## Nature Scientific Reports

Correction – 07/07/2019: I’ve been informed that the journal title is actually Scientific Reports, not Nature Scientific Reports. I’ve edited the text, but not the title.

Michael Brown made me aware of a new paper in Scientific Reports by Valentina Zharkova called Oscillations of the baseline of solar magnetic field and solar irradiance on a millennial timescale. Michael has, in the past, been critical of Scientific Reports because of the dodgy science it seems willing to publish. This new paper seems, unfortunately, to be another such piece of science.

What this paper focusses on is the motion of the Sun around the barycentre of the Solar System, commonly referred to as the Solar Inertial Motion (SIM). This motion is a consequence of the gravitational influence of the Solar System planets, primarily Jupiter. What surprised me about the paper was a claim that

[t]he solar inertial motion means for the Earth that the distance between the Sun and the Earth has to significantly change (up to 0.02 of a.u) at the extreme positions of SIM, and so does the average solar irradiance, which is inversely proportional to the squared distance between the Sun and Earth.

This seems to be suggesting that the typical, or average, distance of the Earth from the Sun can change quite substantially due to the motion of the Sun around the barycentre of the Solar System. Although influences from the other planets in the Solar System can perturb the orbit of the Earth, the semimajor axis (or, average distance) is expected to remain constant. Suggesting that it can vary by up to 0.02 a.u. would seem to be at odds with our understanding of orbital dynamics.

However, since I’m easily confused, I thought I would actually look into this. I use a package called MERCURY6, which can integrate the orbits of planetary systems. You can download a version here. The default setup is to simply integrate the orbits of the Solar System bodies. So, I integrated the Solar System back in time for 800000 years, and then forward in time for 800000 years. I then plotted (below) the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit.

Variation of the Earth’s orbital eccentricity over the past 800000 years, and 800000 years into the future.

The above variations are known as Milankovitch cycles. If you compare the above figure with the eccentricity plot here, you should see that it is essentially the same.

I then considered the motion of the Sun around the barycentre of the Solar System, for the period 1945 to 1996. This is the Solar Inertial Motion (SIM) that Zharkova’s paper is suggesting plays a key role in climate change through changing the distance from the Sun to the Earth. It’s shown in the figure on the right. If you compare it with this figure, it’s pretty much as expected. So, the code (as expected) seems to be working fine.

The claim in Zharkova’s paper appears to be that this motion of the Sun around the barycentre will substantially influence the distance from the Earth to the Sun. So, I then plotted this for the next 80 years (which was mainly so you can see the variations due to the small eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit). As you can see, the distance does change, but this is simply because the orbit is slightly eccentric ($e = 0.0167$). The dashed lines show the expected perihelion (closest) and aphelion (furthest) distances.

So, even though the Sun is moving around the barycentre, the orbit of the Earth around the Sun is entirely consistent with an orbit of fixed semimajor axis and eccentricity (technically, the eccentricity does change, but not very much over a period of 80 years). We can even plot the semimajor axis of the Earth’s orbit, which is shown on the right. Here I’ve plotted it for a time of 1000 years and, as you can see, it is constant (as expected).

So, Scientific Reports appears to have published a paper that makes a claim about the Earth’s orbit around the Sun that violates some pretty basic orbital dynamics and that then uses this to suggest that most of our warming is natural. Firstly, you would hope that a Nature journal would at least pay particular attention to papers that make strong claims about important topics. Secondly, you would also hope that they would check that this isn’t based on some pretty basic error about an extremely well-understood topic. When it comes to Scientific Reports, such hopes would appear to be in vain.

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### 272 Responses to Nature Scientific Reports

1. Before I wrote this, I emailed the author and tried to explain the error in their explanation of how the Solar Inertial Motion would influence the distance from the Sun to the Earth. I even passed on some of the figures from my MERCURY6 simulations. Apparently, I’m the one who is in denial.

2. Dikran Marsupial says:

Did you .cc in the editor? ;o)

Nice Work!

3. Dikran Marsupial says:

It might be worth writing a comment paper, as the barycenter cyclic climate change thing seems quite a common canard.

4. Dikran,

the barycenter cyclic climate change thing seems quite a common canard.

Except this is, from what I’ve seen, more based on this motion influencing solar activity, which then influences the Earth’s climate. This is the first time I’ve seen a claim that it actually changes the distance from the Sun to the Earth and that this then changes the solar irradiation and, hence, the climate.

5. Marco says:

Which Editor, Dikran? There are too many to choose at Sci Rep.

I had to go through one I knew to just get a response from the authors, but despite me showing multiple extremely fundamental errors, two years they still have not even corrected the most basic stuff (like incorrectly citing data from prior literature, and silly mistakes in their figures).

6. Dikran Marsupial says:

ATTP – I’ve noticed that climastrologists seem quite happy to quietly change mechanisms ;o)

Marco, that is pretty disappointing – errors are made in peer review, but a good journal should be willing to do something about them, especially if it is a topic of societal importance.

7. Dikran Marsupial says:

My intuition on this is not very confident, but wouldn’t changing the distance (rather than eccentricity) of Earth’s orbit bu 0.02 AU involve rather a large transfer of orbital energy? If so, for it to go on for a long time, there needs to be a mechanism for restoring it, which doesn’t seem self-evident to me.

8. Dikran,
Yes, if the average separation between the Earth and the Sun were really changing by ~0.02 AU, that would involve a transfer of orbital energy. I’m trying to think of what to say about this, but it makes so little sense, it’s hard to see what more can be said.

9. mt says:

My intuitions for orbits aren’t refined enough that this alarms me in itself, though I’ll happily take your word for it.

I just want to note that if the time scale is on the order of Jupiter’s orbit, the absence of this signal in the paleodata would appear to be telling. We really aren’t missing any mechanisms on a twelve year timescale – there doesn’t appear to be a signal to explain.

10. MT,
I must admit that when I first saw this, I worried that maybe my understanding of orbital dynamics was flawed. That’s partly why I thought I would check it directly. However, I also agree that if the distance from the Earth to the Sun were shifting substantially due to the motion of the Sun around the barycentre, you’d expect to see some kind of signal with a period similar to the orbital period of Jupiter.

11. Magma says:

I’ve very quickly read through the paper in question and am at a loss for words. This is the sort of shaky numerology and wordy filler I would expect to see in a dodgy pay-to-play journal, not a Nature spinoff. Did the reviewers just throw up their hands in despair and walk away saying “whatever”?

Start with a simple task for a reviewer — the data shown in Figure 1 as “[solar activity] reconstruction by Solanki et al.27 (red line)” do not appear in that one-page Perspectives article in Science. Nor is the curve consistent with the widely-cited solar irradiance reconstruction for the Holocene based on Be-10 isotopes in ice cores (Steinhilber, Beer, and Fröhlich, 2009 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2009GL040142) or in a recent paper by Wu et al. with compilations of solar activity estimated C-14 and Be-10 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03464 and references therein). Plots of data that don’t appear in the papers cited should be a large red flag to any reviewer.

Solar physics is very far outside my area of expertise but it’s pretty obvious when someone is forcing a simple dynamic model outside its bounds. Take for example the extrapolation of Zharkova’s double dynamo model back 100,000 years (!) and the figure showing “the oscillations of the summary curve (cyan line) calculated backward from 70 K to 90 K years overplotted by the oscillations of a magnetic field baseline, or its zero line (dark blue line) with a period of about 1950 ± 95 years”

About 1950 ± 95 years? It’s their own numerical model, not measured data!

12. paulski0 says:

Magma,

The solar reconstruction curve is from Solanki et al. 2004, which doesn’t seem to be cited. Actually, I should say “based on” rather than “from” since it appears to have been extended with recent sunspot observations. And, interestingly, Zharkova et al. appear to have spliced together the proxy (10be / 14C) reconstruction from the original paper with a sunspot record, giving the false impression of a single continuous set of data throughout. I’m sure this instance of splicing will be treated with the same sense of scandal as others.

Of course, recent assessments have found that the sunspot record used is in error due to discontinuities in methodology, which is what gives the impression of a modern grand maximum in the Solanki reconstruction. It always struck me as one of those “extraordinary claim” deals that the period we are observing just happened to randomly be a period of uniquely strong solar activity in the context of the past 10,000 years.

But one thing I’ve pointed out to “skeptics” with regards the Harde CO2 paper, and that also applies here: If you believe this paper is correct you must also necessarily believe that Mann’s hockey stick is correct, and that current temperatures are much warmer than occurred during the supposed Medieval Warm Period.

13. Snape says:

Given the center of the sun’s mass and the solar system’s barycenter are in different locations, and we are orbiting the latter, it seems like a no brainer that Earth’s distance to the sun would vary as a result, but shouldn’t this difference be seen within each revolution??

14. mjibrown says:

Others have highlighted selective use of the literature, and I will highlight another clanger. Which temperature history does Zharkova et al. use extensively? They use the heavily criticised data and conclusions of Akasofu, which were published by alleged predatory publisher SCIRP.

A critique of a related Akasofu paper can be found at https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/1/2/76 and it’s not hard to find other criticisms online.

15. David B. Benson says:

Snape — Terra presumably “orbits about” the center of mass of the solar system. This is well approximated by the Sun-Jupiter barycenter. So this establishes the Sun-Terra distance for the purpose of solar irradiance.

I’m no astronomer but I think I did that correctly.

16. Snape,

Given the center of the sun’s mass and the solar system’s barycenter are in different locations, and we are orbiting the latter

I think this is where the confusion is coming in. Yes, all the planets in the Solar System go around the barycentre (or, centre of mass) but this isn’t the point about which the Earth’s orbital semimajor axis is constant. Imagine we only had the Sun, Earth and Jupiter. You could imagine it being two systems, a Sun-Earth systems and a Sun-Earth plus Jupiter system. The Sun-Earth system would orbit the Sun-Earth barycentre, and the Sun-Earth plus Jupiter system would orbit the Sun-Earth-Jupiter barycentre. In other words, you could think of it as a Sun-Earth system orbiting it’s barycentre, with this barycentre then orbiting the Sun-Earth-Jupiter barycentre.

17. Dikran Marsupial says:

ATTP, thanks, that is a very helpful explanation.

18. Eabani says:

I’ve seen this paper doing the rounds in the denialosphere (‘A new Maunder Minimum is predicted’). I only skimmed it and dismissed it as Fourier analysis of sunspot numbers: what I’d read from solar physicists suggested long term variations are chaotic. I find it a bit hard to follow and the English isn’t great (‘occure’).

I’m sure there must be lots of papers on effect of orbital changes on irradiance already. The paragraphs following mention distribution between N & S Hemisphere which is more accepted as how Milankovitch cycles affect climate. I just wondered if the quoted paragraph was meant to imply that eccentricity changed ‘average solar irradiance’ by inverse square law. If you integrate inverse square does it show any trend at all? I’d just imagine it is very, very small.

19. Eabani,

I just wondered if the quoted paragraph was meant to imply that eccentricity changed ‘average solar irradiance’ by inverse square law. If you integrate inverse square does it show any trend at all? I’d just imagine it is very, very small.

I had an email discussion with the author where I tried to clarify exactly this. They do seem to be arguing for something other than simply a change in eccentricity that would influence the average solar irradiance. As you say, if you compute the effect of the changing eccentricity (which occurs on much longer timescales than simply decades) the effect is very small.

20. Everett F Sargent says:

Heartbeat of the Sun from Principal Component Analysis and prediction of solar activity on a millenium timescale
(Published: 29 October 2015)
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep15689
V. V. Zharkova, S. J. Shepherd, E. Popova & S. I. Zharkov
(same four authors, slightly different order)

The name sounds familiar VV Zharkova and solar nazis and WTFUWT? VVZeen there, VVZone that.

21. Dave_Geologist says:

This may be a restating of Snape’s point, but surely it’s not how far the Sun moves that matters, but whether that movement significantly changes the integrated irradiance over a year? If the Sun moves 0.02 A.U. closer at aphelion, it’s 0.02 A.U. farther away at perihelion. Because it’s an inverse square law those won’t quite cancel out, but the net effect will be much smaller than if the Earth’s orbit shrank by 0.02 A.U.

And surely orbital mechanics are quite stable? If this mechanism existed, surely the fossil record should be replete with 3.5°C temperature increases and decreases on a timescale of 700 years. It isn’t.

And it doesn’t change the physics of CO2. So it’s only a proper warming explanation if you also identify what it is that’s precisely cancelling out the increased greenhouse effect.

22. David B. Benson says:

Dave_Geologist, right but the shift is slightly less than 0.005 AU. The effect on solar irradiance calculations is less than 1 part in 1000, much less than the measured uncertainty at TOA, Top Of Atmosphere.

23. Everett F Sargent says:

Comment in moderation (above reference to nazis?).

Use this for Earth-Sun distance (in AU) …
https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi#top
online limited to 90,000 times

Input …
Current Settings
Ephemeris Type [change] : VECTORS
Target Body [change] : Earth [Geocenter] [399]
Coordinate Origin [change] : Sun (body center) [500@10]
Time Span [change] : Start=1773-07-08, Stop=2019-08-07, Step=1 d
Table Settings [change] : quantities code=1
Display/Output [change] : download/save (plain text file)

24. Everett F Sargent says:

Then do FFT (365.24219 ~ tropical year) mostly as check, then do harmonic analysis to remove mainly tropical year cycle or some such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_year
(there is some academic dispute over what is a year, but do as the harmonic analysis sez). Lunar should also be there + shipload of other harmonics (hopefully minor wrt annual cycle).

Not seeing anything below annual (movement from plus 0.02 AU to minus 0.02 AU over ~245 years)

Bye. 🙂

25. Below is a plot showing the irradiation at the Earth’s orbital distance (simply in solar luminosities per AU2). The black band shows how it varies during an orbit; you simply can’t see individual orbits because the time period is too long. You can see how it narrows as the eccentricity changes. However, if you do a one year running average (blue line) it’s virtually constant.

26. Snape says:

ATTP
“Imagine we only had the Sun, Earth and Jupiter. You could imagine it being two systems, a Sun-Earth systems and a Sun-Earth plus Jupiter system. The Sun-Earth system would orbit the Sun-Earth barycentre, and the Sun-Earth plus Jupiter system would orbit the Sun-Earth-Jupiter barycentre.”

Thanks. That’s actually what I had tried to visualize – just didn’t do a very good job.

27. Everett F Sargent says:

The Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics also gets a lot of these cycle nasty papers (e. g. Soon, Scafetta). Search on those two and you will find other authors and journals (at least one other ‘so called’ real journal with regularity as best as I can remember).

28. A colleague in astronomy sent me an email with the following comment, which I think nicely explains the motion of the Earth around the Sun and the motion of the Earth-Sun system around the Solar System barycentre.

The Earth orbits the Sun-Earth two-body barycentre, which is close to the centre of the Sun because of the enormous mass ratio. The Sun-Earth system orbits the SS barycentre, mostly affected by Jupiter with a period of 12 years – effectively a three-body system. The Sun-Earth system has an orbital period of 1 year, the (Sun-Earth) – Jupiter system has an orbital period of 12 years, and since the Sun-Jupiter mass ratio is about 1000 it is only a perturbation on the Sun-Earth two-body system. So the Earth’s distance from the Sun does not change with an orbital period of 12 years, as your Mercury6 calculation showed correctly. It is incorrect for that paper to claim that since the Earth orbits the SS barycentre, whilst the Sun also does so, and then claim that because the Sun’s motion exhibits changes in position of up to 0.02 AU relative to the SS barycentre, this must lead to changes in solar radiation received at Earth. The Earth travels around the SS barycentre with the Sun, not independently of the Sun.

29. Willard says:

30. Everett F Sargent says:

“The Sun-Earth system has an orbital period of 1 year, the (Sun-Earth) – Jupiter system has an orbital period of 12 years, and since the Sun-Jupiter mass ratio is about 1000 it is only a perturbation on the Sun-Earth two-body system.”

Jupiter showed up in my 2^20 day FFT as a very tiny blip, 2E-6 AU, while the annual (primary) cycle was 1.55E-2 AU (about a mean of 1.0001436 AU).

A bunch of other harmonics, which are currently beyond my pay grade. I also get the eccentricity taper per your plot above

31. Regarding the tilt, what can one say? Maybe Zharkova went to Harvard?

Zharkova (2019) : “At the same time, when the Earth moves to its aphelion, the distance between the Earth and Sun is increased because of the SIM resulting in the reduced solar irradiance during summer and autumn in Northern and winter/spring in the Southern hemispheres.”

32. Everett F Sargent says:

I did find this while looking elsewhere …
Jupiter and Venus Change Earth’s Orbit Every 405,000 Years
https://www.universetoday.com/139198/jupiter-and-venus-change-earths-orbit-every-405000-years/
Empirical evidence for stability of the 405-kiloyear Jupiter–Venus eccentricity cycle over hundreds of millions of years
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/24/6153
Astronomical metronome of geological consequence

(Laskar J, Fienga A, Gastineau M, Manche H (2011) La2010: A new orbital solution for the long-term motion of the Earth. Astron Astrophys 532:A89. among other references)

“Rhythmic climate cycles of various assumed frequencies recorded in sedimentary archives are increasingly used to construct a continuous geologic timescale. However, the age range of valid theoretical orbital solutions is limited to only the past 50 million years. New U–Pb zircon dates from the Chinle Formation tied using magnetostratigraphy to the Newark–Hartford astrochronostratigraphic polarity timescale provide empirical confirmation that the unimodal 405-kiloyear orbital eccentricity cycle reliably paces Earth’s climate back to at least 215 million years ago, well back in the Late Triassic Period.”

33. izen says:

There is the usual problem with ‘It’s the Sun’ claims.
If the small changes in irradiance energy can alter the climate significantly then ECS is high and the much larger energy changes from rising CO2 would inevitably have a larger effect.

You have to claim that ECS is very low for CO2, but some ‘magical’ process makes the global climate MUCH more sensitive to some as yet undiscovered solar factor.

34. izen,
Indeed, that’s another issue that those who promote the idea that it’s mostly natural seem to ignore.

35. Everett F Sargent says:

ATTP (I hope you don’t mind),

For those not in the loop …
https://pubpeer.com/publications/3418816F1BA55AFB7A2E6A44847C24#
(I made but a tiny squeak)

36. EFS,
I don’t mind at all.

37. Roger Jones says:

You’ll all be pleased to know that I have just reviewed a paper for Scientific Reports and in the confidential remarks to the editor, sent a rocket about this published paper, while reflecting on the quality of the one I had been sent to review.

38. Magma says:

@ EFS, that PNAS paper is interesting. But for a skeptical (in the best sense) view of the accuracy and completeness of that stratigraphic section for a long-term reconstruction of orbital forcing of climate, see L.H. Tanner and S.G. Lucas (2015), The Triassic-Jurassic strata of the Newark Basin, USA: A complete and accurate astronomically-tuned timescale?, Stratigraphy.

An excerpt (compare this precise, careful wording to the bafflegab of Zharkova et al.):

Essential to the interpretation of an orbital control of sedimentation in continental settings is the assumption that patterns of sedimentation are more sensitive to small-scale changes in climate than to regional tectonics or autocyclic processes. Moreover, the recognition of orbitally-forced cyclicity in the stratigraphic record depends on the conditions of sediment accumulation at a near constant rate, with no significant breaks or hiatuses in relation to the length of the cycle period; these conditions are unlikely to be met for extended periods in many sedimentary environments, particularly those in which the energy of sediment transport processes varies dramatically over short time scales (Sadler 1981; Bailey and Smith 2008, 2009; Miall 2014). Thus, Bailey (1998) noted that the chaotic and complex behavior of sedimentary processes can overwhelm the predictable effects of determinative forcing.

The journal article is paywalled http://www.micropress.org/microaccess/stratigraphy/issue-316/article-1933 but the authors have a copy on Research Gate.

39. izen says:

@-Magma
“Moreover, the recognition of orbitally-forced cyclicity in the stratigraphic record depends on the conditions of sediment accumulation at a near constant rate, with no significant breaks or hiatuses in relation to the length of the cycle period; these conditions are unlikely to be met for extended periods in many sedimentary environments, particularly those in which the energy of sediment transport processes varies dramatically over short time scales”

It would seem that similar objections to the reliability of data from ice cores might be made.
Research reveals that annual snowfall in Antarctica is dominated by a few extreme events (44% of total in one day), that derive from local storms rather than gradual accumulation that may be more directly correlated with global climate.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018GL081517
“It will also have implications for the selection of future ice core drilling sites and the reconstruction of long‐term records of the modes of climate variability.”

40. Roger,
Excellent, that’s good to know.

41. Someone on pubpeer, posted a nice comment where they used the JPL Horizon Ephemerides site to compute the yearly average position of the Sun and the yearly average position of the Earth. You can clearly see them both executing the same small orbit around the barycentre. I produced the same from my MERCURY6 simulations. The only difference is that I did a one year running averages. The Sun is orange, the Earth is blue and the reason for the waviness of the blue line is that I haven’t managed to do precisely a one year average. The offset is because the Sun’s position averages to the focus, while the average position of the Earth is the centre of the orbit. Pretty clear that both bodies meander together around the barycentre.

42. Marco says:

That Pubpeer thread is….astonishing. Did Zharkova just seriously throw in a reference to Ed Berry’s paper in a predatory journal?! I could understand it a little bit if that paper was about solar cycles and whatnot, but it isn’t even relevant to the discussion!

I recommend you guys contact some of the co-authors. Who knows, maybe Shepherd is not yet a lost cause for reason? His English is also likely a lot better, so he just might understand what you are trying to explain.

43. Marco,
Yes, Zharkova did indeed just reference Berry’s recent paper. I’m slightly reluctant to contact co-authors, since I think one should engage with the lead author. I am planning to email Scientific Reports to find out about writing a response.

44. Dikran Marsupial says:

I am also astonished by the pubpeer thread. Why on Earth introduce the Ed Berry paper (oh no, not again), what did Zharkova hope to gain from that? Or from the rudeness to ATTP and others?

It is a great example of what happens when an academic loses their self skepticism, even when the distinction is made very clearly, by the above diagram, Zharkova is still claiming that ATTP was ignorant of the barycenter movement (which clearly wasn’t true). There is nothing that prevents you seeing your errors than not being willing to entertain the possibility of their existence.

I did consider pointing out Berry’s error to him again, but what would be the point? I was very amused by the bit that said “Cawley [5] is an important paper for the IPCC position” – LOL!

45. Dikran,
At least both of our papers get cited (well, maybe that’s not such a good thing).

46. Dikran Marsupial says:

;o)

It seems to me that if Jupiter is throwing the Sun about the barycenter, then that movement of the sun ought to take the Earth along with it, being so much more massive, which sort of explains to myself why the diagram looks as it does. Much more interesting than Berry’s vanity press paper!

47. Dave_Geologist says:

Magma and izen, the PNAS paper does seem to address the issues raised by Tanner & Lucas. Although I note that one of the dates does rely on detrital zircon, and that it has been reworked from broadly coeval volcanics. That is something you’d need detailed knowledge of those deposits to evaluate (for example, was it deposited on a flat plain where each lava flow was quickly buried, or in a mountainous region where numerous lava flows are exposed to simultaneous erosion?). As the PNAS commentary says, there is a long history in geology of looking for astronomical cycles through FFTs, in the hope of refining radiometric dating or determining the duration of a depositional or faunal event. There is always a risk there of falling into a circular argument, and picking the cycle that suits your preconceptions of the time-frame. The gold standard, being seen more often as radiometric dating gets ever more refined, it to date one or more of the cycles absolutely.

For this sort of work one would pick an environment which is stable for a long time like a cratonic interior, or a foredeep which experiences only gentle tilting on a very long wavelength (~ 100km) controlled by the flexural rigidity of the lithosphere. The Newark Formation is not ideal as it is a rift basin. But the people working on it (geologists at least) know that and know what to beware of (astronomers who look at it on their own, perhaps not so much 😉 ). One would avoid chaotic or autocyclic events like turbidite flows or the meandering of major river channels, and focus on long-term drying or wetting trends. Although it may seem counter-intuitive to prefer continental to marine deposits (think of all the action vs. the “placid” ocean), they are better. Firstly, they have a floating base level, that is it doesn’t matter much if the entire basin rises or subsides 100m. That matters hugely for marine deposits, which have the added complication that sea level itself fluctuates. Secondly, they are very sensitive to humidity and aridity, typically lying in dry continental interiors. That’s not just a matter of individual rain showers – the water table integrates humidity over multi-annual timescales, and affects the type and distribution of clay and other minerals. Varved lakes almost always have an annual cycle driven by seasonal plankton blooms, which are themselves sensitive to climate and lake depth. Obviously you don’t choose a small lake with a big river flowing into it, or one perched above the basin floor whose depth is controlled by the knick point of the river it feeds.

In the Southern North Sea, you can trace identical cycles (I don’t know what duration though) over huge distances in parts of the basin away from major rivers or dune-fields. From dry sandsheet to damp sandsheet to sandy sabkha to muddy sabkha to lakeshore to lake. Where there is no interruption by fluvial or aeolian erosion, all the cycles are present. And you can tell fluvial or aeolian dune deposits apart from sabkha or sand-sheet. Where a cycle or two are missing, there is sufficient character change between cycles that you can tie them in the same way as tree-rings or palaeomagnetism. Where there’s a partial cycle, you can tie dry sandsheet to damp sandsheet to sandy sabkha with sandy sabkha to muddy sabkha to lakeshore. That’s how we knew, for example, that the Amethyst reservoir (an isolated dune-field in a more-or-less dune-free environment) was deposited very quickly, probably as a result of reworking sand washed far out into the basin in a single catastrophic flood.

48. Buried in all that just-so minutia, Dave says this:

” As the PNAS commentary says, there is a long history in geology of looking for astronomical cycles through FFTs, in the hope of refining radiometric dating or determining the duration of a depositional or faunal event. There is always a risk there of falling into a circular argument, and picking the cycle that suits your preconceptions of the time-frame. “

Of course Fourier analysis is next to useless if one does not realize what the spectral peaks indicate, in particular when all the frequencies are related via a distinct pattern.

49. verytallguy says:

the pubpeer thread is hilarious.

The latest from the lead author…

There are other people who currently are trying to deliver the similar message to the people of the Earth: Muray Salby (UK) https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Prof+Salby+talk+2016+carbon, Patrick Moore (Canada) http://ecosense.me/ecosense-wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/CO2-Emissions.pdf, Henrik Svenmark (Denmark) https://www.sciencealert.com/cosmic-rays-could-influence-cloud-cover-on-earth.”

Followed by the coup de grace

“This is not a scientific discussion then but something else, I am afraid.”

50. Marco says:

ATTP: be prepared to pay for a new article then, Sci Rep doesn’t do comments.

However: “Readers wishing to draw the Editorial Board Members’ attention to published work requiring retraction should first contact the authors of the original paper and then write to the publishing team, including copies of the correspondence with the authors (whether or not the correspondence has been answered). The publishing team and Editorial Board Member will seek advice from referees if they judge that the information is likely to draw into question the main conclusions of the published paper.”
https://www.nature.com/srep/journal-policies/editorial-policies#corrections

I think this paper is a good example of one requiring retraction (or at the absolute very minimum a correction).

51. Marco,
Certainly don’t plan to pay anything. I’ve highlighted the Pubpeer comments and suggested that it warrants withdrawal/retraction.

52. Dave_Geologist says:

Of course Fourier analysis is next to useless if one does not realize what the spectral peaks indicate, in particular when all the frequencies are related via a distinct pattern.

That’s where the minutiae come in, Paul. For example, that they correspond to a wetting-drying sequence. Which, neatly in the PNAS paper, corresponds to climatological expectations. Warmer, wetter, cooler, drier. Consilience.

53. “That’s where the minutiae come in, Paul. For example, that they correspond to a wetting-drying sequence. Which, neatly in the PNAS paper, corresponds to climatological expectations. Warmer, wetter, cooler, drier. Consilience.”

Not quite Dave. It’s the nature of fluid dynamics and of orbital dynamics where modulations in expected periodicities put the result in the spin cycle. This is not minutiae at all, but the application of the Mathieu equation, Hill equation, and topologically-constrained Navier-Stokes (and not even considering the world of solid-state physics). The power spectra in these cases needs to be treated carefully because a single forcing frequency will show multiple bifurcations that are not easily inverted via conventional Fourier series analysis, especially if one is not looking for it in the first place. That’s the problem with Zharkova and others that naively look at the data. Alas, it’s kind of cringe-inducing the beating she’s taking on PubPeer

54. Windchaser says:

Holy crap, that PubPeer thread is just… wow.

That’s the kind of public professional embarrassment I actually have nightmares about.

55. Magma says:

Holy crap, that PubPeer thread is just… wow. — Windchaser

“Everyone knows you never go full denier.”

56. izen says:

I know the error in the Zarkov paper has been covered already, but sometimes I grasp things better in visual images than words.

I think this is a ‘Frame of Reference’ situation.
Whatever frame you measure from the relative Sun -Earth distance will stay the same.

If you use a Heliocentric Frame of Reference then the Sun is stationary, and ignoring orbital eccentricity, the Sun – Earth distance is constant, so solar irradiance stays the same.

If you use the barycenter of the Sun – Jupiter system as the frame of reference then the Sun does move relative to that. But the Sun – Earth distance is constant, so solar irradiance stays the same.

And if you are pre-Copernican then the Sun moves a LOT, and notice the yearly retrograde motion of Jupiter ! But the Sun – Earth distance is constant, so solar irradiance stays the same.

Is this right ?

57. Zharkova is appealing to the Tattersall/Tallbloke contingent. That gang of numerologists believe that (1) magic numbers tie together the planetary orbits in the solar system and that (2) the collective orbital motion modulates the sunspot cycle. As this cycle barely makes a dent in the primary radiation level from the sun, they then believe that (3) higher-frequency radiation from the sunspot dynamo source is the important factor controlling the earth’s climate, primarily through the interaction with upper atmosphere cloud nucleation.

They need this chain of causality since the impact of the other planets directly on earth is virtually nil compared to the moon’s influence.

Zharkova appears to be creating a shortcut to this causal chain by asserting that we are in the equivalent of a steep slope of a Milankovitch cycle, which of course no one but she seems able to comprehend. So Rog Tallbloke is now on PubPeer trying to clean up the meta-mess that Zharkova is making of his own causal mess (citing something about the Sun-Earth-Jupiter syzygy)

That’s at least my understanding of what is going on.

58. Everett F Sargent says:

“Is this right ?”

Yes. Now do it with Jupiter as the fixed point.

The New Horizons Pluto flyby would have only been accomplished in a local inertial frame of reference relative to its onboard strapdown INS (Inertial Navigation System) AFAIK.

Zharkova is getting lost in combining multiple (two) frames of reference.

At some point one needs to abandon an absolute frame of reference and use a local (inertial) frame of reference. This has been known like forever, at least for any body with an INS, but INS also needs outside information (e. g. Pluto visual field of view corrections), because the INS will never be perfect.

My guesstimate for nuclear submarines is about one week (flying blind by its own strapdown INS).

59. Everett F Sargent says:

“Everyone knows you never go full denier.”

60. Marco says:

Is Zharkova going emeritus, or something? That PubPeer thread is getting weirder and weirder, even though she seems to have stopped with the insults.
https://pubpeer.com/publications/3418816F1BA55AFB7A2E6A44847C24
Allow me (I hope) a little walkthrough:

In one set of related comments, ATTP shows, in #38, how bad Akasofu’s projection has fared (who claimed it to be “a recovery from the Little Ice Age”, which is just about the most unphysical explanation ever).
Zharkova responds in #39+40, first with a poorly-hidden attempt at dismissal by referring to measurements at airports, and then referring to the wrong paper (a paper published in April 2015 cannot have data until 2016, and indeed the figure in #40 does not appear in that paper, but I think comes from an annual report of the Armagh observatory)
In #50 ATTP explains what he plotted, and in #51 Zharkova is still confused and unaware that the figure she provides is of a single location. And so ATTP explains that to her in #52.
Did that help? Of course not! In #53 she makes it clear that she does not understand the difference between temperature at a single location (with all of its large variability) and global temperatures.

This is bad enough in itself, but there’s another group of comments that deserves to be highlighted:
Dikran, in #44, points out that Berry’s (and Salby’s) claims about the carbon cycle can be easily refuted. Zharkova, in #47, then points to Svensmark and (Patrick) Moore who supposedly support the findings of Berry and Moore. I don’t think there is any paper from either Svensmark or Moore that support the notion that the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is not anthropogenic. In fact, Moore in the piece she herself cited (see comment #37) is actually pushing that human emissions are beneficial, and contradicts Berry’s and Salby’s claims by stating “If humans had not begun to use fossil fuels for energy, it is reasonable to assume that atmospheric CO2 concentration would have continued to drop as it has done for the past 140 million years”. Now, apparently, Moore is a “very credible author”, so Zharkova will need to decide whether she believes the “very credible” Patrick Moore about the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, or Salby and Berry…

61. izen says:

@-“Yes. Now do it with Jupiter as the fixed point.”

Yep, Sun – Earth distance still the same…
(grin)

62. izen says:

@-WHUT
“they then believe that (3) higher-frequency radiation from the sunspot dynamo source is the important factor controlling the earth’s climate, primarily through the interaction with upper atmosphere cloud nucleation.”

‘Magic’ all the way down then.

Although they do at least speculate on a process that would amplify the impact on the climate from the small energy change measurable from barycenter/sunspot variation. It is not just hand-waved as ‘NATURAL’.
Just one that has no credible basis in physics or supporting observational data.

63. izen says:

So the Sun ‘wobbles’ around a solar system barycenter that has an ~11 year cycle but with the magnitude of the wobble varying as the outer gas giants enhance or oppose the Jupiter – Sun dominance.

Is the position of the barycenter (of any system) related to the tidal forces ?

Would the wobble of the Sun be detectable in another star, how close, or good would observation have to be ?
If detectable would it reveal the presence of at least 2 large planets and their orbital periods ?

64. Dave_Geologist says:

And there was me thinking the Just-So minutiae you were referring to, Paul, was all that geological detail I introduced, and not the fluid dynamics and orbital dynamics I didn’t mention.

Silly me 😦

65. tallbloke says:

izen says:
July 11, 2019 at 8:37 am
So the Sun ‘wobbles’ around a solar system barycenter that has an ~11 year cycle but with the magnitude of the wobble varying as the outer gas giants enhance or oppose the Jupiter – Sun dominance. Is the position of the barycenter (of any system) related to the tidal forces ?

Mathematically, yes, since the size of the wobble is related to the mass and semi-major axis of the planet(s). However, the tidal force may not be the reason for the strong correlations found between planetary-solar motion and solar variation. See e.g. Woolff and Patrone 2010

Would the wobble of the Sun be detectable in another star, how close, or good would observation have to be ?

66. tallbloke,
Yes, the radial velocity method can measure the line-of-sight velocity variations as a star moves around the centre of mass of its planetary system. However, directly observing this motion is much more difficult. As I understand it, data from ESA’s Gaia satellite may allow us to do this, probably only for relatively massive planets on reasonably wide orbits.

67. tallbloke says:

Paul Pukite (@WHUT) says:
July 11, 2019 at 5:35 am
Zharkova is appealing to the Tattersall/Tallbloke contingent. That gang of numerologists believe that (1) magic numbers tie together the planetary orbits in the solar system and that (2) the collective orbital motion modulates the sunspot cycle. As this cycle barely makes a dent in the primary radiation level from the sun,

“That gang of numerologists” has developed the only model capable of replicating 4000 years of 10Be based solar TSI reconstruction to Pearson R^2 = 0.72 and the Sunspot record to Pearson R^2 = 0.9. When you can do better, let us know.

68. Dikran Marsupial says:

But only managed to get it published via pal review, where tallbloke was one of the editors?

Getting arbitrary accuracy from curve-fitting does not impress me (as a statistician of sorts), physics does.

69. Tom Dayton says:

Indeed, Dikran. A standard introductory statistics class cautionary lesson is to have students get increasingly good fit of a curve to some data, by arbitrarily making their model increasingly complicated. Literally anybody can do it.

70. tallbloke says:

Go ahead and try to make an arbitrarily complex model that replicates Steinhilber et al 2012 to R^2 = 0.72 and the sunspot record to R^2 = 0.9 or better. Take your time. I’d advise reading the Salvador paper first and trying to understand how its variables relate to planetary synodic periods and their orbital resonance harmonics (or Paul Pukite calls it; numerology :-), to improve your chances. Here’s the paper:

71. Dikran Marsupial says:

Yawn. Merely restating the unimpressive curve fitting doesn’t make it any more impressive (it just reinforces the lack of physics behind the curve fitting). Neither does ignoring the part you played in the pal-review of the special issue of pRIP reduce your responsibility for it.

72. izen says:

@-tallbloke

I know that the wobble, or radial velocity of a star can be used to detect planets, what I was asking was whether the wobble of the Sun could be detected and used to determine our solar systems planets.
So could observers on one of the many planets around HD10180 detect anything about our solar system.

I would accept, provisionally, that the tidal forces on the Sun have some role in its variability. But unless climate sensitivity is very high that variability is too small to have significant influence on the climate.
So the usual problem arises. For solar variation to be a factor in climate change without rising CO2 being an order of magnitude greater impact requires ‘Magic’.

73. izen,
Based on this paper (Equation 6) the Sun would have an astrometric signature of about 10-4 arcsec. Given how bright it would be at that distance, Gaia should be able to detect astrometric signatures down to about 10-5. So, this should be possible, but I think we need to wait for one of the upcoming Gaia data releases.

74. tallbloke says:

Izen: If the beings on HD10180c were to have 9 years of observations using the radial velocity method, they’d probably be able to deduce that Sol has two large planets with orbital periods of 1200 and 3000 HD10180c orbits, or whatever they measure time with. They might even be able to tell there were one or two other big planets further out, but probably wouldn’t be able to determine their masses or orbital periods.

So the usual problem arises. For solar variation to be a factor in climate change without rising CO2 being an order of magnitude greater impact requires ‘Magic’.

What we numerologists have discovered, is that as well as solar variation (and the effect it has on cloud which amplifies Earth’s response to it), there are lunar effects on tides/currents, and direct planetary/lunar effects altering LOD (which causes upwelling of cold deep ocean water). Because the planets (mainly Jupiter and Venus) have shaped the Lunar cycles over billennia, and also affect solar variation, effects on Earth tend to be in phase and therefore additive during extended epochs.

Our planetary solar model published in 2013 is on track with the last 5 years of data added in. It matches the output from Zharkova’s 2014 double-dynamo model quite well too.

But never mind my numerological ramblings, the proof of the pudding is in the predictions. We’ve got some testable ones, so you guys had better get on with some modelling and catch up, or miss the fun.

75. Tall,

But never mind my numerological ramblings, the proof of the pudding is in the predictions. We’ve got some testable ones, so you guys had better get on with some modelling and catch up, or miss the fun.

You have no physics, and your argument violates some fundamental physics. That really is a huge problem.

76. tallbloke says:

Try telling the astrophysics guys that orbital resonance doesn’t move enormous amounts of energy around planetary systems. Or why not write a rebuttal to NASA scientists Wolff and Patrone’s 2010 paper ‘A new way planets can affect the sun’?

No-one else has. In nine years.

77. Tall,
That paper is simply a theoretical analysis that suggests that there might be ways for the influence of planets to lead to enhanced dissipation in a star. It explicitly says:

This would cause stars like the Sun with appropriate planetary systems to burn somewhat more brightly and have shorter lifetimes than identical stars without planets.

I have seen nothing to indicate that anything like this has ever been observed, and am pretty sure that a process like this is not operating in the Solar System.

78. tallbloke says:

You should have read the next sentence which says:

The helioseismic sound speed and the long record of sunspot activity offer several bits of evidence that the effect may have been active in the Sun’s core, its envelope, and in some vertically stable layers.

79. Rogbloke said:

“What we numerologists have discovered, is that as well as solar variation (and the effect it has on cloud which amplifies Earth’s response to it), there are lunar effects on tides/currents, and direct planetary/lunar effects altering LOD (which causes upwelling of cold deep ocean water). Because the planets (mainly Jupiter and Venus) have shaped the Lunar cycles over billennia, and also affect solar variation, effects on Earth tend to be in phase and therefore additive during extended epochs.”

Now Rog is stirring the mess. The last comment I posted showed the comparative strength of the Jupiter and Venus gravitational pull in comparison to the lunar forces. These are 1000x less so are barely detectable in tidal charts, and certainly not in LOD.

Perhaps the precise behavior of the lunar orbit was influenced by planetary perturbations over millions of years, but that is irrelevant for characterizing the moon as NASA JPL would via an ephemeris analysis — a body with it’s own stationary orbit, slightly perturbed by the sun

80. Tall,
But the energy has to come from the planetary orbits, which we’re pretty confident are not losing much energy. Hence, even if there is an effect, it has to be pretty damn small.

81. tallbloke says:

Ken: But the energy has to come from the planetary orbits

Read past the abstract. In fact read the whole paper. And if you’re still in any doubt as to whether these two NASA scientists think their physical mechanism can be active in our Sun rather than just some other stars, read the paper’s title again too.

We will discuss a fluid perturbation that depends on the distance and velocity of a star relative to the barycenter (mass centroid) of its planetary system. This motion creates potential energy per unit mass (PE) that can be released by flows pre-existing inside the star.
In other words, the flows set up by the release of energy from the core convecting towards the surface supply the energy, not the planets.

I wish I could highlight the words “conserving its angular momentum” in this figure too. 😉

82. tall,
The fusion is very well-regulated and depends very strongly on the mass of a star. If, as this paper suggests, planetary influences can increase the luminosity of a star, then this energy *has* to come from the planetary orbits. You would then conserve angular momentum by changing the spin of the star.

83. izen says:

Here are some reasons to be reasonably skeptical of the tallbloke numerology.

If you start with the assumption that cosmic ray induced production of radionuclitides is constant and match to known dates like tree rings you find there is a small deviation with a period of ~10,000 years that correlates with the strength of the Earths magnetic field.
The dominant factor in cosmic ray exposure on the Earth is its own geomagnetic dipole.
The claim that this has a significant impact on the climate is not supported by the absence of any significant climate change during the loss and reversal of the magnetic poles ~40,000 years ago.

Much smaller variations in the production rate can be detected in C14 samples of shorter duration that have been linked to various solar cycles and climate cycles. While the dominant 11 year solar cycle can be detected – just – in wine samples, other decadal and centennial cycles are linked to sunspot number. However I understand this metric is now considered dubious in light of the very large changes in observational methodology. Some of these cycles are ill-defined in magnitude and period as the noisy data only reveals a few ‘cycles’ at most without enough detail to determine amplitude.

To further muddy the waters, there is speculation that some of these cycles are that have altered C14 ratios are the result of ocean cycles that alter the reservoir time of Carbon. That they therefore represent not an external forcing of the climate reflected in C14 production, but internal climate variation altering the biological carbon cycle dynamics.

But its worse than that. The definitive German oak derived C14 correction curve that matches known dates to C14 levels does not match with Egyptian dates. There is a REGIONAL effect from local climate/weather that can cause a ~20 year offset.

So noisy data is being tortured, the main components discarded, to extract small variations that are then reified as ‘cycles’ that somehow, despite the doubts about the solar cause and local modifications of these measurements, are combined to ascribe large magnitude climate change to what are, in terms of size, microbes compared to the CO2 elephant in the room.

84. Like I said, Rog is here and commenting on PubPeer because the barn door was left open and someone’s got to do the herding chore.

And if you find all this amusing : over at Roy Spencer’s blog there’s been a running argument that’s been going on for a year now on whether the spin-locked moon rotates about its own axis or not. The non-believers of moon rotation use the analogy of a horse at a racetrack, which to them obviously doesn’t rotate about its axis — it’s only slightly changing direction as it incrementally goes around the track. The common error in their belief system is the refusal to understand how a 6-DOF mathematical abstraction works. In other words, anyone that has done animation work understands how 3 degrees of translational freedom and three degrees of rotational freedom are needed to create an arbitrary motion (plus time). Unfortunately they lack this mode of reasoning and instead deal with it in terms of an appealing narrative. (Or they actually do understand the math and create the narrative to lure the gullible)

Both Rog and Zharkova work on this same narrative level but they are getting their signals crossed so something will have to give.

85. izen says:

@-WHUT
” The common error in their belief system is the refusal to understand how a 6-DOF mathematical abstraction works. In other words, anyone that has done animation work understands how 3 degrees of translational freedom and three degrees of rotational freedom are needed to create an arbitrary motion (plus time). ”

Indeed. An object on a circular path can be in a fixed orientation with no rotation, as would be obvious to any fixed camera on that object. But appear to rotate once for every orbit to an observer at the center of that orbit.
An object can orient tangential to the path like the moon, so that appears to be fixed from the orbit center, but actually rotates once for every orbit with an axis of rotation perpendicular to the plane of the orbit. This is also the situation with a jockey, their POV shifts shifts with the curve of the path taken.

Or like Uranus it can have a rotation period and axis that is independent of its orbital path. The fact the gyroscopic effects limit the change in the orientation of that axis of rotation (excepting long timescale preccession) is sometime a matter of misunderstanding. People sometimes expect the rotation axis to move with the orbital path, so the South pole of Uranus that is now pointing at the Sun will continue to be facing the Sun during its 84 year orbit. While in fact, like the Earth, the orientation of the axis of rotation of Uranus is constant, so it will have a ‘pole star’ just as Earth does, just one in a very different part of the sky. This sometimes causes amusing confusion when people are asked to explain how the tilt of the rotational axis causes seasons…

86. izen said:

“Is the position of the barycenter (of any system) related to the tidal forces ?
Would the wobble of the Sun be detectable in another star, how close, or good would observation have to be ?”

The barycenter of the earth-moon system is located at 75% of the Earth’s radius. The more massive Earth therefore should be observed to wobble slightly. However, the axial wobble in particular is not close to being completely understood. If others are interested, there is a discussion similar to the Zharkova PeerPub at the Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics open-access journal

https://www.nonlin-processes-geophys-discuss.net/npg-2019-12/#discussion

Dr. Sonechkin is trying to argue for a sunspot-cycle connection to the Chandler wobble. What’s nice about this discussion is that it’s at the peer-review stage so that counter-arguments can still have an impact on the final article.

87. Windchaser says:

What we numerologists have discovered, is that as well as solar variation (and the effect it has on cloud which amplifies Earth’s response to it), there are lunar effects on tides/currents, and direct planetary/lunar effects altering LOD (which causes upwelling of cold deep ocean water).

Hey, so… I’ve got a math undergrad degree, and then a doctoral degree in computational materials science. Maybe I can try to explain this in a way that makes sense.

Finding a good fit does not establish causation. Why? Because numerical fit algorithms are designed to create the fit between the source variables and the function-to-fit-to, with the basis functions as mediators.

Better algorithms create tighter fits, and Fourier analysis is one of the absolute best fitting algorithms. The fit converges exponentially as you increase N, the number of fitting variables. This is very good convergence. And this works for any fitting variables, even ones with no actual physical connection to the thing you’re looking at. Simply having more variables makes the fit converge quite quickly, raising your r-value.

This is important. The quality of the fit between your goal function and the weighted sums of the harmonics depends on the shape of the goal function and the number of harmonics. It does not require any actual physical relationship between them.

So when you say that numerologists have “discovered” planetary effects on terran LOD… no, technically you haven’t. You fit separate phenomena to each other, and the fitting algorithm did what it was designed to do — produce a good fit between them. But this doesn’t establish that the two are actually physically linked.

This is why understanding the physical mechanisms are so important. Correlation between some A and B is not enough; you need a testable physics explanation of why A causes B.

88. Windchaser says:

I’ll add: if you’ve done any scientific research, if you’re in the scientific community, or if you’re a mathematician, you know all this. You already know how curve-fitting works, and you know why it can lead to fruitless hypotheses.

Your hypothesis is being treated exactly the same way curve-fitting is treated in every other scientific field. We already know that this is a bad form of reasoning. We don’t need to wait and see whether your predictions come true or not, because we already know the reasoning behind them is faulty.

89. izen says:

@-WHUT
“The barycenter of the earth-moon system is located at 75% of the Earth’s radius. ”

This was why I asked about its relation to tidal forces.
A barycenter is the resultant orbital foci of two independent bodies with their own centers of mass.
A barycenter is NOT a gravitational attractive point. Hang a weight on a string on Earth and it does not indicate the position of the moon by pointing at the Earth – Moon barycenter that is zooming around a few thousand km below our feet.
More obviously, drop a hammer and feather on the Moon and they fall towards the Moon center of mass, not the barycenter…

So while a barycenter is relatively relevant in orbital mechanics, I am not sure what importance it has on physical process that justifies such high levels of mathtubation.

90. Very well described by Windchaser

“So when you say that numerologists have “discovered” planetary effects on terran LOD… no, technically you haven’t. You fit separate phenomena to each other, and the fitting algorithm did what it was designed to do — produce a good fit between them. But this doesn’t establish that the two are actually physically linked.”

Almost all of the fine detail in the LOD variation (i.e. Length of Day) in the Earth’s rotation is directly linked to the lunisolar tidal cycles. This is essentially conservation of angular momentum involving the earth, moon, and sun. What is left is longer-term variations due to ENSO/AAM (possibly long-period tidal), and a multidecadal variation that is the most difficult to pinpoint.

So when RogBloke suggests that his gang of numerologists have “discovered” this connection, he is poorly informed on the current state of the research on LOD. For example, see this recent paper
Le Mouël, J., Lopes, F., Courtillot, V. & Gibert, D. On forcings of length of day changes: From 9-day to 18.6-year oscillations. Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors 292, 1–11 (2019).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031920118302115

91. izen says:

@-WHUT
” This is essentially conservation of angular momentum involving the earth, moon, and sun.”

I was looking at the Wolff and Patrone’s 2010 paper tallbloke referenced and the helpful diagram he posted.

It is well above my grade grade and outside my comfort zone, but I have this nagging suspicion that something is off. It seems to create potential energy de novo, while conserving angular momentum by fudging the measurement of rotation between different frames of reference ??
If the process described is possible, could a perpetual motion machine be constructed on the moon that rotated two masses as described in the paper and generated this potential energy from… wherever?

Hopefully there are those here with a better grasp of orbital mechanics and the issues of angular momentum for many-bodied rotating systems who can prune the magical from the possible with more insight.

92. izen said:
“A barycenter is NOT a gravitational attractive point.”

Correct. Never have to deal with the barycenter in tidal analysis. A more physical measurable location is the null or balance point of gravitational attraction, often referred to as the saddle point (or Lagrange point), which I have cited in a comment above

The point I was trying to make is that there is a mutual perturbation between the earth and the moon, and this perturbation only vanishes when the barycenter sits essentially at the center-of-mass location of the earth. The fact that it is somewhat significant suggests that the moon can apply a torque on the earth, and since the earth is not uniformly spherical, this torque will force an axial wobble in the earth’s rotation. This is the discussion pertaining to the Sidorenkov paper under peer-review I mentioned.

93. Willard says:

> read the paper’s title again too.

A New Way that Planets Can Affect the Sun.

94. Magma says:

I like to do a order-of-magnitude dimensional sanity check before getting lost in the math weeds. At the solar surface, gravitational acceleration of Jupiter/gravitational attraction of the Sun = 10^−9

95. Harry Twinotter says:

Are we in for another round of suspect papers? There seem to be some doing the rounds. There was another one a couple of months ago claiming the 11 year sunspot cycle was dependent on the barycentre. There is also this paper which is being used by Conspiracy Theory websites to claim Antarctica was warm during the MCA (the lead author is well known in climate change denier circles I believe):

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031018219303190

96. Willard says:

97. Steven Mosher says:

micheal brown is great asking her for actual data.

98. Steven Mosher says:

barycenter and c02 were both banned topics at climate audit

99. barycenter and c02 were both banned topics at climat

Censorship! 😉

100. tallbloke says:

Paul Pukite: Almost all of the fine detail in the LOD variation (i.e. Length of Day) in the Earth’s rotation is directly linked to the lunisolar tidal cycles. This is essentially conservation of angular momentum involving the earth, moon, and sun.

Got a link to a model and results since the prediction was made? Didn’t think so. None you’d be prepared to show anyway. We were running a model and testing it back in 2016. Here’s the result.

What is left is longer-term variations due to ENSO/AAM (possibly long-period tidal), and a multidecadal variation that is the most difficult to pinpoint.

Here’s a clue:

101. tallbloke says:

Izen: The dominant factor in cosmic ray exposure on the Earth is its own geomagnetic dipole.
The claim that this has a significant impact on the climate is not supported by the absence of any significant climate change during the loss and reversal of the magnetic poles ~40,000 years ago.

“In both locations, for about 5000 years during the geomagnetic reversal 780,000 years ago, they discovered evidence of stronger winter monsoons: particles became coarser, and accumulation speeds were up to > 3 times faster. These strong winter monsoons coincide with the period during the geomagnetic reversal when the Earth’s magnetic strength fell to less than ¼, and galactic cosmic rays increased by over 50%. This suggests that the increase in cosmic rays was accompanied by an increase in low-cloud cover, the umbrella effect of the clouds cooled the continent, and Siberian high atmospheric pressure became stronger. Added to other phenomena during the geomagnetic reversal — evidence of an annual average temperature drop of 2-3 degrees Celsius, and an increase in annual temperature ranges from the sediment in Osaka Bay — this new discovery about winter monsoons provides further proof that the climate changes are caused by the cloud umbrella effect.”

Yusuke Ueno, Masayuki Hyodo, Tianshui Yang, Shigehiro Katoh. Intensified East Asian winter monsoon during the last geomagnetic reversal transition. Scientific Reports, 2019; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-45466-8

102. Everett F Sargent says:

Well, I took my own advice and downloaded all 20K years (or 7,304,118 days) of JPL Horizons Earth-Sun (center-to-center) distances. 🙂

The JPL data files (82 at ~90,000 days per file (online version download limited)), source code and executable are available to anyone who shows an interest.

There is no copyright assumed or implied (really this is such a simple thing to do, although I am a coding retard, so go figure), no thanks or mentions of me needed, you can take all the glory, I’ve never cared about that stuff before.

The results and analysis are also very interesting:

The eccentricity taper (per ATTP’s plot above) looks like a partial two sine wave envelope (very slightly asymmetric about the mean) . I need to post some plots. D’oh!

The mean distance (0.100014771925464E+01 AU) is removed before further processing. The data are smoothed using a 1461-point boxcar filter (a moving average of 1461-points). that result is then down sampled (or decimated) also at each 1461 point (this is bog standard data analysis stuff) leaving an ~5,000 point time series. There is then a long term residual curve (minimum = -0.691896414874438E-04 AU, maximum = 0.470325296474751E-04 AU (yeah we are already talking small AU stuff)) which I removed with a cubic (lowest order polynomial showing no residual ‘curvy’ behavior). That time series has a minimum = -0.299006486110542E-05 AU
and a maximum = 0.385487920258959E-05 (help, my AU is shrinking).

Now I’m ready for a bog standard FFT (limited to frequencies below 8 years nyquest) which shows Jupiter with the largest amplitude of 0.147180750785102E-05 AU (period = 11.8603 years which is pretty close), there is poor resolution for frequencies below 800 years, however there are only three peaks below 800 years, but none of the three ever exceeds 0.290223432549408E-07 AU.

I’m not too sure that these very small numbers have any influence on Earth’s climate.

103. tallbloke says:

EFS: Good on you for exploring the data. Just as a matter of interest, what are the periods of the other two peaks you found?

104. Dave_Geologist says:

Harry, the PPP paper itself seems unexceptionable. It’s mostly about historic trends, pre-industrial, especially the Medieval “Warm” Period. It’s a review of material which is years to decades old, with some records ending decades ago or even in the 19th Century, so really has no bearing on the now-defunct Paws, although there is a bit of pandering to it.

It is a somewhat eclectic group of authors: a petroleum geologist, a botanist and a chemist. They appear to have no real expertise in the various measures and proxies they review (that is, they have a track record of compiling and reviewing other workers’ proxy records, but a quick search found no original work by them), so it’s essentially just numerology. No doubt with lots of investigator degrees of freedom. Fig. 4 will be popular because it shows the MWP warmer than “today”. At least among those who fail to notice that the MWP average is < 0.5C and the peaks (pre-MWP) < 1C, and the curve ends in the late 1990s. As the lead other has a "sceptical" track record, I assume that preprints have already been quote-mined for talking points. Basically though, my reaction from a quick skim is "meh…". And if it's supposed to support ABC: "Really? Is that the best you've got? Really?".

This reads like a bit of a dig, but it's a bait-and-switch, like the warming hole around Alabama. Yes, but what about the other 95% of the world? Which aspect of the word "global" do you fail to understand?

Natural variability still overwhelms the forced response in the recent Antarctic climate development, and models appear to not fully represent this natural variability. Multiple evidence points to a significant solar influence on Antarctic climate which may be worth testing in future model scenarios in greater detail.

The last sentence has to be read in the context of those solar cycles being multi-century, and this:

Antarctic snowfall, wind strength and air masses all appear to be influenced by solar activity

Well, duh. It’s a big, high, dry continent sitting at the Pole and surrounded by oceans. Weather matters.

105. bloke said:

“Got a link to a model and results since the prediction was made? Didn’t think so. None you’d be prepared to show anyway. We were running a model and testing it back in 2016. Here’s the result.”

This is all standard geophysics — the monthly/fortnightly lunar tide compared to the LOD data since 1962 from IERS.org.

106. Everett F Sargent says:

tallbloke,

The five highest peaks below 40 years are (note one digit shift in E notation vs my last comment):

Years,Amplitude (AU)
9998.213788,2.90223E-08
1817.857052,9.26829E-09
952.2108369,2.06573E-08
238.0527092,1.47796E-08
40.31537818,1.23144E-08

107. Willard says:

> Here’s a clue.

Here’s another one:

108. Everett F Sargent says:

Willard,

One name on that graphic is on the wrong side IMHO and it isn’t etc..

109. Windchaser says:

Aye, Tattersall.

Damn. There’s a lot of interesting Climateball going on over there: playing the players, rather than the ball. It feels like the student who’s flubbing the class report is attacking the graders, rather than addressing the holes in the report.

110. Everett: “One name on that graphic is on the wrong side..”

Windchaser: “Aye, Tattersall.”

I see what you mean, didn’t catch that at first. At least Willis is not on there.

“If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas”

111. Harry Twinotter says:

Dave Geologist.

Yes, I know the paper says very little, at least from the abstract. The name of the lead author does ring alarm bells and he has written articles for WUWT. Once I knew that I did not feel I needed to read the entire paper. And of course the Conspiracy Theory blogs will misrepresent any climate paper that even mentions natural variability caused by the sun.

My point is I have now seen two suspect papers that use the barycentre (one which acknowledged the assistance of Willie Soon), then I saw the Sebastian Lüning paper on the MCA. We know the climate change denier lobby sponsors scientific papers from time to time, I was wondering if we are in for another round of these suspect papers?

112. tallbloke says:

EFS: One name on that graphic is on the wrong side IMHO and it isn’t etc..

I’m firmly on the side of trusting the JPL ephemeris, as my first comment on the PubPeer thread says. So which part of “With regard to the main argument here about whether the Earth orbits the solar system barycentre, or the Sun-Earth barycentre (which itself orbits the solar system barycentre), the JPL DE04 ephemeris indicates the latter.” don’t you understand?

113. tallbloke says:

Also see my 3rd comment, where I dealt with this piece of nonsense from Ilya Usoskin. (he didn’t come back on this so hopefully he’s seen the error of his ways).

Ilya Usoskin: For a 2-body system the movement indeed around the barycenter, but for n-body system it is only a mathematical representation

Multiple exoplanets (in these cases hot jupiters) orbiting a single star have been detected by the method I linked to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_exoplanets#Radial_velocity The motion is complex, but it is real motion, not “only a mathematical representation”. Each individual planet is orbiting its individual barycentre with the star. At the same time, the star is orbiting the system barycentre, as determined by the simultaneous motion of all the planets in the system.

114. angech says:

Either orbits can affect sun earth distance or Izen is right that the orbit distance of the earth around the sun is not affected.
Milankovitch theory is assumed correct by all here?
Hence the distance is affected and can be quite considerable on long term consideration.
Can shorter term effects be seen ie have importance or not?
The time change in irradiation distance over a year is well known and paradoxical.
The two problems I see here are one the “three body or greater” problem.
While we do not usually see changes quickly there is no expectation that this must be the case.
Second with regard to the many diagrams the orbit is not uniform daily
Both the earth moon wobble, and the effect of Jupiter on the actual distance of the earth from the sun when Jupiter is in close proximity are real, if usually insignificant.

115. Dave_Geologist says:

Dunno Harry. PPP is a decent journal*, and the right place to public palaeoclimate analysis. It’s in a different category to Zharkova though. Anyone who claims ABC, or “but solar”, or “no warming” on the basis of this either hasn’t read the paper or is misrepresenting it.

* Only tangentially related to climate, for example, but the recent one on hippopotamus island dwarfism is interesting from an evolutionary viewpoint. Some of the dwarfs had a similar diet and in once case habitat (a permanent lake) to modern mainland hippos. Which is interesting because it implicates islandism alone as the dwarfing factor, e.g. range size as opposed to complete absence of habitat. Others, in contrast, were not specialist grass-eaters so had presumably adapted to different habitats as well. One showed temporal adaptation to a broader diet, perhaps because of lack of competition, or due to Younger Dryas climate change. As with climate change and its impacts, it’s a useful reminder that the same effect can have different causes, and one effect can have multiple causes.

116. tallbloke,

Also see my 3rd comment, where I dealt with this piece of nonsense from Ilya Usoskin. (he didn’t come back on this so hopefully he’s seen the error of his ways).

He did come back. I think he just wasn’t being very clear. He wasn’t suggesting that the Sun doesn’t move relative to the barycentre, I think he was more suggesting that we shouldn’t treat the barycentre as the centre of all the orbits.

117. angech,
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. Milankovitch cycles involves changes in the axial tilt and eccentricity, but not the semimajor axis (average distance).

118. Everett F Sargent says:

tallbloke,

It depends. If you will truthfully admit to reading this thread BEFORE you posted over there.

Exhibit A: Time of your 1st post over there relative to my posting the pubpeer link here,
Exhibit B. Statements contained in your original posting about the Zharkova paper on your blog.
Exhibit C: Your subsequent blog posting of a paper which I mentioned and linked to here.
Exhibit D: I knew what would happen once I posted the pubpeer link here (crank magnet).

You’ve been pwned. 🙂

119. Everett F Sargent says:

Latest table scrap from Zharkova at PubPeer,

“I do not have certain views and happy to look at your arguments against those I seen in Prof. Salty or Dr. Patrick Moore from Canada the founder of the greenhouse motion.”

Comic gold (from Tropic Thunder once again) …

120. Willard says:

> don’t you understand?

In fairness, it’s a mess:

[Geoff] The NASA JPL database shows no SIM effect on the Earth/Sun distance. How did this paper get past the reviewers?

[Rog] Geoff, glad you’ve weighed in on this.

[Geoff] Hi R, as expected the data shows each planet orbits it’s own planet/Sun barycentre. When the Sun moves the planets follow..surprised this one got through.

[Rog] Sun – planet pairs don’t exist in isolation. This is a many body problem. I don’t think the variation will be as big as Zharkova assumes, but there will be some.

121. Twinotter said:

“My point is I have now seen two suspect papers that use the barycentre”

Don’t forget Scafetta’s papers, which is where I personally first ran across the idea. From Scafetta’s Wikipedia entry:

“Scafetta’s climate model is based primarily on a numerological comparison of secular periodic changes of global surface temperature and the Sun´s periodic movement around barycenter of the Solar System caused by the revolving planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Periodic modulation of Moon´s orbital parameters by these planets and subsequent modulation of lunar tides is also discussed. According to Scafetta, who provides no physical explanation of that process, …. “

That pesky numerology

122. Valentina Zharkova’s response to Gavin Cawley, that EFS highlighted above, reminded me of Gavin Schmidt’s response to Judith Curry, when she was defending Montford’s Hockey Stick Illusion:

In future I will simply assume you are a conduit for untrue statements rather than their originator.

123. Yesterday evening I wrote a basic orbit integration code in python. It has a Jupiter (M = 0.001) at r = 5 orbiting the Sun (M = 1) on a circular orbit. I’ve then added a test particle at r = 0.1. The reason for this is so that you can then do a plot that shows both the motion of the test particle and the Sun (at r = 1, you wouldn’t see the motion of the Sun).

If you plot the test particle and Sun in the barycentric frame, then its clear that the Sun moves around the barycentre, and the test particle orbit is not fixed in this reference frame.

If you then plot the test particle in the heliocentric frame, then the orbit does appear to be fixed (as expected).

I can’t seem to do much more than 1/4 of a Jupiter orbit, which is either because the integrator isn’t accurate enough (I used a simple leapfrog) or because the system isn’t stable.

I’ve posted a comment on pubpeer about this and have provided a link to the code, so that Valentina Zharkova can either use it to check which view is correct, find an error, or – potentially – set up a test particle orbit that is fixed in the barycentric frame. The latter is very unlikely, but if someone is going to claim that this is indeed what is to be expected, they should – ideally – try to show that it is indeed the case.

124. Everett F Sargent says:

Willard,

Understood, given those posting dates. I didn’t read them all, I actually only read the original content portions (e. g. omitting the cut-n-paste sections from the paper) of the main blog post itself.

125. Willard says:

No worries, Everett. I would agree with you that Rog got pwned. Or at the very least he got “some” pwnage, to borrow from his own weasel wording.

126. “In future I will simply assume you are a conduit for untrue statements rather than their originator. ”

and then wonder why they end up being called a misinformer…

127. Everett F Sargent says:

ATTP said …

“I can’t seem to do much more than 1/4 of a Jupiter orbit, which is either because the integrator isn’t accurate enough (I used a simple leapfrog) or because the system isn’t stable.”

What is your time step? Anyways, if you haven’t checked the time step, that is where I would look,

I had some FD code (6-DOF moored ship motion) that always would blow up and I had to lower the time step by a factor of ~16 (that was like ~35 years ago, the initial time step stability estimate was way too high) to get very long lasting stable solutions.

128. EFS,
Yes, I’ve played around with the timestep. It’s now so small (10^{-6}) that if I make it any smaller the code will take too long to run. I might try a run with an even smaller timestep, but there are some other things that I would rather be doing (like, having a break 🙂 ).

129. I’d say the ball was definitely in Zharkova’s court following the MERCURY6 simulation ;o)

130. Dikran,
Indeed. We now have 3 different sites providing orbital elements (MERCURY6, JPL, and swephR) and now I’ve provided a code that Zharkova can use to test this directly. I think there is certainly little more that can be done.

131. Marco says:

“I do not have certain views and happy to look at your arguments against those I seen in Prof. Salty or Dr. Patrick Moore from Canada the founder of the greenhouse motion.”

Ignoring for a moment her inability to get names right, I would love to hear her arguments as to why *we* should provide arguments against Salby or Moore, when *the two contradict each other on the cause of the rise of atmospheric CO2*. Moore lauds anthropogenic emissions for its supposed wonderful contribution to the biosphere, whereas Salby claims anthropogenic emissions have nothing to do with the observed rise.

132. Corey says:

(Why the fuss? Zharkova and Professor Salty are correct: Patrick Moore DID discover Greenland.)

133. > Patrick Moore DID discover Greenland.

Really…that’s quite an accomplishment. Although he doesn’t look particularly Inuit, he may have been a stray they picked up along the way. Also, he’d be a tad older than I imagined. Healthy lifestyle, I suppose.

134. Corey says:

(A cup of glyphosate a day, I read somewhere.)

135. Corey says:

(Yail – it was a joke based on Moore’s false claim as one of Greenpeace’s founders and Zharkova’s botched reference.

I apologize for the confusion.)

136. > I apologize for the confusion.

Nah, no confusion all. Your reference is far less murky than than Dr. Z’s description of Moore as

> the founder of the greenhouse motion

By day, he’s Patrick Moore, hawker of nukes and defender of Monsanto’s (mostly) harmless glyphosate. By night, he assumes his secret identity of Joseph Fourier, early nineteenth century French physicist.

Since he’s so versatile, I wonder if he is also adept at “stop[ping] ignoring the elephant in the room while hunting for a mouse?”* If he’s had a few snifters of glyphosate, his vision may be so impaired he may be unable to locate either one. No grass (or anything else) grows under Patrick Moore’s feet.

137. tallbloke says:

Ken Rice: He (Ilya Usoskin) did come back. I think he just wasn’t being very clear. He wasn’t suggesting that the Sun doesn’t move relative to the barycentre, I think he was more suggesting that we shouldn’t treat the barycentre as the centre of all the orbits.

I searched the thread on his name but didn’t find any response. Let me have the comment number if you find the time.

As for “He wasn’t suggesting that the Sun doesn’t move relative to the barycentre”, I refer you to the Usoskin comment I originally picked up on:

Ilya Usoskin: The movement of the Sun around the Solar system barycenter is imaginary and is used to simplify some mathematical computations. Of course, you can calcuate these cycloides mathematically and discuss those, but there is no such movement in an inertial system.

This is simply incorrect, as the radial velocity method for detecting exoplanets shows. Stars do a complex orbit of their system barycentre due to the angular momenta of their planets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_detecting_exoplanets#Radial_velocity

It’s worth remembering that although in the case of our solar system the Sun has ~98% of the system mass, the four outer planets have around 93% of the system angular momentum.

138. tallbloke,
I commented here and he responded here.

139. tallbloke says:

Thanks. His reply to you shows how confused he is.

Usoskin: My point is that there motion of each body (in a inertial frame) is dtermined by the full complexity of individual gravitational pairwise forces but not reduced to a simple rotation about a single point somewhere. In this sense Sun is no different to the Moon. And thus, the Sun’s “movement about the barycenter” cannot produce any effect on solar activity. This is known to all (oh. sorry. to most of) solar physicists, and solar dynamo models do not consider this.

Blimey. Where to start?
1) No-one ever said the Sun’s motion WRT to the system barycentre was “a simple rotation about a single point”. Indeed it involves a constantly changing radius and quite rapid changes in acceleration.
2) And thus? What does he think he’s proven? The Sun is very different to the moon. The old “Sun is in freefall and feels no forces” argument is bogus. It theoretically applies to inelastic point masses. The Sun’s surface layer is a million mile diameter roiling mass of plasma, internally, the Sun is differentiated with discontinuities in matter phase, with humongous amounts of matter-energy conversion taking place as heat is transferred from core to surface via chaotic convection..
3) “Solar dynamo models do not consider this.” Indeed. That might help explain why solar dynamo models have never produced a useful prediction of changes in solar activity, or even an accurate hindcast.

Meanwhile, our solar system orbital resonance model, Which uses non-random parameters and variables which are defined by observed solar system dynamics is able to reproduce 4000 years of Steinhilber et al 2012 to Pearson R^2 0.72

140. tall,

Meanwhile, our solar system orbital resonance model, Which uses non-random parameters and variables which are defined by observed solar system dynamics is able to reproduce 4000 years of Steinhilber et al 2012 to Pearson R^2 0.72

Any physics, or just curve fitting? (I think I know the answer)

141. izen says:

@-tall
“It’s worth remembering that although in the case of our solar system the Sun has ~98% of the system mass, the four outer planets have around 93% of the system angular momentum.”

The relative proportions of Sun and Earth mass means the Earth’s orbit is tied to the Sun and its movements around the barycenter, So that movement has no effect in the average orbital distance as has already been shown.

Where does all that angular momentum of the Sun go from its waltz around the barycenter in the year 2169 when the position of the 4 gas giants results in the barycenter and the Sun’s center of mass/rotation becoming coincident ?

142. tallbloke says:

Yes. The physics of resonance. The behaviour of complex systems with many interacting resonances is hard to derive from first principles though, so we have to infer model parameters and variables from cyclicities in paleo data and observations of patterns evident in celestial motion.

It’s certainly legitimate to criticise our approach as ‘curve fitting’, but it’s worth remembering that most accepted physics starts out as curve fitting and elucidation of mechanism comes later. Even well known properties of matter like gravity and the gas laws.

143. tallbloke says:

Izen: I have to go out, but briefly; because the motion of the Sun is driven by the motion of the planets, the law of conservation of angular momentum applies to the whole system, not individual elements of it.

144. izen says:

@-tall
“so we have to infer model parameters and variables from cyclicities in paleo data”

Actually the cyclicities are imposed upon the data. Given the noise and confounding factors that alter the measurement of isotopic proxies of solar activity such as geomagnetic strength, carbon cycle, and snowfall altered by the climate, the existence of even quasi-cyclic periodicies is dubious.
That you then have multiple putative periodicies of celestial motion makes it almost inevitable that you can make one match the other.
Have you tried scrambling the isotope data and then seeing if you can still get a match with the celestial cycles?

@-“the law of conservation of angular momentum applies to the whole system, not individual elements of it.”

Thats the point.
And why I suspect there is no physics in the barycenter position. As stated above;
“And thus, the Sun’s “movement about the barycenter” cannot produce any effect on solar activity.”

Tidal effects of the Gas Giants may be another matter…

145. tallbloke says:

I haven’t scrambled isotope data and agree it would be a good test to do. Paleo-geo and holocene direct evidence throw up all sorts of interesting celestial periodicities. For example there are the Hudson bay and Siberian coastal ridges which appear on isostatically rising beaches with great regularity at 44.3 year intervals (inner solar system & Jupiter orbital return period). Every second one (~90yrs) is higher (Gleissberg cycle), and every fourth one (~179 yrs) is higher still (Jose cycle). The 14C data shows a ~2000 to 2500 year periodic oscillation in the smoothed data (Hallstatt cycle, which is the half period of the 4627yr solar system return period).

As I said in response to Ilya Usoskin’s comment:

The old “Sun is in freefall (about the barycentre) and feels no forces” argument is bogus. It theoretically applies to inelastic point masses. The Sun’s surface layer is a million mile diameter roiling mass of plasma, internally, the Sun is differentiated with discontinuities in matter phase, with humongous amounts of matter-energy conversion taking place as heat is transferred from core to surface via chaotic convection.

Angular momentum is (we trust) conserved across the entire system, but it doesn’t necessary follow that there are no exchanges of angular momentum between the Sun’s orbit and its spin. I can’t find the reference just now but I remember looking at a paper which found correlations between observed changes in the angular velocity of zonal bands on the solar surface and the Sun’s orbital velocity WRT the barycentre.

So there may well be something like the Wolff-Patrone mechanism occurring. Planetary-solar researchers aren’t the only ones who don’t know for sure what’s going on inside the Sun. After a bit of digging I even got Leif Svalgaard to admit that solar physicists still don’t know what causes the equatorial regions of the solar surface to rotate so much more quickly than the higher latitude regions (“It’s a work in progress”).

Shirley and Fairbridge found good correlations between peaks in the sunspot record and the synodic periods of inner planets and Jupiter. Jupiter’s tide on the Sun is only a few millimetres high, due to the very high surface gravity. But the solar surface is likely very close to boundary conditions, and all sorts of exotic Kelvin-Helmholtz type instabilities might occur from comparatively small ‘seed’ perturbations. Maybe rather than weak gravitational forces we should be looking at EMF feedbacks. It’s just been discovered that magnetic fields in the inner solar system are an order of magnitude stronger than previously thought. Speculations on a postcard to the usual address.

Regardless of the possible physical mechanisms, the refining of the pattern matching between planetary motion and solar activity we’re doing will, I hope lead to better understanding of solar system resonance and the feedbacks operating between planets and Sun. You’re right to be sceptical, but if our predictions turn out well, and the Sun turns out to have a bigger effect on climatic variation than currently thought, I expect interest in the subject will grow in the decades ahead. I’ll try to buckle down to doing a full bibliography and review book when I eventually retire.

146. Willard says:

When will you write to the Australian, Tall One:

147. Izen :
“Where does all that angular momentum of the Sun go from its waltz around the barycenter in the year 2169 when the position of the 4 gas giants results in the barycenter and the Sun’s center of mass/rotation becoming coincident ?”

Tides are tides, and absent a superfluid , viscosity is viscosity and the sun ‘s interior being seriously hot doesn’t mean tidal heating can’t make it a wee bit hotter.-

So you are almost, but not perfectly right about ““And thus, the Sun’s “movement about the barycenter” cannot produce any effect on solar activity.”

148. Windchaser says:

It’s certainly legitimate to criticise our approach as ‘curve fitting’, but it’s worth remembering that most accepted physics starts out as curve fitting and elucidation of mechanism comes later. Even well known properties of matter like gravity and the gas laws.

Sure, but:

(a) looking at the problem this way is subject to “Survivorship Bias” — you focus on the cases where curve-fitting turned out to be helpful, and ignore the many, many cases where it did not.
The skepticism here of active scientists towards curve-fitting reflects ongoing experience, finding that curve-fitting is not generally useful, without a mechanism. There are many more failures than successes with it, more busts than booms.

You can point out the times where it worked; we’re faced with the much more often that it does not.

(b) Gravity and Gas Laws only have one fitting parameter each. Yours has… how many?

149. Tallbloke wrote “It’s certainly legitimate to criticise our approach as ‘curve fitting’, but it’s worth remembering that most accepted physics starts out as curve fitting and elucidation of mechanism comes later. Even well known properties of matter like gravity and the gas laws.”

There is no problem with curve fitting, as long as you are clear and open with people that that is what you are doing. If you want to move on from there, then you need to provide evidence that the fit is not spurious, for example out of sample predictions, or physics, or showing that the class of hypothesis you use is small (i.e. the degrees of freedom are small compared with the explanatory power of the model – this includes “researcher degrees of freedom”). Let me know when you have made progress on any of those things.

150. Ben McMillan says:

The tidal ellipticity due to the influence of one body on another is 1 + 1.5 (m/M)(r^3/d^3), where M is the body which experiences the tide, of radius r, and the body producing the tide is mass m at distance d away.

I think that is an ellipticity of the Sun due to Jupiter of one part in a billion.

So I think the tidal bulge due to Jupiter on acting on the Sun should be ~5m high. That gives tidal velocities of order 0.1 microns per second (unlike earth, where a thin layer of fluid needs to move pretty fast, so tidal streams can be big in some places, the whole of the Sun is fluid).

Bodies like the Sun don’t know about (respond internally to) uniform acceleration (like barycentre motion) because general relativity.

151. Ben : as the sun rotates faster at the equator than the poles , its relativisticall¥ OK for its accelerational response to be nonuniform.

Cue friendly local MHD modelers to elaborate

152. Harry Twinotter says:

Am I stating the obvious here? The FUD paper has worked, people are now debating the barycentre instead of the elephant in the room which is the claim that sun irradiance changes in cycles. Any casual naive reader will just walk away with the notion that scientists are uncertain about the sun.

Zharkova is now an established climate change denier, the presentation she gave (at Heartland I think) was painfully bad.

153. Everett F Sargent says:

“Cue friendly local MHD modelers to elaborate”
Dynamo theories
Francois Rincon

Frank Stefani
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=wvFATuIAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate
“A Model of a Tidally Synchronized Solar Dynamo” (1D) (2019)
“On the Synchronizability of Tayler–Spruit and Babcock–Leighton Type Dynamos” (2018)
“Synchronized Helicity Oscillations: A Link Between Planetary Tides and the Solar Cycle?” (0D) (2016)

Bottom line? Nobody today knows.

One would think that those that claim that AOGCM’s or ESM’s must be ‘so called’ exact, then Solar System (dynamo) models must also be ‘so called’ exact (3D at all reverent turbulence scales). Not going to happen in either case ever. Denial is anything but human.

154. Everett F Sargent says:

“Zharkova is now an established climate change denier, the presentation she gave (at Heartland I think) was painfully bad.”

Don’t deny that you weren’t there. >.<

155. Ben McMillan says:

No, nonuniform rotation doesn’t allow the sun to avoid a fundamental principle of general relativity (ie that physics is the same in a frame under uniform gravitational acceleration). This is why only tidal effects (i.e. non-uniform gravitational fields) matter for solar structure.

156. MJ Owens latest comment on pub peer points out something I had not picked up on. Prof Zharkova writes:

” I have been learning to make JPL ephemeris… if one does not include SIM into ephemeris, the Earth orbit around the Sun is stable … However, if we include the motion of the Sun about barycentre (as it should be because this motion exists beyond our wishes) the Earth rotation becomes [variable]. ”

So she has found that the JPL software shows that the Earth-Sun orbit is stable (as ATTP demonstrated) and so decided to correct them to add the motion around the barycentre. This seems to me to be monumental hubris.

As MJ Owens puts it “Do you honestly believe JPL didn’t think to include the gravity of the other planets when they put the ephemeris together?”

157. izen says:

@-dikram
“…and so decided to correct them to add the motion around the barycentre. This seems to me to be monumental hubris.”

The hubris mat be accidental, or he result of a bad case of Dunning-Kruger.
The error in the correction is applying it ONLY to the Sun and not to the whole Earth-Sun orbit.
This just happens to conform to the original claim.

But there might be a more general point to make about this and the Kaupinen and Malmi ‘Clouds, not CO2 emission’ ‘paper’ that is rippling through the contrarian media at present. Both show an amazing degree of (wilful?) ignorance about basic facts and processes inherent in the subject and specific issues they are writing about. (I have been learning to make JPL ephemeris…! ) The Kaupinen and Malmi preprint(?!) makes the same zombie claim that the oceans are source of the rising CO2, not a sink.
Perhaps this ignorance is real on the part of the authors.
But there might be an expectation that editors, peer review or at least some of the media that picks it up would fact check it against the basic knowledge.
Even if you a journalist on a Murdoch platform pushing the corporate line, it might be thought prudent to check you are not disseminating something that can be easily refuted.

Certainly neither of these paper could ever get any traction within the scientific establishment. It seems inconceivable that the authors or anyone else could expect these papers to be taken seriously by even a lay person with a basic knowledge of the subject.

So what purpose do such papers serve?
If not written as such, they seem to be used as a means to manipulate uninformed opinion. A method of shifting the Overton window.
There is no intention of engaging with the actual science, it is blatantly unpersuasive as any sort of scientific argument because of the simple and egregious errors that are so easily exposed. But the outraged complaints of those with knowledge is an irrelevance to these sort of papers. Science is not their target. Either with the conscious collusion of the authors, or not, they are aimed at providing plausible deniability to vested interests in the wider public/political discourse. To poison the spring, so that doubt is cast and people are discouraged from drinking deep…

158. izen says:

@-Ben McMillan
” (ie that physics is the same in a frame under uniform gravitational acceleration).This is why only tidal effects (i.e. non-uniform gravitational fields)”

My thanks to Ben.
THAT is the concept I was groping after in my ignorance earlier when trying to say why I suspect there is no physics in the barycenter position.
Or the shuffling between angular and potential energy in solar interiors.

159. Everett F Sargent says:

VVZ is now plotting the sum of two vectors (Sun-EMB and Sun-SSB ending up as a SSB-EMB vector) this is a simple dot product calculation using vector notation. Also note this modulation appears to be symmetric about the mean Sun-Earth distance and the largest modulation appears to be the annual period of Earth’s (approximately tropical year) orbital period.

At least that is what I think she is doing.

But we only ever care about the Sun-Earth (center-to-center) distance for the only purpose of a correct TSI calculation.

160. EFS, it turns out the diagram is not Zharkova’s but Geoff Sharp’s.

161. Everett F Sargent says:

Also, too fully account for the EMB one needs to capture the primary EMB orbital period modulation (~27 days, that is one of the reasons I choose daily, the other reason was to select J2000 times at integer dates (12 PM (noon) GMT)).

Finally, the PubPeer crank magnet pulled in one Geoff Sharp (which only confuses what should be a relatively straight forward discussion, a Sun-Earth distance as a function of time discussion)).

162. Everett F Sargent says:

DM,

We cross posted and GS is wrong (TSI based only on the Sun-Earth distance). D’oh!

163. Everett F Sargent says:

DM,

Yes, I see that now. Dumb meets Dumber.

164. Everett F Sargent says:

OK, I made two errors …

EMB (@Sun) – SSB (@Sun) (subtraction of vectors not summation of vectors) and
EMB shows up at the Synoptic Period (in the FFT) of 29.53055903 days (vs Wikipedia value of 29.530589 days, I’m limited by the FFT spectral (frequency) resolution).

165. izen says:

How amazing that with all this apparently unconsidered relative motion between the Earth, Sun and the rest of the solar system we have managed to land probes on Venus, Mars, assorted comets and asteroids, Titan and even landed men on the moon !
(sarc/off)

166. OT but on day, this is the 50th anniversary of the Greatest Carbon Footprint Ever Sold

https://drive.google.com/drive/search?q=seitz%20conde%20nast

25 tonnes of CO2 a second, yielding 116 gigawatts for two glorious minutes , and very, very loud.

167. Steven Mosher says:

in the humanities some poor guys end up doing dissertations on shitty forgetable writers.

it would be interesting , 50 years from now, to do a volume on shitty skeptics doing science..

who is the best of the worst, and worst of the worst.

168. Corey says:

(I’d nominate someone at CliDeny, but my very own thread was pulled…

Clearly, Jaime was trying to protect me from myself.)

169. Everett said:
“the PubPeer crank magnet pulled in one Geoff Sharp “

Yup, he’s one of Tattersall’s active numerologists.

also
“EMB shows up at the Synoptic Period (in the FFT) of 29.53055903 days (vs Wikipedia value of 29.530589 days, I’m limited by the FFT spectral (frequency) resolution).”

I mentioned in a comment earlier in this thread about the position of gravitational saddle points. This chart below shows the annual period along with the synodic period of the moon. Interesting that the moon’s perturbation is not a smooth sinusoid superposed on the annual variation, but shaped more like impulses that appear to occur when the moon is most strongly in conjunction with the sun (which is the definition of the Moon’s synodic orbit of 29.53 days)

Galianni, P., Feix, M., Zhao, H. & Horne, K. Testing quasilinear modified Newtonian dynamics in the Solar System. Physical Review D 86, 044002 (2012).

The saddle point is only related to the distance by the moon via the location that the gravity precisely cancels, so the actual distance can be determined. It is significant because this number is accurately determined for proposed experiments on general relativity in low-gravity environments. In other words, if they screw up on this calculation, any space expedition to this location will turn into a boondoggle.

170. Willard says:

Geoff looks displeased:

171. Geoff Sharp says:

Guys, please get your facts right before making outlandish statements that ultimately reflect negatively on yourselves.
While I comment on tallbloke’s blog occasionally I am not part of the numerical crew and in the most part argue against that proposition. I have my own science that stands alone and is based purely on JPL Horizons data.
I have for years been arguing and providing evidence that the planets all orbit their own planet/Sun barycentre, so I am in complete agreement with the thrust of this post.

Zharkova has stolen my plot from 2010 that is posted on my blog and is fraudulently claiming to have produced it a couple of days ago and now states that both plots just “appear” to be the same ( the chances of reproducing the two plots in excel with EVERYTHING matching is inconceivable..She must think we are all stupid.

172. Everett F Sargent says:

Compare Geoff Sharp’s image …

with the image VVZ shows at PubPeer …

not ‘exactly’ the same (taller and narrower) but I think that I would accuse VVZ of cut-n-paste of a slightly modified Geoff Sharp original. That VVZ appears to claim this a work of her own is a lie.

173. Everett F Sargent says:

VVZ states (in two comments) …

Comment #170

“However, given a very intense discussion of possibilities of the SIM effects on the Earth orbit, n the past few days I have been learning to make JPL ephemeris with a help from specialists. We managed to produce the Earth-Moon orbits from 1800 till 1899 with the effect of SIM shown in Figure below.”

Hmm, err I do wonder who those ‘specialists’ might be?

Comment #181

“To George Sharp:

We got a help from the specialist who advised me how to obtain the data:

Enter the following …

Current Settings Ephemeris Type [change] : VECTORS Target Body [change] : Earth [Geocenter] [399] Coordinate Origin [change] : Sun (body center) [500@10] Time Span [change] : Start=JD2711424, Stop=JD2801424, Step=1 d Table Settings [change] : quantities code=1; labels=NO; CSV format=YES Display/Output [change] : download/save (plain text file)”

Again with ‘the specialist’, who could possibly be that specialist?

See …

Comment #73

“Unless I missed it, we are only interested in the time series of the distance between the Earth and the Sun (center-to-center). That determines TSI uniquely.

Go here and download actual state-of-the-art data … https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi

Enter the following …

Current Settings Ephemeris Type [change] : VECTORS Target Body [change] : Earth [Geocenter] [399] Coordinate Origin [change] : Sun (body center) [500@10] Time Span [change] : Start=JD2711424, Stop=JD2801424, Step=1 d Table Settings [change] : quantities code=1; labels=NO; CSV format=YES Display/Output [change] : download/save (plain text file)

I really don’t understand how it could get much simpler?

Best Regards One and All”

Same exact text string (for the Horizons online inputs), therefore VVZ’s specialist must be someone named ‘Nothoholosticha Fasciola’ who just happens to be ME! (see Comment #14 where I outed myself).

Note to self: I am NOT a specialist of any kind, I just happen to have used the online JPL Horizons interface in the past.

174. Willard says:

> Guys, please get your facts right before making outlandish statements that ultimately reflect negatively on yourselves.

Which statements do you find outlandish, Geoff?

175. Everett F Sargent says:

I will repeat one paradox and add a second paradox …

While on the one hand, AOGCM’s/ESM’s are not to be trusted because resolution, while on the other hand, Solar dynamo models are to be trusted because resolution. Obviously, if one isn’t exact then neither is the other because POOR resolution. Ironic.

While on one hand, paleo proxies can’t produce useful temperature reconstructions, while on the other hand, paleo reconstruction of SSN’s or solar magnetism or solar somethings can produce useful reconstructions of solar somethings. Obviously, if one isn’t exact then neither is the other because POOR resolution. Ironic.

176. Everett F Sargent says:

h/t Michael Brown tweet …

Journal criticised for study claiming sun is causing global warming
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2209895-journal-criticised-for-study-claiming-sun-is-causing-global-warming/?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=SOC&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1563292450

“A high profile scientific journal is investigating how it came to publish a study suggesting that global warming is down to natural solar cycles. The paper was criticised by scientists for containing “very basic errors” about how Earth moves around the sun. … ”

Looks like someone is in a hole and should stop digging. 🙂

177. Geoff Sharp says:

Paul Pukite (@WHUT) says:
July 16, 2019 at 11:31 pm

Everett said:
“the PubPeer crank magnet pulled in one Geoff Sharp “

Yup, he’s one of Tattersall’s active numerologists.
———————————-
These comments are offensive.

178. Everett F Sargent says:

So what happens when Valentina Zharkova Northumbria University, UK is listed here …
https://www.nature.com/srep/about/editorial-board
under MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS, THERMODYNAMICS AND NONLINEAR DYNAMICS?

Just, you know, curious. 😦

179. A sounds rather like Loehle’s paper on climate sensitivity which was published in a journal where he was on the editorial board.

FWIW, while neither was an editor in chief, I think the discussion to my question “Should an Editor in Chief publish in their own journal?” on Academia stack exchange is probably still somewhat relevant. The question wasn’t hypothetical, it related to an actual case.

180. Prof Zharkova writes:

Our data is our intellectual property, which we will share on a reasonable request as stated by the SR rules.

Given the history of our relationship with Dr. Usoskin {see our answers to his comments published in JASTP http://computing.unn.ac.uk/staff/slmv5/kinetics/reply2usoskin_jastp17.pdf) and his baseless accusations of our results, we have the full right not to trust his request being reasonable and to refuse him our data as he is trying to discredit us and our results..

181. In summary, they lost the plot and the Tattersall crowd is furiously trying to do damage control. They were all supposed to follow the narrative of the SSB proxy only impacting the solar sunspot cycle and that this would then ripple through to the earth via stronger fluctuations in cosmic rays resulting in a variable seeding of clouds.
Another just-published Scientific Reports article claims this effect has indirect paleoclimate evidence
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45466-8

But alas, they lost the mo and it will take them awhile to get their stories straight.

182. Geoff Sharp says:

No damage control Paul, I was onto Zharkova’s paper immediately and instantly criticised many aspects of her paper. On the whole most of us not drinking the cool aid are just trying to find what drives the sun and climate..I wouldn’t think any part of science has anywhere near all the answers.

So get over it and just try and be civil..and perhaps keep an open mind, who knows what you may learn.

183. Joshua says:

Following criticism of the paper, lead author Valentina Zharkova, of Northumbria University, described Rice as a “climate alarmist” in an online discussion.

Oh dear. An alarmist . That’s gonna leave a mark. I wish i had known sooner that I’m reading an alarmist blog.

It seems to me that if a changing distance between the sun and the earth were to cause measurable and significant changes in the Earth’s climate, those changes in distance would have to be rather large. So large, in fact, that the changes would be easily observable, scientifically. Am I wrong about that?

(BTW, I notice in that NewScientist article they don’t cspitalize “the Sun” or “the Solar System.” Is there some punctuation convention that I’m) missing?)

184. Joshua says:

(My assumption that the distance changes due to eliptical shape of the Earth’s orbit isn’t big enough to cause measureable changes in our climate)?

185. Willard says:

> These comments are offensive.

“Offensive” isn’t “outlandish,” Geoff, and as far as I’m concerned “crank magnet” and “numerologists” are less offensive than “drinking kool-aid.”

I had the impression that your “get your facts right” referred to facts, not tone.

Please desist from playing the ref.

Thank you for your concerns.

186. Kintsukuroi is a good metaphor for an approach to existence (well, I like it anyway). I wonder what the Japanese for “repaired with earwax” would be?

187. Everett F Sargent says:

Broken is the enemy of good.

188. Everett F Sargent says:

If it is broke then fix it.

189. “Broken is the enemy of good.”

broken and repaired is not though, especially if the repair itself has inherent quality.

I’ve been corrected on my understanding of climate physics on several occasions, I am quite happy for my corrections to be on display.

All science is broken, the day to day work of scientists is fixing the cracks, rather than making new pots.

190. I think my understanding of climate physics/science has evolved substantially over the last few years as I’ve learned more about the details. I probably, though, couldn’t explicitly describe how it has changed.

191. Everett F Sargent says:

The grandfather of Dynamo theorists and Dynamo researchers …

(circa 1973, I had that album plus a couple thousand others so far)
Not to be confused with Ancient Alien theorists and Ancient Alien researchers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Aliens

192. Dave_Geologist says:

Another just-published Scientific Reports article claims this effect has indirect paleoclimate evidence

Paul, as I recall the effect is real, and was supported by experiments carried out at CERN. But like the IRIS Effect it's much too small either to explain the current round of global warming, or to offset a significant proportion of the effects of anthropogenic CO2.

The paper is pretty thin gruel for the "but cosmic rays" brigade. A subtle change in the SE Asian monsoon which took place over a timescale of several thousand years, associated with a four-fold reduction in the strength of the Earth's magnetic field. A rate of change of about 0.02% p.a. So not only too small to worry about unless you depend on a stable monsoon, but too slow to worry about even if you do depend on a stable monsoon. Geophysicists have made a gazillion measurements of the strength of the magnetic field, typically with a sensitivity of 0.01 nT, about one millionth of the total field strength. We'd notice. Indeed we have noticed. It’s getting stronger in some places, weaker in others.

193. Willard says:

194. izen says:

@-Dave
“A subtle change in the SE Asian monsoon which took place over a timescale of several thousand years, associated with a four-fold reduction in the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field.”

Most of the efforts to find a correlation between the Earths magnetic field strength and climate suffer from the same problem. The claimed effect is rarely above the ‘noise’ level.
The other problem, as with the paper tallbloke cited above that claims to detect a rapid change during the reversal ~40,000 years ago when the field strength effectively dropped to near zero, is that the variations attributed to the changing magnetic field also appear throughout the record during times of a stable magnetic field. This is most evident in the GISP2 Greenland ice cores. You can find a big temperature change in association with the Be10 excursion of the reversal event, but similar big variations run throughout the record and there is little to definitively place a specific climate variation in association with the magnetic reversal. A time when if the variation in cosmic ray flux was going to have ANY effect it should be most obvious.

The CERN stuff linking cosmic rays to cloud nucleation has always seemed dubious because from what I have understood, cloud nucleation is dominated by biologically produced dimethyl-sulphides.

195. Dave_Geologist says:

I was going from memory re the CERN stuff, izen, because at the time I skimmed it and thought “real, but too small to matter”.

You can demonstrate an effect if you exclude the rest of the world. But in the real world, the rest of the world overwhelmingly dominates the signal. Beyond “some forest fires are started by lightning, so there can be no arsonists” to “some forest fires are started by meteorite impacts, so there can be no arsonists”.

196. Kudos to a billing in an article in The Independent — subtitled “Argument erupts after paper by UK scientists claims movement of Sun within solar system impacts temperatures on Earth”
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-study-journal-temperature-earth-distance-sun-scientific-reports-paper-a9009811.html

[Once or twice should be enough. Chill. -W]

197. Everett F Sargent says:

This is my latest verbatim comment at PubPeer (“Awating Moderation” with a new cryptic user name of “Camellia Caudata” (because I could not find the original assigned password for “Nothoholosticha Fasciola” and I didn’t even save the current “Camellia Caudata” assigned password, hopefully there won’t be a beed for a 3rd time)):

“#190, #185 and #181,

I do not wish to be drawn into this discussion once more, for somewhat obvious reasons (adding even more confusion to what should be a direct simple discussion of Sun-Earth geometric (center-to-center) distance time series), but …

I am the author of Comment #73 and I am certainly NOT a specialist of any kind as Zharkova appears to claim (twice even if one includes Comment #170).

The Julian dates used in comment #73 were taken from my last download on July 8, 2019 from the JPL Horizons website. I use the Google Chrome web browser and it keeps a cached version of my last visit to the JPL website including all inputs.

Comment #73 was originally posted on “commented July 9th, 2019 5:33 PM and accepted July 11th, 2019 1:19 AM” and it would have originally appeared as Comment #24 in a proper timeline of this discussion. AS such my cut-n-paste in Comment #73 represents the inputs left over from my July 8th download.

One final note the, Julian dates represent a total of 90,001 days of Sun-Earth center-to-center XYZ coordinates (heliocentric, meaning the moving Sun center as the origin) which is approximately 246 years (not 90 years as Comment #190 suggests).

Regards, Everett F Sargent

198. izen says:

@-Dave
“some forest fires are started by meteorite impacts, so there can be no arsonists”

Ha.
I like that analogy, and will steal it the next time I see an occasion to apply it.!

I would withdraw my previous claim that cloud nucleation is dominated by biological dimethyl suphide. That is the CLAW hypothesis, and inevitably with a system involving physics, chemistry, AND biology its a bit more complex than that.
DMS plays a big role, but sea spray from winds, dust, SOX, pollution, and even airborne bacteria all play a part.
There has even been speculation that the dust and chemical residue from micro-meteors burning up during the main meteor showers (Perseids, Leonids) increase cloud nucleation and subsequent rainfall…

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.3402/tellusa.v8i3.9007

Another external astronomical times series to provide a degree of freedom when the numerologists are matching their ‘cycles’ to clouds and climate noise

199. Everett F Sargent says:

Decreased Sun’s activity will lead to a small ice age

“Due to the cold weather in 2014 and 2018-2019, millions of people around the world began to pay attention to the problem of «global cooling». In our country this problem has become known thanks to the publication of an article of physicist H. Abdussamatov in «Science and Life» (2009) and an interview with an English Professor of Mathematics V. Zharkova in a popular Russian
newspaper«Komsomolskaya Pravda» (2018). During the preparation of the materials, we talked with many climate researchers in Russia and abroad, and we met some unanimous opinions based on the firm belief that climate warming will occur. The point of view of «climate warming» is so widespread that it seems a self-evident truth, it is unequivocal and does not need special evidence, and any attempt to challenge it may seem a hopeless effort. But Russian physicist H. Abdussamatov and English Professor of Mathematics V. Zharkova firmly claim the onset of global cooling in the middle of this century. We asked them to tell us about the latest results of their research.”

More to come as I try find them all.

200. Everett F Sargent says:

Upcoming modern grand minimum and solar activity prediction backwards five millennia

(EGU so all you get is the abstract)

“In this study using a summary curve of two eigen vectors of solar magnetic field oscillations derived with Principal Components Analysis (PCA) from synoptic maps for solar cycles 21-24 we extrapolate solar activity backwards five millennia showing the occurrence grand cycles of 350-400 years. … ”

Wow, just wow.

5000/(4*11) = 114X extrapolation
350/(4*11) = 8X extrapolation

Fun with filters and FFT’s.

201. Everett F Sargent says:

Press-release on the research reported at National Astronomy Meeting 2015 (Landudno)
“Irregular heartbeat of the Sun with Principal Component Analysis and prediction of solar activity”

“Blah … blah … blah …
Our results have clear and profound relevance to the current debate on climate change and open a new era in long-term solar physics research. … blah … blah … blah.

Lots and lots of PR links at the end so it must be true. I’m taking a break now as I need to take a shower.

202. Harry Twinotter says:

That study Zharkova et al did several years back about solar cycles. I have been told the paper was nothing special, papers attempting to predict solar cycles are common because it is an open question in solar physicis. The paper might have mentioned the Maunder Minimum, however the Maunder Minimum is not linked to climate change despite what a lot of media and some scientists say – it’s a myth – there is not even a coincidental correlation between the Maunder Minimum and climate change.

It appears somewhere along the way Zharkova got mixed up with the climate change denier crowd. She expressed opinions and speculations about solar cycles affecting climate (one I heard was bizarre). She gave at least one presentation about her “theories” at GWPF. She also was interviewed by a YouTube end-of-the-world type hoax channel. So come to your own conclusions about whether she has an agenda or not, I certainly have.

203. MarkR says:

That PubPeer discussion was great for a laugh.

I commend Dr Zharkova on her ability to avoid the point, by post #3 she shifts the topic to emails and CO2 instead of answering whether she thinks the Earth-Sun distance changes by 0.02 AU or not. I got a bit bored and maybe missed this somewhere in all of her bluster. Does she think that the Earth-Sun distance changes by 0.02 AU as she said in her paper, or does she not?

204. Everett F Sargent says:

MarkR,

All indications to date are that she does. But somewhere in all that mess she also states something to the effect that it doesn’t matter anyways. Because of the ‘so called’ magnetic and SSN reconstructions or some such (and no, both of those are also rather suspect as shown in the rather atrocious graphics that she presents).

There is another criticism from who knows who here …

Criticism of a new paper by Zharkova et al. (2019)

205. Everett F Sargent says:

from Mother Jones
Do You Know Where Your Barycenter Is?
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/07/do-you-know-where-your-barycenter-is/

“In the meantime, all the climate denialists have themselves a jen-u-ine scientific paper to show that greenhouse gases aren’t doing any harm after all. It turns out that global warming is all down to celestial mechanics. And if the paper is eventually retracted? Then it will become yet more evidence of the scientific establishment covering up inconvenient truths. Oh joy.”

206. Everett F Sargent says:

Having somewhat depleted my English language sources, I’ve begun to find gold in them there Russian hills (you will need to use something like your browser’s built in translate feature as the following link is in Russian, search terms – Valentina Zharkova solar = Валентина Жаркова солнечная) …

Сперва бы надо научиться правильно измерять температуру и применять статистику
First you need to learn how to measure temperature and apply statistics. April 25 2019, 15:30
https://goodspb.livejournal.com/3345859.html

“What is debatable, and generally wrong, is that these changes are caused by human technology. In the above-mentioned article, Professor Akasofu showed that these pseudo-scientists from the IPCC incorrectly applied interpolation and derived the temperature rise from the positive slope of the function with the Gaussian (normal) distribution. Any statistician will indicate this error. True, recently, in 2016, in an article in Nature, they reduced the temperature rise to 2.0 ° C by 2100, which is still too much and wrong, based on evidence from Professor Akasof. As a professional mathematician, I am just shocked by this use of statistics! And the models used to predict the Earth’s temperature do not take into account all the possible mechanisms affecting it (for example, the magnetic field and cosmic rays are not taken into account).”

“Increasing carbon dioxide would provide better nutrition for forests that live off of this gas and convert it to chlorophyll. I believe that natural changes are primary, and they cause the growth of carbon dioxide.”

“Humanity is not yet so powerful to influence our planet.

Those negligibly small changes in the volume of carbon dioxide (about 3%) that are noticed in the atmosphere cannot be divided into components (of natural and man-made origin). I propose to watch and listen to the report of the American professor, specialist in the field of atmospheric physics Murry Lewis Salby on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGZqWMEpyUM).

If we assume that these emissions are caused by technology on Earth, then earthlings, apparently, do the same on Mars (where polar caps are melting) and on Jupiter (typhoons appeared there like on Earth).”

“The efforts spent on restraining warming will come to nothing, for it is a myth. The observed warming on Earth, Mars, Jupiter and other planets is due to the movement of the Earth and the planets around the Sun and solar activity.”

“You must first learn how to measure the temperature correctly, apply statistics correctly (do not apply methods for normal (Gaussian) distributions to data that are very far from the normal distribution).”

“We must begin to explain to the population the influence on the Earth’s temperature of the Earth’s orbit itself, the tilt of the Earth’s axis and the precessions of this axis (Milankovitch Cycles) and other orbital movements of the Sun and planets (we will soon publish an article on this topic). Earth and other planets regularly go through such warming and cooling of a much larger scale, if you look at the data for the past half million years.

It is necessary to bring to the attention of the general public the elementary mathematical and statistical errors made in deriving the temperature prediction, and to acquaint Professor Akasof and other scientists with the forecasts.

Carbon dioxide measurements need to be made by other people and instruments. If the experiment is not repeatable, then there is a defect in the instrument, and you need to understand what it represents.”

207. Marco says:
208. Everett F Sargent says:

Marco,

Don’t forget the dreaded issue of confirmation bias (as it cuts both ways).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias#Science

“However, assuming that the research question is relevant, the experimental design adequate and the data are clearly and comprehensively described, the found results should be of importance to the scientific community and should not be viewed prejudicially, regardless of whether they conform to current theoretical predictions.

Dr. Zharkova, et. al. totally score two giant goose eggs with respect to the “data are clearly and comprehensively described” part.

209. Brett Harris says:

I got half way down, and then scrolled the rest of the way. I’m not a proponent of the sunspot theory, but I believe we have a heck of an example of a bandwagon effect right here. I can’t believe that everyone swallowed one reviewer’s argument about the barycentre, and ran with it, without anyone noticing these two paragraphs

“Although, unlike Fairbridge31 and Charvatova33, we do not propose a replacement of the solar dynamo role in solar activity with the effects of large planets, or solar inertial motion. This replacement would be very unrealistic from the energy consideration because the tidal effects of the planets are unable to cause a direct effect on the dynamo wave generation in the bottom of solar convective zone (SCZ).

However, in the light of newly discovered double dynamo effects in the solar interior6 the planets can surely perturb properties of the solar interior governing the solar dynamo in the outer layer, such as solar differential rotation, or Ω-effect, governing migration of a magnetic flux through the outer layer to its surface, and those of α effect, that can change the velocity of meridional circulation. This leads to the dynamo waves in this outer layer with the frequency slightly different from that than in the inner layer, and, thus to the beating effects caused by interference of these two waves and to grand cycles discussed above.”

That is, they do not believe that changes in the Earth-Sun orbital radius contribute, apart from the above mentioned effects equivalent to precession of the Equinox, but given their theory of magnetic cycles, they only consider the effect of the barycentric oscillation on the modulation of the magnetic field period of various configurations, and the subsequent effect on solar activity.

The initial reviewer saw the orbital argument, and because of his preconceived notion that this theory is wrong, they found what was for them the easiest way to to refute it, and never read further.

210. izen says:

@-“…assuming that the research question is relevant, the experimental design adequate and the data are clearly and comprehensively described, the found results should be of importance to the scientific community and should not be viewed prejudicially,..

The research question of possible causes of climate change is relevant.
However the experimental design, or mathematical method in this case, is inadequate and the data unavailable –
“we have the full right not to trust his request being reasonable and to refuse him our data as he is trying to discredit us and our results..”

So the found results are viewed prejudicially.

All that really remains, considering the inherent failure for this research to have any traction within mainstream science is to speculate on whether the authors are useful idiots who really believe this nonsense, and are being used by otters to peddle doubt in the wider public discourse, or whether they are active participants in the program of misinformation.

Anyone know anything about the Shepard SJ who seems to be the only non-Russian name to keep appearing in all these ‘it’s the Sun+imminent cooling’, ABC papers?

211. Everett F Sargent says:

izen,

I sort of fell sorry for Northumbria University …

New mathematical formula sheds light on solar activity past and future
https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/news-events/news/new-mathematical-formula-sheds-light-on-solar-activity-past-and-future/

“During a cycle lasting around 2,000 years, the Sun slowly moves slightly closer (0.02% of the distance from the Earth to the Sun, known as an astronomical unit) to the Earth’s aphelion, the point of the orbit furthest away from the Sun, and further away from its perihelion, the point of the orbit closest to the Sun. This small difference in the solar position can have an impact on the temperature here on Earth.”

This is testable and has been shown to be false. The 0.02 AU motion is an annual motion not a 2,000 year motion. Proverbially speaking, there is no other way to skin that cat.

One would expect that the “new mathematical formula” would be part of the Zharkova, et. al. (2019) paper. So where is it?

As to Simon J Shepherd (School of Engineering, University of Bradford) …
http://www.simonshepherd.com/
https://bradford.ac.uk/ei/engineering/staff-profiles/profile/?u=sjshephe
http://143.53.36.235:8080/sjsacad.htm

You tell me? I’d say something along the lines of IMHO, but no, this is better: Jeremy Hillary Boob (you go look it up).

212. izen says:

@-Sargent
“One would expect that the “new mathematical formula” would be part of the Zharkova, et. al. (2019) paper. So where is it?”

Perhaps it refers to Shepards’ invention of a new algorithm that enables very fast Fourier transforms.

http://143.53.36.235:8080/vfft.htm

https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?FT=D&date=20081106&DB=EPODOC&locale=en_EP&CC=WO&NR=2008132510A2&KC=A2&ND=1

213. izen says:

@-Sargent
“I’d say something along the lines of IMHO, but no, this is better: Jeremy Hillary Boob”

You may be onto something…
Apparently he is a member of this lot.

http://arcadiansociety.org/answerinstone.htm
Consider also the research of Dr. Masaru Emoto in which he conclusively proves that our thoughts and emotions do have a direct influence upon (inanimate?) matter. Dr. Emoto discovered that concentrated specific thoughts, projected at water, will result in dramatic changes in the resulting ice crystals when the water sample is frozen. Positive, loving thoughts and emotions produced brilliant, beautifully complex snowflakes, while negative thought forms projected at the same water sample resulted in incomplete, dull and asymmetrical snowflakes.

214. Everett F Sargent says:

Zharkova is wrong about grand solar minimum and LIA (YouTube author’s title).

Published on Jan 17, 2019 by Dr. Keith Strong (give it a watch ~20 minutes)
https://scicolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov/Strong.html

215. izen says:

Has anyone managed to make it through the whole Zharkova GWPF talk ?

Is there any explanation why most of her slides are blurred out after the first 40mins ?

Piers Corbyn makes an appearence !

216. Geoff Sharp says:

Yes I watched it, not an easy job.

I am thinking this whole exercise is just an example of curve fitting, and the process she describes to record the double Dynamo wave is not clear.

It would be interesting to see a thorough investigation into their processes.

217. Everett F Sargent says:

izen,

The superimposed presentation slides go dark at 47.13 and come back at 50:13.

In those ~3 minutes it looks like two additional slides are shown and from the CC text (because who can really understand what Dr. Zharkova is saying but for some form of AI), it would appear (swag) that those two slides are perhaps Figure 2 and Figure 3a included in their 2019 paper.

Anyways, new unpublished work at that time, not shown because new work to be published later..

218. Everett F Sargent says:

izeb.

It goes dark again at 51:29 and comes back at 51:30 (looks like another slide is held back). That one looks like a spliced out section (a time gap from the actual presentation is removed in this online version).

For no other reason then the obvious (blued out background with super-positioning of (1) Dr. Zharkova and (2) the original slide deck), this is an edited version of the actual real time presentation.

Introduce GWPF cons piracy theories here >'<

219. Everett F Sargent says:

izeb should be izen above

220. Everett F Sargent says:

OK, so no time splices, just three short periods of the presentation where the the slide deck is not shown in the foreground (the 3rd period is from 52:24 to 52:42). I’d like to see the entire presentation from just one (there are at least two cameras) in focus camera. Don’t care to watch the discussion portion at all.(anything after 53:50).

221. Brett,

That is, they do not believe that changes in the Earth-Sun orbital radius contribute, apart from the above mentioned effects equivalent to precession of the Equinox, but given their theory of magnetic cycles, they only consider the effect of the barycentric oscillation on the modulation of the magnetic field period of various configurations, and the subsequent effect on solar activity.

I’m slightly confused by this claim. I’ve had numerous exchanges with Valentina Zharkova in which she seems pretty certain that the Earth-Sun distance does change as the Sun moves around the barycentre and that this contributes to global warming.

222. Everett F Sargent says:

Brett Harris,

You have to go through their entire literature back to at least Zharkova, et. ak. (2012) …
Principal component analysis of background and sunspot magnetic field variations during solar cycles 21–23

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C25&q=SBMF+%22solar+background+magnetic+field%22&btnG=
(Google Scholar SBMF “solar background magnetic field”)

Other than one Russian named UM Leiko (circa 2004 with no direct cross references from Leiko-to-Zharkova or vice versa AFAIK), the “solar background magnetic field” (SBMF) appears to be a unique construct of just their papers (2012-2019).

Some (Usoskin (peer reviewed, 2017)) have begun to question the entire chain of custody of the ‘so called’ SMBF.

Principally, the extrapolation backwards in time (of even 350 years) based on just 34-45 years of direct observations.

This thread has had but a single focus, the Sun-Earth distance as a function of time (at least that would be my POV).

To put it simply, we will not know for a while, where this leads or ends.

223. Eli Rabett says:

As Usoskin has pointed out (also Mike Merrifeld on Twitter) the so called perfect fit from Fig. 1 in Zharkova (2019) is a perfect mess. This goes nowhere but it will never end

224. Pingback: Retract! | …and Then There's Physics

225. EFS,
You may be interested to know that the Venus-Sun/Venus-SSB figure that Zharkova included in this and which she suggests she generated using the JPL ephemeris data, actually appeared here more than 4 years ago. (H/T to someone who email me to point this out – not sure if they want to be named, or not).

226. Everett F Sargent says:

Thanks ATTP.

It appears that Northumbria University has ‘disappeared’ their PR statement for Zharkova paper:

New mathematical formula sheds light on solar activity past and future
https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/news-events/news/new-mathematical-formula-sheds-light-on-solar-activity-past-and-future/

Now shows up as “Oops ! We can’t find that page.”

But it was there, as shown in this archive (saved by someone else on 2019-07-05) …
http://archive.is/lVvAL

227. Geoff Sharp says:

Good news on the Zharkova page being taken down, perhaps a sign of things to come. Also interesting that she stole another plot off the internet.

228. Bob Loblaw says:

Amazing. That link to the second figure she “borrowed” says a lot. In her post, the figure’s file name suggests it is a screen capture.To her credit, she only claims that the top graph of the figure is from the calculation she did (“see Fig. 2, top plot”). I couldn’t see a spot where she discussed the bottom half, but it is clearly a badly-re-scaled copy of the original. Who would choose such a squished font if they ere generating the graph from scratch? Why would you include the bottom plot if you didn’t want to discuss it? If you could only produce a file by doing a screen capture, how did you generate the original?

Maybe it’s an incorrect interpretation of the old adage “copying from one is plagiarism. Copying from many is research”. Does anyone credible actually think that copying from many, without attribution, is scholarly?

229. Barycentric reality? Solar inertial motion?

230. Naba,
Are those actually questions?

231. Hello Dr. Rice.

I think I mentioned before to you on Twitter that potholer54 (Peter Hadfield) is interested in the Dr. Zharkova situation:

(in response to “Kamil C”): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QCBDnJU2sQ&lc=Ugz879–v6uhGu5-2FJ4AaABAg.93MotTLYQT993OBH9avJCF

Potholer54 would like to get in contact with you about this, since he thinks it’s worth doing a video on. You can reach him via his e-mail address, which I’ve shared with you in a private Twitter message; I can also forward his message to an email address of your choosing. Alternatively, you could respond publicly, if you wanted. I’ve included potholer54’s message below, minus his e-mail address which he wishes to keep private:

“Regarding Ken Rice, I would very much like to put a question to him, because this is worth doing a video on. I have read through the discussion and I’m trying to think of a good analogy to explain this to people who are not well-versed in this field. So I’d like to see if this analogy is appropriate. Please pass it on to Prof. Rice, along with my e-mail address (if you’re able to send it privately) so he is welcome to respond directly:
Imagine a hammer-thrower standing on a spot in a field. He grabs the hammer by the end of the shaft, and leans back to counterbalance the weight of the hammerhead as he spins round and round. The hammerhead becomes the lighter body ‘orbiting’ around him.
As he spins, he’s not staying exactly on the spot, he’s moving a few inches either side of it.
It seems to me Zharkova’s saying that as the man shifts around the spot, he is getting at times closer and at times further from the hammerhead.
The other researchers are telling her this is impossible — the distance between the man and the hammerhead is always the same.
No analogy is perfect, but is that the gist? Somehow I will have to convey this to people who have never studied science.

Best regards,
Potholer”

232. dikranmarsupial says:

The hammer thrower analogy seems a good start. I would extend it by getting the hammer thrower to spin a hula-hoop at the same time (representing Earth’s orbit) as well as the hammer (representing Jupiter). The Hammer-and-thrower (sun-jupiter) barycenter is the largest oscillation, but it doesn’t cause a difference in the mean hula-hoop/thrower distance because the hammer induces changes in the hula-hoop’s orbit as well because of the Sun’s movement around the hammer/thrower barycenter. I’d check that with an astronomer first, but it is how I understood it.

233. The hammer thrower seems good for two bodies, not sure how you extend it to 3. Unless you assume that the person is the Sun-Earth system and the hammer is Jupiter.

234. Geoff Sharp says:

Spot on, the main point is the hammer thrower rules. Everything in the solar system follows the hammer thrower, Zharkova in another universe.

235. Geoff Sharp says:

Makes no difference how many other bodies are involved (including Sagittarius A)..when the Sun moves the planets follow. The hammer thrower rules.

236. dikranmarsupial says:

I suspect my extended analogy isn’t quite right because the Earth’s (hula-hoop’s) orbit isn’t only perturbed by the oscillation of the Sun (thrower) around the Sun-Jupiter (thrower-hammer) barycenter but also by the orbit of Jupiter (hammer). But analogies are never 100% accurate…

237. Geoff Sharp says:

No..your analogy is accurate..many bodies perturb the Sun, but each body in the solar system follows that perturbation.

238. Everett F Sargent says:

Let’s see if this works …
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AiO-AOyNG0HsfuJ0sNN5jNeT6pMth4bT/view?usp=sharing
It is a png file from Google Drive.

239. Everett F Sargent says:

OK, it didn’t inline properly, trying a jpg from Google Drive …
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MRIWCym9NRvk24a0ikexkmjYmP75D04z/view?usp=sharing

240. Everett F Sargent says:

OK, so I’m a real dummy, I’m trying to post an inline graph as an image file via Google Drive, but no file extension so no inline image?

Anyways, please delete last two posts. And please suggest an image posting site. I’ll be looking myself in the meantime. TIA

241. Geoff,
You do have to be slightly careful. It does depend when other big planetary body is. Since Jupiter is orbiting outside the Earth’s orbit, we can regard the Earth as orbiting the Earth-Sun barycentre, and then the Earth-Sun system being perturbted by Jupiter. However, if the Earth were orbiting beyond Jupiter, it wouldn’t be this simple.

242. Everett F Sargent says:

3rd time a charm? Via Flickr …

243. dikranmarsupial says:

ATTP does that mean my extended analogy is O.K. for the purposes of potholer54?

244. Everett F Sargent says:

I guess that will do for now. So what is it?

Well, it isn’t an eccentricity calculation per se.

The plot is the residual of ~30.4K years of JPL ephemeris data obtained from this website …
http://iaaras.ru/en/dept/ephemeris/online/
It is the daily distance between the EMB (Earth-Moon barycenter) and the Sun center, then the combined EMSB (Earth-Moon-Sun barycenters) distance from the EMB and the EMB-S barycenter (a small number of ~449 km) based off of the JPL mass constants as shown on page 49, Table 8. Mass parameters of major bodies. See here for additional information …

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycenter#Primary%E2%80%93secondary_examples

The black line labeled ‘1461’ is a decimated average distance using 1461 days as this is very close to the sidereal orbital period = 365.25636 days as defined by JPL (in their own Horizons output files). This is only one way of very easily removing the annual eccentricity of the Earth. This might commonly be called a finite impulse response (or FIR) filter without overlap (so strictly speaking not a moving average as each average uses a unique 1461 days sequentially). This method is as I described it above in a previous post.

The red line labeled ‘475, 21’ is a two pass butterworth (IIR) filter of the same raw time series, see …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_impulse_response
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterworth_filter
This filter can be tricky as it rings outside of the trailing end of the filter (which is, or can be, compounded when doing the 2nd or back pass of this filter), but I’ve pretty much developed my own method to eliminate this ringing effect. Anyways the 475 stands for the halfpoint (50% attenuation of the original signal) of this filter in days and the 21 is the number of poles in the filter.

I very much prefer the butterworth filter (when there is a lot of data and I consider 30.4K years of daily data a lot of data) as it produces a very clean low pass signal of the original time series, is monotonic and maximally flat, and does not have the node/antinode behaviors of FIR filters (again if you haven’t used FIR/IIR filters before, you always want to plot the frequency response of the filter of choice using uniform IID white noise).

TL;DR?

I am searching for the hypothetical ~2000 year motion that VV still stands by even in their ERRATUM (which IMHO is even worse than the original paper, if you can imagine that). The ERRATUM link was posted at PubPeer and you will want to compare the above figure with their Figure 3 …

I have one more figure to post, which is an FFT of the above red curve (with a polynomial fit used to remove the long term behavior, to get to a time series that is almost stationary throughout the ~30K years of ‘clean’ IIR filtered data).

I don’t think there is a simple analogy for any of this, but you do need to get to the low frequency motions as cleanly as possible. Taking a short break, 2nd figure shortly. 🙂

245. Everett F Sargent says:

I have a longish post in moderation (six links). please post it at your own convenience or as you see fit and delete me (this post).

246. Dikran,
I’m not sure the hula hoop quite works, but I’ll to try and think about it. Depends on what you’re intending the hula hoop to represent.

247. dikranmarsupial says:

The hula-hoop just represents a much lighter object that also orbits the thrower, but that orbit is indirectly influenced by the perturbations of the thrower induced by the orbit of the hammer. It doesn’t orbit in quite the same manner as the Earth, but it is just an analogy.

I don’t think Potholer54 quite gets Zharkova’s error when he writes “It seems to me Zharkova’s saying that as the man shifts around the spot, he is getting at times closer and at times further from the hammerhead.”

It is not the Sun-Jupiter distance that she says is changing but the Sun-Earth distance because of the Sun-Jupiter barycenter, and if you take it that the hammer represents the Earth, IIRC it isn’t that barycentric oscillation that she is talking about. Perhaps I need to read through the pubpeer discussion again (I only got involved in it because she mentioned Berry and Salby).

248. I think the problem with the hula hoop might be getting people to realise that it’s meant to represent a third body.

249. dikranmarsupial says:

I’d just tell them ;o)

250. Deficit model thinking 😉

251. Everett F Sargent says:

Before I post the 2nd graph, I just wanted to comment on the VV ERRATUM Figure 3, and I quote …
“Figure 3. The Sun-Earth distance variations of 0.00025 au per 100 years derived from the current JPL ephemeris (compare the Y-magnitudes at the times of 1900 and 2000, for example) considering the small gravitational effect of four large planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus).”

So, 2.5E-4 AU/century (centered on 1950) from VV figure 3, and from my 1st graph above the slope of the residual motion is -7.0E-07 or a factor of ~360X smaller then their new conical number. What would explain this discrepancy? I have no idea, I can only assume time series data aliasing on their part (sampling frequency close to and/or close to and a multiple of the annual period). Regardless, they have assumed a spherical cow, so to speak, in that the hypothetical 2200 year cycle is assumed to begin with in the 1st place, but the motion is actually the ~100 Kyr Milankovitch eccentricity cycle.

So here is the 2nd graph …

where 1.5 km ~ 1E-8 AU.

So there is something at ~2000 and ~1000 years, perhaps a couple of kilometers for either, and perhaps better estimates then my previous numbers in a post of mine way upthread. If these amplitudes explain some hypothetical 2200 grand cycle, then heavens forbid all those relative motions between one year and 200 years …

(same scale units, y-axis is now logarithmic)

252. Everett F Sargent says:

Some other reviewer comments and replies have been posted here …
http://mpee.northumbria.ac.uk/staff/slmv5/kinetics/news.php
Don’t ask me why VV (or who knows) posted the reviews/replies, as the review comments are pretty brutal IMHO.

253. Everett F Sargent says:

Well, VV, et. al. plagiarized another web based graph, this time from SkS …

Which is used (as is) by VV’s in Figure 5b (lower figure on page 12 of their ERRATUM). That figure is titled “The bottom plot: variations of the terrestrial temperature (red lines) and solar 11 years activity (blue lines)31 (also taken from https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov).

Reference 31 is wrong (originally published in 2011 but the SkS graph is through to, and includes, 2015), the data are from GISS not NCDC. The SkS figure caption reads …
“Figure 1: Annual global temperature change (thin light red) with 11 year moving average of temperature (thick dark red). Temperature from NASA GISS. Annual Total Solar Irradiance (thin light blue) with 11 year moving average of TSI (thick dark blue). TSI from 1880 to 1978 from Krivova et al 2007 (data). TSI from 1979 to 2015 from PMOD (see the PMOD index page for data updates).

254. Everett F Sargent says:

The two time series diverge. The irony is killing me.

255. Everett F Sargent says:

1st link above should be …

256. dikranmarsupial says:

I think there is a clear deficit of something in the pubpeer discussion!

257. Arctic Haze says:

The paper has just been retracted.

By the way, the reason why barycentric movement influences the Sun-Earth distance only slightly is that the movement is predominantly the result od gravitational attraction of planets beyond the Earth orbit (mostly Jupiter). Sun and Earth are being pulled in the same direction.

It is easy to explain imagining a situation when the barycentric movements were caused by the Sun having a binary companion (another star). far beyond the Earth Orbit. The whole Solar System would orbit the other star without large perturbations of the planet orbits. Otherwise the orbits would become quickly unstable (an we know this is not the case in the real Solar System).

258. william Duncan says:

I’m not a physicist but I try to keep up. I’m also late to the party reading all this but it seems to me that if, as Zharkova seemingly asserted, the SIM results in changes to the earths orbital distance from the sun then there should be some simple astronomical observation and actual measurement that would decide this matter. Would for example the timing of star transits behind the sun not differ over the timescale if the sun was angularly bigger during the part of the claimed cycle when it was nearer to the sun? From what I gather there is already data on solar irradiation which contradicts her position. But is there some form of direct measurement of the position of celestial bodies that could or has been done which would put this to bed? From what I’ve read even I could see that ATTP pretty much demolished her paper on the orbit issue alone but I’m interested from a astronomical perspective as what positional observational measurements would be decisive on this issue? Many thanks if anyone can be bothered to answer.

259. William,
Michael Brown covered that in this Pubpeer comment. Kepler’s Laws are based on the Sun being at one of the foci of the Earth’s elliptical orbit. We make predictions about the other bodies based on Kepler’s Laws. If the Sun isn’t at one of the foci, then these would be end up being quite wrong, but they’re not.

260. Dave_Geologist says:

And here, Wiiiliam, is a link to the Supplementary Material (not paywalled) of the Pages2K paper I referenced in the follow-up thread: Consistent multidecadal variability in global temperature reconstructions and simulations over the Common Era

Supplementary Fig. 16 presents a cross wavelet analysis of GMST and solar forcing. The results indicate no robust relationship between GMST and solar forcing. Coherence is mostly found at the very lowest frequencies (below 500 years), where the degrees of freedom are too small to allow a robust significance analysis.

Of course that’s with the solar forcing correctly calculated…

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