+Ne disturbance, and the solar dynamo escaped the trap. So in this case the tidal cycles allowed the sunspot cycle to begin early, and the disturbance was just a bit too late to ruin the party :)

When looking at current situation, I would expect this Gleissberg low to influence SC24 and 25, ending around year 2030. There is a mild Ur+Ne disturbance around year 2045, which is too late to create a trap and grand minima. Also the tidal cycles are not in the right state to create trouble the way I see it. So the Gleissberg should end around year 2030, and we get stronger cycles again. So looks like ~100 years until next chance…

264. JMW says:

Is there something to “The Jupiter Effect” after all?

265. lsvalgaard says:
November 14, 2012 at 2:54 pm

lsvalgaard says:
November 14, 2012 at 2:54 pm

Geoff Sharp says:
November 14, 2012 at 2:27 pm
Hi Jan, yes without N/U there would be no grand minima and also no cycle variation. Every cycle would be the same.
——————————————————
I think you have lost it now…

This is not a figment of imagination, rather it is what the data shows.

If grand minima are excluded the data shows solar cycles are in step with Solar AM.

Before you can offer comment on a theory it is important to understand it’s base principles. I have offered a challenge some time ago to prove your understanding, but so far you have not illustrated the understanding required.

http://tinyurl.com/2dg9u22/?q=node/216

November 14, 2012 at 3:37 pm

Hi Geoff
We have some similar views, and some different :)

I think we are on the same page. Although the 2045 AMP event looks to be almost non existent from my end.

267. Geoff Sharp says:
November 14, 2012 at 4:57 pm
If grand minima are excluded the data shows solar cycles are in step with Solar AM.
This is vague statement. ‘In step with’ means what? You explicitly said all cycles will be the same [amplitude?]. This is clearly wrong.

268. lsvalgaard says:
November 14, 2012 at 5:54 pm

Geoff Sharp says:
November 14, 2012 at 4:57 pm
If grand minima are excluded the data shows solar cycles are in step with Solar AM.
———————————————————————-
This is vague statement. ‘In step with’ means what? You explicitly said all cycles will be the same [amplitude?]. This is clearly wrong.

Let me attempt to make the point more clear. The natural trend in solar cycle amplitude (grand minima omitted) follows the the same trend in amplitude of solar AM. This is clear on the powerwave diagram. N/U are the ONLY planets capable of modulating the amplitude of solar AM outside of the base AM sine wave created by Jupiter and Saturn. The J/S sine wave does not vary in amplitude, but when the outer two planets are added amplitude is added when N/U are together. Without the AM change in amplitude only available from N/U the solar cycles would also not change in amplitude. AM or another aligned force would seem to drive the solar dynamo. This is part one of the theory which also lines up with observations.

269. Geoff Sharp says:
November 14, 2012 at 7:28 pm
Let me attempt to make the point more clear. The natural trend in solar cycle amplitude (grand minima omitted) follows the the same trend in amplitude of solar AM.
From Rikubetso, Hokaido, Japan [explains my tardy reply]
Apart from that not being the case, you are also [as I pointed out] throwing under the bus all planetary ‘mechanisms’ and ‘theories’ that rely on Jupiter and Saturn to regulate the amplitude of the solar cycle [by Vuk, Aubreu, Wolff&P, tallbloke (?), and all the rest]. In a sense that is OK with me as under the bus is where they belong. It is good of you to here confirm this.

270. lsvalgaard says:
November 15, 2012 at 3:45 pm

Apart from that not being the case, you are also [as I pointed out] throwing under the bus all planetary ‘mechanisms’ and ‘theories’ that rely on Jupiter and Saturn to regulate the amplitude of the solar cycle [by Vuk, Aubreu, Wolff&P, tallbloke (?), and all the rest]. In a sense that is OK with me as under the bus is where they belong. It is good of you to here confirm this.

If you wish to ignore the solid correlations that’s fine, but you run the risk of being left behind.

No one is under a bus here, Aubreu et al and Wolf & Patrone have both corresponded with me commenting on the synergy, tallbloke is working on the Z axis (which may offer subset data) that needs the outer 4 and he is also working on the cycle timing which is unrelated IMO and Vuk needs to add 2 more planets to his equation. No one has any claim on the full solution just yet, but the momentum is moving fast. Exciting times for us.

271. Geoff Sharp says:
November 15, 2012 at 7:19 pm
No one has any claim on the full solution just yet, but the momentum is moving fast.
It seems to me that everybody claims to have a full solution. What does not have momentum is your Angular Momentum idea. And your claim that without Neptune and Uranus all solar cycles would be the same. The rest of the gang claims that they have excellent correlation without N and U. You can’t have it both ways..

272. lsvalgaard says:
November 16, 2012 at 1:47 am

What does not have momentum is your Angular Momentum idea.

AM may just be a marker that exists closely alongside torque, velocity and other forces. They are all related. It seems the real division is with the Babcock boys, shallow dynamo, deep dynamo, fast and slow conveyor belts, crazy theories that say the solar poles drive the next cycle etc etc.

The sad part for you is that your own ranks are now joining us.

273. phlogiston says:

Are epicycles making a comeback?

274. Volker Doormann says:

There are some problems with the conclusions in the paper of Abreu et al.

The authors have compared their FFT torque frequencies with the FFT spectrum of Steinhilber et al. and their time calibration.

They do argue with solar tide forces from planets, without naming any planet or couple.

The named phantom cycles like de Fries etc. was given without any link to astronomical geometries.

It is not clear to me whether the calculated FFT frequencies are independent from the Steinhilber spectrum or not.

Well, it is well known since 2010 in this blog that the global temperature proxies can be simulated using astronomical solar tide functions of couples in the solar system which I have called Geometric Harmonic Index (GHI). *)

Depending on the number of couples I have introduced the basic GHI and many other GHIx up to GHI 11 to simulate the present RSS or UAH data.

One can compare the spectrum of Steinhilber et al. with the GISP2 spectra in a time interval or in whole.

But also if there is a match this does not mean that the time calibration of the isotope data is of astronomical precision.

I can make use of a time interval of -2500 CE to -500 CE, and can compare it with different GHI compiles.

Trying to match the GHI for the last 2000 years, it seems that there is a time calibration that do not match with the astronomical time line.

This is also indicated if the FFT spectra of Steinhilber et al (green) are calibrated by a factor of 0.93333 in the frequency values, because the FFT spectra of the GHI2 (lightblue) and the GHI 4 (bue) does match then in the major peaks:

The point here is that all the calculated GHI spectra have basis in real planetary synodic tide functions and real positions on the heliocentric plane of the ecliptic.

However, it seems that there is no interest in research of solar system geometries neither in WUWT nor elsewhere.

http://www.volker-doormann.org/climate_code_s.htm

V.