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
@- kenmoonman
“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.”
Actually the Newton equations are sufficient to descibe ALL the motions of the apple, … unless it is travelling above 90% of lightspeed.
It is good to see WUWT finally become skeptical enough to join the mainstream and reject the non-physical fantasies of the barycentrists.
Rational challenges to the Equivalence Principle persist. http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz.pdf
This thread seems to refer only to the sun’s centre of mass but I understood the barycentric theory as also leading to fluid movements within the body of the sun surrounding the centre of mass separately to the movement of the sun as a whole.
Planetary movements would then influence the internal solar cycle much more than they would move the sun itself.
Consider our moon not moving the Earth much but having measurable effects within our fluid oceans.
We are already accumulating evidence that on Earth there are responses that amplify solar variations across multiple cycles.
Personally, for my New Climate Model, I do not need to know how or why solar variations occur but it is interesting nonetheless.
***
Monckton of Brenchley says:
March 12, 2014 at 2:42 am
***
I’m an admirer of your courage, but when arguing physics w/Motl, you’re out of your league. Read and understand his link.
temp says:
“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”
Couldn’t agree more.
“homogenization adjustments now distort our perceptions” — Jim Steele
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/25/unwarranted-temperature-adjustments-and-al-gores-unwarranted-call-for-intellectual-tyranny/
Just to clarify an error stated above, the planets orbit within ~6 degrees of the ecliptic plane, but are not actually as coplanar as might be suggested, and the main reason they are so close has to due with the method by which the solar system was formed. Protoplanetary discs start out with most of the mass orbiting near the same plane, the planets didn’t tug each other towards it from some wildly varying arrangement of orbits.
You could actually argue that the fact that they aren’t perfectly coplanar is more in favor of this sort of influence than the other way around, I’d think.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
— Bertrand Russell
“I think the main problem with this study is the 60 year window that is chosen throughout most of it.”
As the author of the paper let me comment on this statement. It is true that the plots republished on this blog are based on 60 year windows, but the conclusion is not based on that. These plots are just illustrations of the lack of stationarity in the data. The coherence plots in Figs. 4 and 5 and also in Table I are based on shorter windows. Otherwise the number of averages is too small to get any confidence in the coherence estimates.
” Monckton of Brenchley says: March 12, 2014 at 2:42 am
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. ”
Hear, hear!! Well said.
Monckton of Brenchley asks “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.”
A sensible first step would be to see what can be plausibly explained by known forcings (solar, volcanic, aerosol, GHG etc.). The cycles are much less apparent if you look at the residual remaining after subtracting the plausible effects of the forcings, than if you fit cycles to the data and then look at the residuals to see what the cycles don’t explain.
Dear Lobos Motl, Newtonian center of mass analysis doesn’t apply to extended bodies under general relativity. Given that gravity is transmitted at the speed of light (or less), different parts of extended bodies “feel” the effects of another body in a particular position at different times, and the effects they feel at theorectically simultaneous times are from that moving body when it was a different points in space. Whether the effects of this body can or “cannot measurably influence any observation done locally on Earth”, is not a scientific truth but a technological question. The effects are real but perhaps too small to measure. The direct GR implications for processes on the earth are almost certainly to small to amount to anything significant, even cumulatively except perhaps on the earth/moon system. The ocean cycles might be a characteristic frequency of circulation interacting with their basins. The GR implications for the climate would have to be indirect through some kind of cumulative influence on the sun. The sun is extended body 4 light seconds in diameter, with an extended circulation (mass currents) and dynamo that perhaps has its own characteristic frequency. While even with Jupiter the GR impacts are so small as to be instantanenously insignificant, we’ve seen physical processes in other phenomena that allow small effects to accumulate and concentrate, and allowed to have significance through a fortuitous coupling of oscillators, hypothetically beat frequencies between the orbits of the planets and the cycle of the solar dynamo. As unlikely as this seems perhaps billions of years of interactions combine to actually make such coupling likely. like the locking of the moon’s rotation with its orbital period about the earth.
“Science” can be “settled” in so much as a hypothesis can be proven to be invalid. In real science, observations lead to a hypothesis. This hypothesis is used to make predictions. An experiment is run – sometimes being simply the passage of time — and the results are compared to the predictions. If the results vary from the predictions by more than measurement error, then the hypothesis has been proven to be invalid – SETTLED! This isn’t to say that the original hypothesizer cannot go back and rethink / modify the idea, and try again with a new version of the hypothesis, but the original one is indeed clearly disproven. That’s the thing about science. You can never 100% universally prove anything to be settled as being true for all circumstances, but you darned sure can settle something as being unequivocally false.
I’m not sure this particular hypothesis has been tested yet. Has it even been used to make any predictions?
too much noise (natural variation) … too little signal (periodic trends) …
Isn’t FUD wonderful? It creates so many opportunities!
(I must be feeling particularly loquacious today, for I’m going to chime in on this one.)
Now, my training in physics is sorely limited but Scarfetta’s ‘Beautiful Concept’ has always had the appearance of an interesting statistical result in desperate need of a workable physical theory. Any conceivable force that could give rise to a detectable spin-orbit coupling in solar dynamics seems breathtakingly small (notwithstanding the possibility of resonant amplification).
Like many, no doubt, I am enticed by the siren’s call of Scarfetta’s work but, sadly, but in the absence of a physically plausible mechanism, it seems more prudent to set this concept aside for the time being.
Martin Lewitt says:
March 12, 2014 at 6:06 am
—————————————
From the sun to Saturn you’re looking at a maximum of 1 hour and 20 minutes.
Sverre Holm says:
March 12, 2014 at 5:21 am
“As the author of the paper let me comment on this statement. It is true that the plots republished on this blog are based on 60 year windows, but the conclusion is not based on that.”
I was not challenging the conclusion as such, I was observing that the study did indeed find an ~60 year signal in the data, but was not able to assign it to the claimed factors.
As that ~60 year signal is very close to the window width it may not be well or correctly represented in the outputs. A longer 75 year or so window value would make that sort of complication less likely.
http://climatedatablog.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/andersonmannammannloehlegisshadcrutrss-and-uah-global-annual-anomalies-aligned-1979-2013-with-gaussian-low-pass-and-savitzky-golay-15-year-filters1.png
dikranmarsupial says:
March 12, 2014 at 6:03 am
“A sensible first step would be to see what can be plausibly explained by known forcings (solar, volcanic, aerosol, GHG etc.). The cycles are much less apparent if you look at the residual remaining after subtracting the plausible effects of the forcings, than if you fit cycles to the data and then look at the residuals to see what the cycles don’t explain.”
Not really. If you do a standard low pass filter treatment of all of the data to date then the ~60 year signal is easily observable. You do not have to able to explain how it got there to be able to observe it is present.
http://climatedatablog.wordpress.com/combined/
RichardLH, it appears that you did not understand the point I was making. The climate responds to changes in the forcings, if TSI goes up, then global temperatures will follow; if we have more volcanos, the resulting aerosols cause a bit of global dimming and the earth cools. Increase GHGs and temperatures will rise. The basic physics of these things are rather well understood.
If you look for cycles in the data BEFORE properly controlling for these known forcings, then your model is implicitly assuming that the effects of these forcings are precisely zero. If the net effect of these changes in individual forcings happens to be correllated with some cycle that can be fitted to the data, the effects will be attributed to this cycle, rather than to the effects of changes in forcings which actually caused them.
In statistics this is called “omitted variable bias” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omitted-variable_bias). If you don’t include the forcings in your model, you run the risk of overestimating the effect of these nebulous cycles.
@ur momisugly Monckton.
While I agree with you that keeping an open mind is important, as well as being gentle with new ideas, you’ve missed a very important point.
Like with some other people who have graced the pages here at WUWT, and met with an open mind initially, allowing publication and discussion of some of the ideas off the beaten path, Dr. Scafetta has had that privilege too.
His ideas didn’t hold up under discussion over many months, and then there was systemic off-topic thread bombing to tell anyone and everyone how his theory is the one that matters.
I’m fine with giving a look to new ideas, but if they don’t hold up, I’m not fine with the continual pushing of them even though it has been made clear we are moving on from them and they have become unwelcome. Witness Doug Cotton and the gravity theory of atmospheric temperature.
We can’t embrace such behavior when the science doesn’t hold up.
Scafetta’s Global Temperature prediction
Nicola Scafetta provides a phenomenological model that appears to provide far greater near term accuracy than the IPCC Global Climate Models where > 95% of the 35 year temperature projections are wrong – too hot.
Global Warming Prediction Model
The Knowledge Miner software has been applied to identify a phenomenological model of global warming at the Global Warming Project. Like Scafetta’s, its near term accuracy appears to be much greater than the IPCC GCMs.
The tasks now are to identify the underlying causes of the much greater near term accuracy of these phenomenological models and what causes the failures of the IPCC’s models despite their $ billions behind them.
Venus-Earth-Jupiter spin-orbit coupling
Lubos
Look forward to your evaluation of another tidal focused model by IRG Wilson:
The Venus–Earth–Jupiter spin–orbit coupling model, I. R. G. Wilson, Pattern Recogn. Phys., 1, 147–158, 2013 http://www.pattern-recogn-phys.net/1/147/2013/ doi:10.5194/prp-1-147-2013
Fail faster as to find sooner.
As Richard Feynman described the scientific method: “First we guess”.
Keep encouraging exploration, testing and civility.
Remember:
Thomas Edison. Spoken statement (c. 1903); published in Harper’s Monthly (September 1932)
Keep on guessing, testing, perspiring, validating and encouraging each other on with civility to the goal of discovering truth.
dikranmarsupial says:
March 12, 2014 at 6:52 am
“RichardLH, it appears that you did not understand the point I was making.”
No I understood all too well the point you were making. You can reduce things to not present by trying to assign parts of what is there to various factors and thus prove that there is nothing there. Sort of like the Cheshire Cat I suppose in reverse.
The fact is that there IS a ~60 year cycle to all of the data. The fact that you cannot find the components that make it up does not mean it is not present, only that you are unable to model it correctly. Not the same thing.
Poor Anthony,
some authors above have pointed out problems concerning the 60-year windows and the fact that my model is not based on “barycentrism” but on something else. Anthony has never understood this point among other things.
Let us not detail much the things. Just one point. In the above Figure 3 there is an analysis of the speed of the sun. Here no 60-year oscillation is observed! As a consequence, Holm does not find a coherence between the ~60-year temperature oscillation and the ~60-year astronomical oscillation.
It is curious. An astronomical 60-year oscillation has been known since ancient times by nearly everybody such as Chinese, Indians, Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Babylonian up to Kepler and beyond. Indians called it the Brihaspati-Jupiter cycle, Babylonians used it to develop the 60-base numerical system that we still use in our watches.
Of course, 60-year oscillation are macroscopic in numerous astronomical records as extensively demonstrated in my papers and by many others.
The stability of the temperature lines has also been tested in my papers. For example, the model was calibrated in 1850-1950 and predicted the 1950-2010 records and vice-versa. Etc, etc.
Read my papers:
http://people.duke.edu/~ns2002/#astronomical_model
REPLY: Read Holm’s comment upthread: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/11/death-blow-to-barycentrism-on-the-alleged-coherence-between-the-global-temperature-and-the-suns-movement/#comment-1588394
-Anthony
… damn, and that was my favourite hockey stick.
dikranmarsupial says:
March 12, 2014 at 6:52 am
P.S. You seem to think that I am looking for a cycle and trying to fit it to the data. Nothing could be further from the truth. I do not expect to find ANY cycle in the data longer than 15 years. The data says that there is one. It could have fallen at any period longer than 15 years and it would show up in the output. These are broadband, flat topped, filters which will show anything that is present.
You have to come up with a reasonable conclusion as to how this wriggle got there, not me.
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
This is just the data and summaries of that data. No theory, just observation.
RichardLH, ironically, ignoring the forcings is exactly the sort of “Cheshire cat in reverse” approach that you seem to dislike. Of course those who want to argue that there is a cycle in the data do not want to see the evidence for those cycles diminished by controlling for the forcings. Now if there really is a cycle in the data, it will still be there after controlling for the forcings, if it isn’t that is because the forcings plausibly explain the apparent cycle.
An important difference is that we have well understood physical mechanisms underpinning the effects of the forcings. The causes of the cycles is rather nebulous, which is why they end up with rather tenuous explanations, such as barycentrism.