What is the Planetary Theory about? Why all the Fuss?

Over the last five years there’s been a revival of an old hypothesis which suggests that the motion of the planets around the Sun modulates its output, and that variation in the Sun’s output affects the Earth’s weather and in the longer term, shifts in regional and global climate. This revival has been most visible here in the blogosphere, where ideas can be kicked around with less professional reputational risk, and a faster exchange and development of concepts and narratives can take place. There has also been a steady trickle of papers published in the scientific literature relevant to the theory, and these have been championed and denigrated by bloggers on both sides of the issue.

Naturally, in the overheated atmosphere of the climate debate, the second part of the idea is especially controversial, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change telling us that human emitted ‘greenhouse gases’ are the primary driver of global warming since the middle of the last century. They also say the Sun’s variation has very little effect on climate change. An IPCC author recently took exception to our special edition on the theory and got the journal we published it in axed. The first part of the idea is controversial too, as the received wisdom from most mainstream solar physicists is that the planets are too small and too far from the Sun for their motion to affect it. They are sure that the Sun runs an internal ‘dynamo’ (Babcock & Leighton) and ‘chronometer’ (Dicke) which accounts for the observations of its cyclic variations that have been made over the centuries.

Zombie Science: Gergis et al disinterred for remake

My thanks to Tony Thomas for giving the talkshop the exclusive of his take on this breaking news item:

Gergis findings re-surface – the Hockey Stick lives!

By Tony Thomas 31-03-2014

Hello again Hockey Stick, goodbye global Medieval Warming Period.

These are the conclusions of a multi-proxy 1000-year climate reconstruction published today (March 31) in Nature Climate Change, by Dr Raphael Neukom of the Oeschger Centre at the University of Bern, and Dr Joelle Gergis of the University of Melbourne.

Dr  Neukom   summed up for a University of Melbourne press release:

The study showed the ‘Medieval Warm Period’, as identified in some European chronicles, was a regional phenomenon. 

During the same period, temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere were only average. Our study revealed it was not a common climate event that many people have previously assumed.

The paper claims that in 99.7 percent of the results, the warmest decade of the millennium occurred after 1970.

The press release says,“And surprisingly, only twice over the entire past millennium have both hemispheres simultaneously shown extreme temperatures.

One of these occasions was a global cold period in the 17th century; the other was the current warming phase”.”[1]

European Carbon Price Plunges to New Low: Sell Dead Dogs – Buy Fish!

Credit : Steve Bell : the Guardian

H/T to pat for this snippet from the Autralian

31 March: Australian: Staff Reporter:

EU carbon plunges ahead of emissions data
Speculation EU emissions fell further than expected last year has seen the continent’s carbon price experience its biggest one day drop in a year, with the price falling more than 20 per cent to below €4, Bloomberg reports.

According to the news service, carbon futures for December fell as much as 29 per cent after Britain posted a bigger-than-expected emissions drop last week, analysts are expecting the same when EU data is released this week.
EU carbon futures had reached a 15-month high earlier in the week, Bloomberg reports, as backloading took effect.

Bloggies, Tallbloke’s Talkshop: Best European Blog 2014

Thank you Nominators, first judges,  our readers for voting and of course The Bloggies host.

I’ll add more later. I’ll get the fire hydrant ready to cool Tallbloke. Well done mate.

Andrew McKillop: Death Cross Mix for European Energy : No Future

Guest post from Andrew McKillop

Death Cross Mix for European Energy : No Future
by Andrew McKillop 29-03-2014

Play With the Toy Until it Breaks
Commentators have begun to focus on the “moving average” of always-unrealistic energy policy and programs in the European Union, easily finding that they signal a “bearish outlook” for future energy supply in Europe – but certainly not for energy prices.  In fact not only the poster child victim of the EU’s mix and mingle of often-extreme policies – electricity, but also increasingly gas and then oil – faces a supply outlook that almost inevitably has to be down. This is despite, or because of, ever-rising energy prices, led by electricity price rises! Prices are driven up by a death cross convergence of political, economic, financial, technical and even cultural “life style” factors. In the poster child country for European “energy transition”, German household electricity prices are around 25 euro cents per kiloWatthour in early 2014, pricing their power at an oil equivalent (1600 kWh per barrel) of around $540 per barrel equivalent. Can we be surprised that German electricity consumption is falling?

Magnitude 5.1 quake sends shiver down Los Angeles spine

From Buzzfeed

LOS ANGELES — A shallow magnitude-5.1 earthquake struck the Los Angeles area Friday night, causing minor damage and injuries, scattered power outages, and gas leaks.

The earthquake occurred at 9:09 p.m. at a depth of 4.6 miles and was centered near Brea in Orange County — about 20 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. It was immediately followed by dozens of aftershocks, including a 3.4 and 3.6 magnitude.

The playing field has a natural tilt climate modelers won’t see

Twitter climate debate warrior ‘Ima Disbelievin‘ sent me this short article which is worth a post. It’s a followup to the Tony Thomas article a week or so back which covered the story about the American Physical Society APS reworking their position statement on climate change and global warming.

In the American Physical Science’s transcript of discussions relating to their upcoming revision of their position statement on Anthropogenic Climate Change, Dr. Collins states:

So, we build climate models. We assume when we construct those models that the net energy balance of the planet was identically zero or effectively zero at the start of industrialization.

Talkshop housekeeping announcements

Two minor blog housekeeping announcements from da management

1) Tim has rolled over the suggestions page which was getting too large for easy loading. The old one is linked.

2) I have closed comments on threads over eight months old. This is due to the increasing deluge of spam, 95% of which is arriving on old threads no-one is contributing too. Apologies for any inconvenience. Just flag up a desire to continue an old debate and I’ll bump the post through time to a period where it is within the time limit.

Thanks for choosing to debate science at the talkshop. All suggestions for improvements welcome.

Richard Feynman on Pseudoscience and Uncertainty

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Valuable insight from a great scientist.

MalagaBay

The BBC Horizon The Pleasure of Finding Things Out[1981] interview with Richard Feynman is available on Youtube.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out was filmed in 1981 and will delight and inspire anyone who would like to share something of the joys of scientific discovery. Feynman is a master storyteller, and his tales — about childhood, Los Alamos, or how he won a Nobel Prize — are a vivid and entertaining insight into the mind of a great scientist at work and play.

In this candid interview Feynman touches on a wide array of topics from the beauty of nature to particle physics. He explains things that are hard to grasp in layman’s terms much like Carl Sagan did in the cosmos series. His explanation of the scientific method covers what we know, why we know it and most importantly, what we don’t know and the pleasure of figuring…

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Hubble Eyes Mars-Bound Comet

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Siding Spring will whizz by close to Mars

Lights in the Dark

Hubble image of comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring), before and after processing. Credit: NASA, ESA, and J.-Y. Li (Planetary Science Institute)

Comet Siding Spring won’t hit Mars on October 19 but it will come really, really close: 86,000 miles, or just a bit over 1/3 the distance between the Moon and Earth. That’s like having a bullet from a sniper positioned a mile away knock your hat off! (Given that you were the target of a military-class sniper, not sure why you would be. Is there something I don’t know about you?) And while it won’t get bright enough or close enough to Earth to become a spectacle in our night sky, exploration robots on and around Mars should be in for quite a show.

Earlier this month, as Siding Spring (aka C/2013 A1) passed within the orbit of Jupiter, the Hubble Space Telescope turned its gaze onto it and…

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President Obama Issues An Official Threat To Climate Heretics

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From the “WE’RE GOING TO PAY YOU A LITTLE VISIT” dept…

Real Science

President threatens that anyone not paying homage to the official state sponsored religion, will be punished.

https://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/climatechangeactionevent/gs8fj4

In 1938, Jews were visited in Germany to show them “how foolish being a Jew really is.”

http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/17536550

Hitler also made it clear that everyone has to follow the official state sponsored religion.

http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/95010800

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WSJ: Green policies destroy the economics of power generation

From the Wall Street Journal, via GWPF

On Thursday, the U.K. power regulator Ofgem announced it would refer the six biggest power companies to the antitrust authorities for investigation. Not that there’s any evidence of price collusion, mind you. It’s just that prices for consumers rose by about 9% last October, outpacing the increase in wholesale prices, and so politics demands that something is done.

To anyone who is economically literate the price increases come as no surprise, since Britain faces electricity shortages. A cold winter would push demand to 95% of capacity, meaning a real risk of blackouts.

A Remarkable Lunar Paper and Numbers on Major Standstill

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It’s the right time to reblog this great post from the Chiefio

Musings from the Chiefio

Yesterday we had a sort of a review of the lunar postings so far and a look at how the orbital changes are not quite as expected. That the lunar orbit is “wrong” – per some folks. Also a touch on the history of tides and that some of the very earliest writings are claiming much stronger tides than at present. There was also a link to a WUWT article about about the way tides are much larger during certain alignments of sun, moon, and earth with particular orbital conditions (perigee). Including calculations that tides then could be significantly larger. Between 1.5 x and 2 times present. This would tend to wash more warm water under the North Pole ice cap and help break up the ice. It would also cause large changes in ocean mixing of water levels and change both ocean surface temperatures, and through them, air temperatures.

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Steinhilber & Beer: Prediction of solar activity for the next 500 years

H/T to Gerry Pease for alerting me to this paper from last year by Steinhilber and Beer which lays out a solar prediction from their analysis of their reconstruction of solar activity from proxy data.

Prediction of solar activity for the next 500 years
Friedhelm Steinhilber1 and Jürg Beer1
Received 18 May 2012; revised 18 February 2013; accepted 2 March 2013.

Recently, a new low-noise record of solar activity has been reconstructed for the past 9400 years by combining two 10Be records from Greenland and Antarctica with 14C fromtree rings [Steinhilber et al., 2012]. This record confirms earlier results, namely, that the Sun has varied with distinct periodicities in the past. We present a prediction of mean solar magnetic activity averaged over 22 years for the next 500 years mainly based on the spectral information derived from the solar activity record of the past. Assuming that the Sun will continue to vary with the same periodicities for the next centuries, we extract the spectral information from the past and apply it to two different methods to predict the future of solar magnetic activity.

Bart: A possible origin of terrestrial 60 year cycles

Guest post from talkshop contributor ‘Bart’:

We’ve all seen the ~60 year periodicity in the surface temperature data.

Here is a potential cause.

Abreu et al planetary periods not found in old section of Epica ice core

A new paper in Astronomy and Astrophysics (A&A) finds that cosmogenic nucleides in a section of Epica dome C covering 325-336 kyrs ago doesn’t exhibit Abreu et al’s planetary periods. They conclude that solar variability might have been different then. They don’t consider that Epica ice cores might not be telling them what they think they’re telling them.

Here’s the abstract

No evidence for planetary influence on solar activity 330 000 years ago

A. Cauquoin1⋆, G. M. Raisbeck2, J. Jouzel1, E. Bard3 and ASTER Team3⋆⋆

Battsby: The Windmills of the Apocalypse

Reposted from Battsby’s blog:

Do you remember Up Pompeii? Frankie Howerd, as Lurcio, regularly encountered a series of unlikely characters who dragged him into their deranged world with increasingly far-fetched but ultimately pedestrian plots, almost always relying on deception and the concealing of truths on pain of death. None of Lurcio’s encounters were met with such dread and derision as those with Senna the Soothsayer. “Woe, woe and thrice woe…”? Well, that’s the climate change lobby, that is.

 

Met Office tries on new tutu dress code

The UK’s weather will become both too wet and too dry – and also too cold and too hot – as climate change increases the frequency of extreme events, the Met Office has warned in a new report.

Credit

There, fixed, anything can be excused, same ploy as before.

Out of curiosity what is not too wet too dry too cold too hot?

And another thing, it seems the Met Office has selectively leaked to friends of the Met Office, BBC had it, The Guardian (quote source) had it. The Met Office web site Press Releases has nothing, the Met Office blog has nothing.

That’s too too much.

Malcom Shykles: The global warming hoax

Reposted from Ukipdaily.com. The content about Enron and Gore is what caught my eye. The final paragraph is a bit of a mashup. Perhaps we could help Malcom out with a similar length statement which is a bit more rigorous.

There were three key individuals central to the advance of the Global Warming Hoax; Ken Lay of the Enron Corporation, Al Gore Vice President of the USA and his former University lecturer Professor Roger Revelle.

A former under-secretary general of the United Nations, Maurice Strong also aided the promotion of their efforts.

In 1957, Revelle suggested that the Earth’s oceans would absorb excess carbon dioxide generated by humanity at a much slower rate than previously predicted by geoscientists, thereby suggesting that human gas emissions might create a ‘greenhouse effect’ that would cause global warming over time.

Al Gore graduated from Harvard in 1969 and had been particularly impressed by Revelle’s class. From then on Al Gore was and still is, convinced of manmade global warming.

 

McCracken Beer & Steinhilber: Evidence for Planetary Forcing of the Cosmic Ray Intensity and Solar Activity Throughout the Past 9400 Years

This is a major new paper published in the March issue of prestigious journal ‘Solar Physics’ by solar-planetary theorists Ken McCracken, Jurg Beer and Friedhelm Steinhilber, which makes a newer and more extensive analysis of planetary motion in relation to the Carbon 14 and Beryllium 10 Glactic cosmic ray proxies than the 2400 yr Hallstat cycle study we looked at yesterday. The paper has been in the works a long time (submitted in July 2012), achieving final acceptance in late February this year. I can’t make the whole paper available due to copyright restrictions, but the abstract gives a clue as to the content. I’ve added one of the figures up to help convey some of the more important results. I’ve also appended the bibliography, as this isn’t part of the paper’s main text, it’s great to see Geoff Sharp and Ian Wilson getting citations. We can discuss other parts of their paper in comments. Boy is Martin Rasmussen going to look stupid in the future, by axing PRP for publishing our solar-planetary special edition.