People send me stuff.
Tonight I got an email that contained a link to a paper that takes on the wonky claims related to barycentrism and Earth’s climate, specifically as it relates to Nicola Scafetta’s 2010 and 2012 papers. This new paper taking on the Scafetta claims will be published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, April 2014. The author is Sverre Holm Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway.
Abstract, some graphs, and discussion/conclusion, along with a link to the paper follows.
Abstract
It has recently been claimed that there is significant coherence between the spectral peaks of the global temperature series over the last 160 years and those of the speed of the solar center of mass at periods of 10-10.5, 20-21, 30 and 60-62 years. Here it is shown that these claims are based on a comparison between spectral peaks in spectral estimates that assume that the global temperature data contains time-invariant spectral lines. However, time–frequency analysis using both windowed periodograms and the maximum entropy method shows that this is not the case. An estimate of the magnitude squared coherence shows instead that under certain conditions only coherence at a period of 15-17 years can be found in the data. As this result builds on a low number of independent averages and also is unwarranted from any physical model it is doubtful whether it is significant.
…
Discussion and Conclusion
Scafetta (2010) claimed the global temperature series for the last 160 years to have
spectral lines at 21, 30 and 62 years. Time–frequency analysis shows that the lines are
time-varying (Figs. 1 and 2) and very different from the nearly constant lines in the
time–frequency plot for the speed of the center of mass of the solar system (SCMSS)
(Fig. 3).
The supposed periodicity around 30 years in Scafetta (2010) is not really
present in the climate series at all and could be an artifact due to a combination
of model overfitting and smearing due to the time-invariance assumption which has
been forced on the data. The claimed spectral peaks by Scafetta (2010) for the global
temperature series are therefore not reproducible if proper consideration is taken of
the time-varying nature of the data. The only significant coherence between the cli-
mate series and the sun’s movement that was possible to find was at 15-17 years (Table 1). However, both the low number of independent averages that it builds on as well as the lack of a physical explanation for this coherence, makes us hesitate to claim that it is significant.
===============================================================
Looks to me like “game over” for claims of Barycentrism controlling Earth’s climate. Clearly this was a case of pulling a signal from noise that is just an artifact of the process, much like Mann’s special brand of math that made hockey sticks from just about any red noise input data.
Full pre-print of the paper here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.1086.pdf
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
and then …
Buriedcentrism.
I don’t see how either sides claims hold up. Temp data has been so adjusted/deleted/tampered with the mere claim that you’ve used it to prove/disprove/show anything other then the data is worthless is a bit of a stretch
Game over? Isn’t that a little bit like saying that the “debate is over?” 🙂
REPLY: Oh, people will still debate it I’m sure. Tallbloke and his group of cyclists will try to prop it up, but I’d say it pretty much has reached the end of credulity as a workable theory.
Some years ago I thought the theory had some merit, and I dabbled with it a bit, but then just like with CAGW, things didn’t quite add up. Now I’m quite convinced it’s junk. – Anthony
WUWT is a fantastic site for weather and climate. As for debating the Electric Universe…this is a fantastic site for weather and climate. That is all.
I particularly liked “due to a combination of model overfitting and smearing” sounds a lot like yet more data torturing to fit the required results.
Jbird says: Game over? Isn’t that a little bit like saying that the “debate is over?” 🙂
Or as Sir Christopher of Belchley would put it:
“I am going to show you the latest science that now doesn’t leave the question unsettled anymore. This is now settled science. It is now settled science that there is not a problem with our influence over the climate. The science is in, the truth is out and the scare is over.” (2009)
I also looked at this some years ago, and found that the idea of spin-orbit-coupling is almost certainly wrong. I don’t see a need to call it ‘wonky’ or anything else, though. ‘Wrong’ is sufficient.
Similarly, the idea of CO2 having any effect at all on the climate is also almost certainly wrong. As with barycentrism, empirical evidence is missing.
Scafetta theorized that variability in some of the sun’s spectra are caused by magnetic disturbances which are multiplied by the small wobble caused by interplanetary pull.
One is left to presume that the Earth’s stratosphere would provide provide further amplification.
While mapping the exact position of the sun back through time is well beyond current methodologies, he argued that the magnetic pull of Jupiter and Saturn would cause a wobble analogous to climate variation over the past millennium.
It’s rather difficult to disprove an idea that has not been fully developed in the first place, and then offer nothing to replace or to improve upon that idea.
I just want to make sure that Anthony doesn’t look like a lonely tyrant. I also think that these theories were ludicrous, for physical reasons.
Such an influence would heavily violate the equivalence principle (all bodies accelerate at the same rate in a gravitational field – so on Earth, you can’t locally measure the potential or gravitational acceleration but only the next derivative, the tidal forces), something we experimentally know to be extremely accurate (better than a part in trillion) and that seems to be exactly required for general relativity to be consistent. So it can’t be surprising that all the empirical support for such correlations had to be an accident that has to go away after a closer scrutiny. This was discussed e.g. under an interview with a “barycentrist” here
http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/06/interview-is-climate-change-caused-by.html?m=1
Search for “equivalence principle”, to get to my comments.
It is like saying “the debate is over” except that we have strong theoretical *and* empirical reason for stopping being interested in such potential explanations. People may discuss about everything but science isn’t an unrestricted babbling. Science eliminates ideas that disagree with known experiments or observations. Some barycentrists may fail to do so, and climate alarmists also fail to do so quite often, but Anthony usually doesn’t and I want to support him in his “blasphemous” decision to disagree with these explanations. Theories can’t be viable just because they are alarmist or just because they are “skeptical”.
It is not improper to look for patterns in physical observations, for they may (or may not) reveal a physical law.
It would be interesting to know, for instance, what causes the 30-year periods of warming followed by 30-year periods of cooling that seem to characterize the global mean surface temperature anomaly record since 1850 that are in phase with the great ocean oscillations.
I do not say that these cycles – if they are more than mere coincidences – must be caused by the infinitesimal gravitational influence of the planets on the Sun. However, that the planets are capable of influencing each other gravitationally if the influence is exerted for long enough is suggested by the coplanarity of nearly all the planetary orbits.
And it is climate science that first gave us the notion that has come to be known as mathematical chaos – the observation that in certain objects, the climate arguably among them (Lorenz, 1963, Giorgii, 2005), even the most minuscule perturbation of the initial conditions at any chosen t-zero can exert a disproportionately large influence on the evolution of the object over time.
In short, both theory and observation indicate that it is not impossible for the planets to influence the Sun and, via the Sun, the Earth/Moon system. However, merely because it is not impossible, it ain’t necessarily so.
[snip – off topic, your usual ploy -mod]
It would be more weird if the sun, moon and planets did not influence climate and weather patterns in a cyclical way. Science has yet to explain how that could be.
It is not enough to find ways of debunking what one researcher may have found to be evidence of something cyclic and call that scientifically superior. All that we know of nature operates in cycles, and even electromagnetism, and so probably geomagnetism which starts with the sun and planets.
This leaves us with the reality that we would find more real science lurking in cycles than in debunks, which often have the scent of operator bias on them. I’m not saying this is the case here but the author Holm may be looking in the wrong place.
There are always ways to disprove anything – ask a good lawyer. Scafetta’s work is basically sound – he is suggesting repeatability. Perhaps he did not get the exact nature of the repeatability, but that is to be honed by others. The basic brief of science has always been to look in observations for reliable patterns, which means cycles, which then can be used to make predictions. Anything else departs from science and would have to come under some other label.
It is why highlighting anomalous weather patterns and calling it climate change is to cherrypick observed results to, with politics thrown around in good measure, come up with a case for funding, and will not in the long run of looking for truth, advance knowledge much, if that is our intention.
Ken Ring
The predictions from Landscheidt’s 2003 paper are all coming true: temperature, solar cycle 24, negative PDO to at least 2016.
And climate models?
Dear Lord Monckton, you wrote that “It is not improper to look for patterns in physical observations, for they may (or may not) reveal a physical law.”
A priori, you are right. A posteriori, you are not. Before 1666 AD, any signal observed on Earth could have revealed a physical law describing the influence of planets on each other. But since 1666 AD, the actual law governing the mutual influence of planets on each other has been known, verified with a huge accuracy, and it unquestionably implies that the relative positions of Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, or the center-of-mass of the Solar System cannot measurably influence any observation done locally on Earth. The whole Earth just accelerates according to the average vector of gravitational acceleration (caused by the Sun, the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and others) in its volume, and only deviations of the local gravitational acceleration from the average one – i.e. the tidal forces – may imply new effects measurable by those who are moving along with the Earth through space because they tend to push pieces of the Earth in different directions.
Similarly, the Sun itself is only affected by the tidal forces caused by the planets etc. Already the acceleration from Jupiter – that still doesn’t matter for the internal processes in the Sun – is about 10 billionths of the gravitational acceleration on Earth only. The tidal forces go like 1/r^3 and they imply “relative accelerations” of pieces of the Sun that are smaller by additional two orders of magnitude or so, like 10^{-9} m/s^2. This is vastly smaller than any other source of acceleration that actually operates within the Sun.
The right law describing the forces exerted by one planet or star or another have simply been known (and Einstein’s refinements to Newton’s theory in the general theory of relativity are demonstrably too small to matter at the level that one could “feel”, e.g. through the climate), so it is misguided to look for or to expect completely different, incompatible explanations of the same kind of effects (forces exerted by one planet on another). It doesn’t mean that there can’t be any repeatable 30-year periodicity. But it does mean that if there is such a periodicity, the correct explanation does not include the forces exerted in between different celestial bodies of the Solar System because such influences have been ruled out by the same experiments that have confirmed Newton’s law of gravitation.
Chaos may be relevant for producing various hard-to-predict patterns. But it must be chaos in the “internal processes” in the Earth’s atmosphere (plus oceans) and I am afraid that by definition, “chaos” is the opposite than what you suggest. (Deterministic) chaos is when the past determines the future but the approximate past does *not* determine the approximate future. In effect, it means that it is impossible to determine the future because it depends – pretty much randomly – on *every* (exponentially) tiny variation of the initial conditions. And the negligible variations in the barycentric etc. quantities are not the only tiny variations. There are other, also tiny, but larger effects that matter. In effect, you are saying that one may restore the controllable predictability of the Earth’s climate etc. (following a simple law that may be described in these papers) by studying some details about the initial conditions. But that’s exactly what chaos prohibits if it is present.
I don’t think this is “game over.” From my perspective (a background in Systems Science) it doesn’t seem surprising that you would find “wobble” in the timing of the response (climate) to a highly regular stimulation (astronomical tidal effects), because of the influence of other (chaotic) factors.
What’s more, systems in which there are delayed feedbacks (either positive or negative!) are prone to oscillation, but in such systems you can expect drastically different effects of small periodic forcing depending on the frequencies of those forcings. Small forcings at or near resonant frequencies may have large effects, even though much larger forcings at anti-resonant frequencies have very little effect. That’s why one should not dismiss astronomical cycles as climate forcings simply because of their small magnitudes.
Here’s a famous example of a system in which a small forcing, combined with unfortunate resonance modes, led to dramatic oscillation:
REPLY: Oh I have no doubt the wobble is there, it is just that it is small by comparison to the solar system and doesn’t manifest itself as a viable signal in Earth’s climate – Anthony
Lubos Motl, I think you have fallen into the same mire about gravitational pull as other no-solarists and nonlunarists, intent on establishing that Earth is entirely nonaffected by extraterrestrial bodies, and this because the debate might begin to look more kindly upon and even favour astrology. One cannot take the gravitational laws arising from when an apple falls from a tree to the ground and apply this to extraterrestrial bodies having potential effects on each other, and on everything on each other, like the sun or moon on the e.g. tide of the atmosphere or ocean. The initially stationary apple falling to the stationary ground set of equations do not adequately describe an apple that was always moving, impacting to the tree and ground both also in constant transit.
Lubos Motl makes the mistake of assuming that someone with no piece of paper to say he is a scientist knows nothing about science. I am well aware that chaos is deterministic though not necessarily determinable, for instance, having co-authored a paper on it with Fred Singer. Precisely because the planets move according to well-established laws, if there be any chaos arising in the relative motions of the planets, then indeed we know the initial conditions sufficiently to determine the future by observing the past – which is what physics does.
And I am also well aware of the laws of gravitation. That is why I was cautious in my approach, and I did not say, as Lubos Motl seems to imagine, that there is a detectable influence on the Earth’s climate arising from the influence of the planets on the Sun. I raised a not uninteresting question about the cause of the ocean oscillations and of the apparently-associated cycles in global temperature. I often raise such questions here, not because I wish to make a point but because I want to know the answer.
We must not fall into the same poisonously intolerant attitude as the true-believers in the New Religion, who are unwilling to allow any discussion that they might regard as heretical. But the history of science is precisely the history of those who came along and said they did not agree with “settled science”. Mr Motl mentions Newton’s laws of gravitation as though they were inviolable, but it was a patent clerk from Switzerland, in a non-peer-reviewed paper containing some errors of notation, who demonstrated that – whether Mr Motl likes it or not – Newton’s was not the last word in the matter.
Let us be gentler with one another, and not be too harsh with those who advance theories that appear incompatible with what we think we know. The stifling of intellectual enquiry that the New Religion seeks to impose is bad enough. We must not be corrupted by it. In science, an open mind is of near-infinitely greater value than an open mouth.
Does this not all seem a little contrived? I don’t know of any natural signal that is stationary does this suggest that global spectral analysis is a lost cause in the Earth Sciences.
On a general point, what surprises me is that there is no discussion or qualification of whether the approach was – in the context of the times series which they didn’t even present – narrow or wide band in nature; just enough to say that it is based on a sort of arbitrary judgement and that their approach was super. From their discussion it seems clear that they were aiming for a narrow band approach and good frequency resolution – their time resolution is so poor that they are picking up very localised changes in amplitude (tut, tut…) which can inflate the predominance of anomalies, which by nature are localised: non-stationary. Surely, as the subject of the paper is good practice they should try practicing what they’re preaching and discuss whether this could overstate the case against Scafetta’s work (which I haven’t read).
Oops scratch that…should be:
From their discussion it seems clear that they were aiming for a narrow band approach and good TIME resolution – their time resolution is so HIGH that they are picking up very localised changes in amplitude (tut, tut…) which can inflate the predominance of anomalies, which by nature are localised: non-stationary
And yet is it not so that Scafetta’s temperature forecast is the closest to actual observation? I know that doesn’t make his theories necessarily correct, after all, it may just be serendipity his observations just happen to follow another, unknown mechanism, however his predicted temperature evolution is the best.
With all that said the climate still warms and cools iin 30 year cycles (PDO) super imposed over a 60 year cycle (AMO). I wouldn’t exactly call it a death blow anymore than I would say the world cooled 40% in February!
I think the main problem with this study is the 60 year window that is chosen throughout most of it. Whilst I am fairly confident that periods lower than ~60 years are not significant in the data, I am NOT convinced that a signal of that length is not present.
All of the temperature data sets show a clear ~60 years signal in them. This is true of thermometer, satellite, AMO, PDO, etc.
I do not believe we have identified correctly where this cyclic variation comes from, but you cannot just says the cycle does not exist.
Temperature
http://climatedatablog.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/hadcrut-giss-rss-and-uah-global-annual-anomalies-aligned-1979-2013-with-gaussian-low-pass-and-savitzky-golay-15-year-filters1.png
ANO/NAO
http://climatedatablog.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/esrl-reconstructed-monthly-nao-rnao-monthly-anomalies.png
PDO
http://climatedatablog.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/pdo-reconstruction-1470-1998-shen-2006-with-gaussian-low-pass-30-and-75-year-filters-and-hadcrut-overlay.png
This is NOT a curve fitting exercise. It is using longer period low pass filters that will show what cycles, if any, are present.
There is most definitely something at ~60 years. The above treatment show it is present in Fig 1 & 2, but then says it is not present in Fig 3.
That just says the assignation/attribution is wrong, not the signal.
It was pointed out countless times in the past that the lines are time-varying. Now the message suddenly sinks in? Also, I would hardly call Scafetta’s views “barycentrism”. His approach might better be described as eccentrism, as it used any and all cycles, well beyond just the traditional barycentric ones. Leveling valid criticism at Scafetta’s work would be child’s play, but at wuwt we’ve seen time and time again attacks on Scafetta from people who don’t even understand what he has done. Sensible discussion just won’t happen here.
Lubos: I would be more convinced by your comment was it not for the fact that we do not seem to be able to accurately predict what the Moon’s orbit was going back even a few 100 years. The clockwork does not seem to be as precise as one would like.
The Moon, which has a large influence potential and real on climate here on Earth,
CAN be moved in its orbit by other bodies even though their influence directly here on Earth is tiny.
Principle of levers may then apply over what would otherwise be considered to be ignorable.