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
dikranmarsupial says:
March 12, 2014 at 8:40 am
“It is fairly obvious why RichardLH is unwilling to accept this simple element of good statistical practice.”
The problem is that there is not enough data to do valid statistical analysis as you well know. The margins for/of error are just too wide.
There is more to the world than statistics though, which can draw valid inferences without needing the time periods that statistics require.
A simple filter to the data will provide information on a noisy signal long before the statistics will turn up an answer.
And models have so far failed to predict anything valid in the short term, or hadn’t you noticed?
Pacific Decadal Oscillation
There are tens of thousands of papers on the PDO. There may be multiple causes/drivers. e.g.
The Forcing of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation*
Such multiple drivers makes it difficult to sort out complex chaotic systems which have a general 50-70 year oscillation. Are there similar multiple affects masking the other oscillations?
cd says:
March 12, 2014 at 8:58 am
“Blimey just popped back after a while and I see you’ve got your horns locked in another battle.”
Well the data and summaries of the data does not change (except we ad another month – right on the trend line as well – purely by chance of course). Only the fact that people seem to be prepared to ignore what it shows. 🙂
http://climatedatablog.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/uah-global.png
Carl Wunsch said in http://ocean.mit.edu/~cwunsch/papersonline/thermohaline.pdf
“The conclusion from this and other lines of evidence is that the ocean’s mass flux is sustained primarily by the wind, and secondarily by tidal forcing,. Both in models and the real ocean, surface buoyancy boundary conditions strongly influence the transport of heat and salt, because the fluid must become dense enough to sink, but these boundary conditions do not actually drive the circulation.”
So tides DO affect the climate indirectly if not directly. It is not a big stretch from there to suggest that long term patterns in those will also affect things.
Modelling it may well be beyond us though at present as he also observed.
Steven Mosher says:
March 12, 2014 at 8:58 am
You do need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater though. Even if Nicola’s derivation for a ~60 year cycle is not physically correct, that does not mean that a ~60 year cycle does not exist in the data. The observation of the cycle needs to be separated from the explanation.
Does so far it works?
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~christrask/Solar%20Activity%201600-2100.pdf
Nicola
I do not have a dog in this particular fight having no worthwhile knowledge of this subject.
However, it is obvious that you could immediately convert people to your views if you would produce your code so those with the knowledge can check and validate it.
As far as I understand you refuse to provide the code and people are therefore unable to reproduce your results and remain sceptical of them.
This could all be cleared up very quickly by producing your code. Why do you refuse a reasonable request?
tonyb
RichardLH
So tides DO affect the climate indirectly if not directly.
We know that the tidal range has changed through geological time (Moon moving further away due to tidal surge). Is there some dependence between climate and tidal range through geological time? If there is then it would seem likely that gravitational oscillations, no matter how small may play apart.
Anthony How do you and Lubos explain the Milankovitch cycles which are observed in the Geological record back for hundreds of millions of years. In fact Astrochronology and Cyclostratigraphy are commonly used in constructing the Geological time scale from the record of changing climate in the rocks .Interested parties will enjoy the beautiful example of the 100,000 and 405,000 year eccentricity cycles seen these Chinese Permian rocks (near to the Great Extinction)
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2013/130913/ncomms3452/full/ncomms3452.html?WT.ec_id=NCOMMS-20130918
Here is a quote from the paper
“Strong ~405 kyr cycles predominate in both U–Pb age-calibrated series, which we interpret as evidence of forcing from Earth’s 405-kyr orbital eccentricity cycle. This cycle originates from interaction between Venus and Jupiter orbital perihelia, and is stable over long timescales owing to the great mass of Jupiter. The 405-kyr cycle has been adopted as a ‘metronome’ for the astronomical tuning of the Cenozoic–Mesozoic stratigraphy.”
There are of course other periodicities in the system which have been discussed in various papers by Scafetta and Wison.
It is best to stay close to the climate data as for example see
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
where the 60 and 1000 year periodicities are used to forecast the coming cooling.
REPLY: Periodicity is one thing, I have no qualms with Milankovitch cycles, as they are easily calculable and broadly reproducible to show the variation in watts/m2 on the surface of the Earth over those time scales.
Claims like Scafetta that are only reproducible by him, where he says everybody else is wrong while not sharing his data and code to allow others to test it, don’t rate any serious consideration in my mind. We don’t let Mann, Jones, and others get away with such stuff, why should Nicola rate a pass? – Anthony
See Fig 5 in the link in my 9:44 post
“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.”
Its not impossible that unicorn farts influence the climate.
When the most celebrated proponent of a theory refuses, flat refuses, to SHOW HIS WORK to share his code, when he hides his unicorn and then demands that we believe in his private experience of this unicorn, we are rationally obligated to dismiss his work. Obligated to dismiss it.
He writes a nice story about what he did to find this unicorn, but until he actually shows his work and shares his code, we are compelled by reason to dismiss his work. Especially when others such as McIntyre, who has no patience with foolishness and no shortage of grey matter, was unable to conjour up Scafettas unicorn.
Skeptics have place in the climate debate. Nic Lewis has shown folks how to make an impact.
share your data. share your code. Steve mcintyre, Anthony watts, troy masters, Odonnel, McKittrick.. They all have show you the way: do the science. share your data. share your code.
When you comprehend that solar cyclesis short-and long-term changes in the solar magnetic field. Number of solar magnetic radiation does not change, but will change the amount of radiation Galactic, which is evident in geological research.
Mosh
I am rather bemused as to why Dr Scafetta does not kill the controversy by showing his code. It seems illogical to me unless the code is not as robust as he hopes
tonyb
@climatereason ditto. If somebody not connected with his group can reproduce his work, and show why it’s either right or wrong, I’ll adjust my opinion accordingly.
“read my papers” doesn’t cut it. if McIntyre can’t reproduce it, it may very well be irreproducible.
Monckton’s new journal on unicorn farts looks stillborn.
what would mr feynman say? The barycentrists had a theory. everyone gets to have a theory. I like the unicorn fart theory. have an open mind.. yes the open mind argument.. anything is possible. So, that theory got tested in this paper. What was Feynmans rule again? ah yes,
the barycentric theory is at odds with these observations. And the science machine therefore says “theory false.” with barycentrism dead, perhaps we can focus research dollars on unicorn farts.
It could be true. Have an open mind. After all, Einstein was clerk which proves everything is possible
“Monckton of Brenchley says:
March 12, 2014 at 8:45 am
First, there is no 60-year oscillation in Dr. Holm’s fig. 3.”
It is not hard to reanalyze the solar movement data and see a ~60 year line, albeit a somewhat unstable one and much weaker than the dominant other peaks. It just needs more data than the 160 years and longer windows as mentioned by several here.
But, please look at Figs. 4 and 5 of the paper (the ones which are not reproduced in this blog). That’s where the conclusion comes from. The essence is that with only about 160 years of data for the temperature series, there is simply not enough data for making a claim of coherence at a 60 year period in the strict sense of a magnitude squared coherence which has a significant peak. My approach to this is not as a astrophysicist, but from the point of view of data analysis.
@Henry Clark
Re the increase in resolution to the point where ‘no correlation’ exists – Willis just did that a few days ago to show the ‘poor correlation’ between two data sets where one was smeared (smoothed) and the other was high resolution. By plugging them directly into a process to get a correlation coefficient, obviously it will be terrible. But what is proven by the calculated number? The tool used can hide the truth of a correlation, or reveal it. There are many examples of this but a couple from Monty Python come to mind like the witch-detector.
@dikranmarsupial says:
>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.
Well, as usual it is not quite a simple as that. Before demanding the removal of ‘all forcings’ one has to assume, for the sake of argument, that all are in some way dependent, not independent, then one by one prove they are not. For example there are many claims that solar conditions affect earthquakes and volcanism. It is known that electric currents can be used to trigger earthquakes and a weapon based on this knowledge is said to exist. Electromagnetic effects are not all understood. Testing the hypothesis can’t be done in a cartoonish manner by arbitrarily assuming these don’t matter but that does.
I am completely unmoved by arguments based on a ‘lack of a physical explanation’. Good grief do we still have to hear that? How can one look for a physical explanation before one knows what to look for as a predicted effect? First characterize the effect, then look for an explanation – which might take generations to nail down. Does anyone really need examples from history?
There seems to be undue haste to dismiss a poorly understood complex phenomenon that is working within a system filled with harmonics. Surely no one needs to be reminded that the position of the planets and their year-lengths are harmonic, and function as a single system?
The arguments against all barycentric ideas are overly simplistic. According to the ‘gravity is too small’ argument the moon can’t raise much of a tide on earth because the overall force is too small and spread over the mass of the Earth. Yet the ocean tides rise quite high cyclically because they are free to flow and hence rise far more than the land underneath (which also rises a little). The bodies are treated as if they are billiard balls. Basically the anti-claims are that all influence on the Sun has to be amortized over the whole solar mass, the cyclical influence will not appear in the fluid motion near the surface. There are papers describing how the butterfly pattern of sunspots is synchronized with the position of the Earth-Moon-Venus barycenter and the charts are pretty impressive. Maybe it is a coincidence. I could conclude ‘the effect is obvious to the eye’ but there are still people who would cry that the mass of the EMV system is too low, the sun is so huge, blah-blah-blah.
Yet the tides still move.
I would be much less impressed with barycentric postulations if the predictions of climate based on it were not so very much better than the ‘accepted’ and ‘consensus’ physical models of the universe. If there is a major drought in the USA in 2018 and again in 2025, consensus climate physics will have even more explaining to do.
cd says:
March 12, 2014 at 9:38 am
“We know that the tidal range has changed through geological time (Moon moving further away due to tidal surge). ”
Tidal friction rather than surge, but that is on a very long timescale. The point worth considering is in the range 10s to 100s of years and how, if at all, the alterations is the tidal factors here on Earth may or may not have affected things.
The Moon and Sun take a long while to return to the same positions as viewed from the Earth’s surface. That will, in itself, produce different outcomes from gravitational fields on the Earth’s surface. It will not require further ‘action at a distance’ or new physics. It will just be a simple variation on what happens each month/year.
Now if that is sufficient to get above the noise that the system already produces then perhaps we can start to explain why things change as they do – or not.
And the timings may well line up with what Nicola Scarfetta has demonstrated – though through a completely different mechanism.
You know the argument I like best..
Imagine that the molecules in the atmosphere were people in a football stadium.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/welch_slide7.jpg?w=562&h=391
Ok now lets do the same thing with gravitation forces.
tidal forces would be half of a peanut shell in section 42 row 15 under seat 34.
right next to the unicorn fart
Sverre Holm says:
March 12, 2014 at 9:58 am
“The essence is that with only about 160 years of data for the temperature series, there is simply not enough data for making a claim of coherence at a 60 year period in the strict sense of a magnitude squared coherence which has a significant peak. My approach to this is not as a astrophysicist, but from the point of view of data analysis.”
From a statistical point of view you are correct. There are more things than statistics though. A simple low pass filter will remove higher frequencies and display any cycle longer than 15 years which is what I have attempted to show.
This discovers an ~60 year signal in the data. It is not curve fitting, it is data reduction.
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
Backed up with a similar signal in the PDO that just cannot be pure co-incidence.
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 just observational data. Nothing more.
“Anthony How do you and Lubos explain the Milankovitch cycles which are observed in the Geological record back for hundreds of millions of years. ”
Unicorn farts.
havent you read my paper? These phenomena are explanable by unicorn farts. My friends peer reviewed it. Nobody can reproduce it. If you dont understand it you are dumb. and no you cannot see my code, and no you cannot have my data. I have some sea front property for sale as well, would you care to buy it. here’s a picture, trust me.
It is ridiculous to think that the Earth and the Sun existed since the era of satellites.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013SoPh..286..609M
Two 9400-year long 10Be data records from the Arctic and Antarctic and a 14C record of equal length were used to investigate the periodicities in the cosmic radiation incident on Earth throughout the past 9400 years. Fifteen significant periodicities between 40 and 2320 years are observed in the 10Be and 14C records, there being close agreement between the periodicities in each record. We found that the periodic variations in the galactic cosmic radiation are the primary cause for periods 250 years. The spectral line for the Gleissberg (87-year) periodicity is narrow, indicating a stability of ≈ 0.5 %. The 9400-year record contains 26 Grand Minima (GM) similar to the Maunder Minimum, most of which occurred as sequences of 2 – 7 GM with intervals of 800 – 1200 years in between, in which there were no GM. The intervals between the GM sequences are characterised by high values of the modulation function. Periodicities < 150 years are observed in both the GM intervals and the intervals in between. The longer-period variations such as the de Vries (208-year) cycle have high amplitudes during the GM sequences and are undetectable in between. There are three harmonically related pairs of periodicities (65 and 130 years), (75 and 150 years), and (104 and 208 years). The long periodicities at 350, 510, and 708 years closely approximate 4, 6, and 8 times the Gleissberg period (87 years). The well-established properties of cosmic-ray modulation theory and the known dependence of the heliospheric magnetic field on the solar magnetic fields lead us to speculate that the periodicities evident in the paleo-cosmic-ray record are also present in the solar magnetic fields and in the solar dynamo. The stable, narrow natures of the Gleissberg and other periodicities suggest that there is a strong "frequency control" in the solar dynamo, in strong contrast to the variable nature (8 – 15 years) of the Schwabe (11-year) solar cycle.
RichardLH
I do not want to derail this thread but we do have CET of course which gives a very extended series from which a 60 year cycle could be detected, if it exists.
I have extended CET to 1538
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/11.jpg
A regional signal should show up just as well as a global signal. Is there a 60 year cycle in your view?
tonyb
‘You do need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater though. Even if Nicola’s derivation for a ~60 year cycle is not physically correct, that does not mean that a ~60 year cycle does not exist in the data. The observation of the cycle needs to be separated from the explanation.
There is no cycle IN THE DATA.
the data is the data
There is no trend in the data
There is no mean in the data
The data is the data. nothing more and nothing less. It is what it is and nothing more.
When you CHOOSE to apply a method to the data you create a result. That result is not in the data. the result comes from your decision to apply a technique to the data. That technique like all methods has assumptions. So what we want to see is your work. because it is your work what you actually DO to the data that produces this result. Describing what you do, is not sufficient
You must show what do. You must show your assumptions. You must show your actual work.
And to be really diligent you should question the sensitivity of your results to your assumptions.
Most proxies used in historical reconstructions are highly unreliable. Uncertainties are inherent when you look for a weak signal in a strong noise; it may be present when using one statistical method and absent with another method. You can “prove” whatever you like.