A controversial paper claiming that fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field could be driving global warming has been retracted — prompting protests from most of the authors, who called the move
a shameful step to cover up the truthful facts about the solar and Earth orbital motion reported by the retracted paper, in our replies to the reviewer comments and in the further papers.
The 2019 article, “Oscillations of the baseline of solar magnetic field and solar irradiance on a millennial timescale,” appeared in Scientific Reports and was written by a group of authors from the UK, Russia and Azerbaijan. The first author was Valentina Zharkova, a mathematician/astrophysicist at Northumbria University, whose group reported having received funding for the work from the U.S. Air Force and the Russian Science Foundation.
The paper purported to find that fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field are making the earth hotter:
These oscillations of the baseline solar magnetic field are found associated with a long-term solar inertial motion about the barycenter of the solar system and closely linked to an increase of solar irradiance and terrestrial temperature in the past two centuries. This trend is anticipated to continue in the next six centuries that can lead to a further natural increase of the terrestrial temperature by more than 2.5 °C by 2600.
The article immediately received a barrage of criticism, including commenters who pointed out mistakes in the analysis. The controversy reached the science press, including this article in New Scientist, which reported:
Ken Rice of the University of Edinburgh, UK, criticised the paper for an “elementary” mistake about celestial mechanics. “It’s well known that the sun moves around the barycentre of the solar system due to the influence of the other solar system bodies, mainly Jupiter,” he says. “This does not mean, as the paper is claiming, that this then leads to changes in the distance between the sun and the Earth.”
Not surprisingly, the paper also garnered attention from climate change skeptics — some would say denialists — some of whom saw critiques of the work as evidence of left-wing scientists taking aim at any findings that threaten the dominant climate change narrative.
Scientific Reports evidently concluded that the critiques of the research had merit. According to the notice:
After publication, concerns were raised regarding the interpretation of how the Earth-Sun distance changes over time and that some of the assumptions on which analyses presented in the Article are based are incorrect.
The analyses presented in the section entitled “Effects of SIM on a temperature in the terrestrial hemispheres” are based on the assumption that the orbits of the Earth and the Sun about the Solar System barycenter are uncorrelated, so that the Earth-Sun distance changes by an amount comparable to the Sun-barycenter distance.
Post-publication peer review has shown that this assumption is inaccurate because the motions of the Earth and the Sun are primarily due to Jupiter and the other giant planets, which accelerate the Earth and the Sun in nearly the same direction, and thereby generate highly-correlated motions in the Earth and Sun. Current ephemeris calculations [1,2] show that the Earth-Sun distance varies over a timescale of a few centuries by substantially less than the amount reported in this article. As a result the Editors no longer have confidence in the conclusions presented.
S. I. Zharkov agrees with the retraction. V. V. Zharkova, E. Popova, and S. J. Shepherd disagree with the retraction.
‘We wish to declare our protest’
S.I. Zharkov is Sergei Zharkov, of the University of Hull, Zharkova’s son. Zharkov did not respond to our request for comment. However, in a lengthy response to our queries, Zharkova told us:
We wish to declare our protest against such the [sic] actions by the Chief Editor R. Marscalek to retract the paper with the new ground-breaking results on some minor corrections. We wish to record this protest with their Editor’s message retracting the paper.
We consider these actions by Mr Marszalek, Deputy Editor in chief, as an attempt to reduce our paper [sic] importance and the authors’ scientific standing.
Zharkova provided a link to a corrected version of the article, and claimed that:
The Editor retracts our paper based on the minor correction of the distance between Sun and Earth based on solar inertial motion mentioned in the last section.We have proven that the Editor’s statement of the reason for retraction is not a correct recollection what was said in this single paragraph of the paper, which was used against us to retract the paper (see the archive paper with the amended paragraph marked in blue https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020arXiv200206550Z/abstract). We said that the Sun-Earth distance would change UP to 0.02 au not that it would change BY 0.02 au.
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It is interesting to look at the blue paragraph in the amended paper. It states “The S-E distance is found, in average, linearly reducing from 1700 until 2700 with the rate of 0.00025 au per 100 years, or 0.0025 au per 1000 years.”
The authors have posted their plot of this in Figure 1 of http://mpee.northumbria.ac.uk/staff/slmv5/kinetics/Editor_Reviewer%20comments_v3b.pdf. A red flag in this plot of “Sun-Earth distance” is it is always below 1 au – indicating they cannot be not plotting the average Sun-Earth distance with time. They also repeat the false claim that the JPL ephemeris only include a limited number of planets in their calculations.
It is thus not surprising that the journal doesn’t have confidence in the results presented in any version of the paper.
Yes, it isn’t surprising. One of my regular commenters (link at the end) seems to have worked out how the produced that plot. It seems that they were trying to plot the Sun-Earth distance at a fixed time each year. Firstly, this wouldn’t give you the average and explains why it is less than 1. I had initially thought that they were plotting the perihelion distance, because this does change slowly as the orbital eccentricity changes. However, it’s my understanding that this is currently increasing slightly, rather than decreasing (as their figure shows). The issue appears to be that they’ve selected a sampling period that is very slightly smaller than 1 year, so that the Sun-Earth distance in their plot decreases very slowly, even though the perihelion distance is currently increasing slowly. It’s an aliasing problem.
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2020/01/13/zharkova-et-al-an-update/#comment-170070
It’s essentially worse in one way, she essentially seems to ignore Kepler’s third law, without any evidence beyond a misjudged single year observation and ignoring that which is claimed to be at the heart of any theorized instability, Jupiter’s 16.4m/s wobble on the sun and all because of hand wave.
And all of that, to try to disprove observations of ensolation, observations of atmospheric chemistry, observations of greenhouse gases, via extraordinary claims that can’t withstand a modicum of peer review!
I’m sorry, but if one wants to overrule Newton and Kepler, one had best bring along some extraordinary evidence and tons of it, along with replicated observations.
“Some would say denialists”…..
In true science, scepticism is demanded and is the main mechanism for ensuring scientific integrity and accuracy.
In climate science, scepticism is ruthlessly suppressed and no challenge is allowed of AGW theory.
If you criticise AGW, you are a “denier”
If you criticise a paper challenging AGW, you are a sceptic.
A lot of the people who promote this kind of work are of the ABC-type: Anything But Carbon. Their ‘scepticism’ is not scientific at all and they therefore do not deserve to be called skeptics.
A scientific skeptic would look at this paper and wonder how it got through peer review, and they’d also wonder how the authors managed to propose so few textual corrections, and yet manage to make an error even I (not an astrophysicist at all) can see right away. It’s in the paragraph in blue that the lead author points our attention to: Watts per second for Total Solar Irradiance. It’s mentioned twice.
Anyone know what process would have the units Joules per second square? Not TSI, that much is clear. The paper they cite (but for which they only list two authors, not all three) has the right units for that one: Watts per meter square.
You just proved my point, I wasn’t commenting about the article, I was commenting about the use of the word “denier”.
I am a climate sceptic but Zharkova’s work has always sounded a bit dodgy to me.
And you proved his point – you are not interested in the correct labeling in science skepticism respectively science denialism.
(And if you whine about garbage papers being retracted while blaming everything but the authors’ poor science, you are a tool…NOT a sceptic.)
Another example of reviewers who use a single non important point of the paper to cause a retraction, instead of asking for a correction. Another good example of shameful peer review.
I wonder why (rethoric)
No, the paper is predicated on the premiss that the S-E varies as the Baryonic centre.
It doesn’t.
That’s far from “not important”.
A Banton ==> “the paper is predicated on the premiss [sic] that the S-E varies as the Baryonic centre.” That is not the case — you need to read the paper itself and not the criticism of it by Brown, Rice, Schmidt, etc.
Even here, Ken Rice is quoted as saying “This does not mean, as the paper is claiming, that this then leads to changes in the distance between the sun and the Earth.” — and yet, Scientific Reports states clearly in their retraction statement: “….show that the Earth-Sun distance varies over a timescale of a few centuries by substantially less than the amount reported in this article.”
So, Rice is WRONG — the S-E distance does change — just not quite as much as Zharkova found. She corrects the distances in her corrected paper. The changes are “at the closest point – to 1.492238×10^{8} km (instead of 1.47x 10^{8} km listed in Z19) and at the most distant point – to 1.499719×10^{8} km (instead of 1.51x 10^{8} km listed in the paper Z19).”
I guess the question whether Rice is wrong hinges on the potential aliasing problem Everett F Sargent mentions. If Everett is right, Rice is right, and Zharkova is wrong even in the correction.
What Marco states is true. There is a temporal aliasing issue (sampling at the wrong annual cycle) and that temporal aliasing is exceptionally easy to reproduce, given a start time, a time step and a stop time.
Zharkova has not changed their Earth-Sun distance calculation since their use of the Alcyone Ephemeris software.
Read the paper! The dispute about S-E distances is irrelevant to the main point of the paper, which is the variation in the sun’s magnetic field. It is just a tiny correction. I suspect the venom of the criticism is due to people who haven’t read the paper assuming that the authors deny global warming by CO2. They don’t: they merely say the sun’s magnetic cycle is superimposed. It’s important to know, because the grand minimum may mask part of the CO2 global warming until 2050, but after then it will accelerate it.
Have any of the commentators here actually read the paper?
1. The authors do not deny that manmade CO2 emissions cause global warming: their theory is about an independent effect of the varying solar magnetic field.
2. Yes, the solar MAGNETIC FIELD, not the solar irradiation, which they agree has a very minor effect and is what is influenced by the earth-sun distance.
EXACTLY I agree.
Skepticism means considering *all* claims and evaluating the evidence as best you can.
In this case, the claim that the motion of the Sun around the solar system barycenter causes the Earth/Sun distance to change drastically is a difficult one to support; and the author’s attempts to defend her position on PubPeer were not convincing to me. When you go straight to impugning your critics’ motivations without first considering whether your physics holds up, you’re not doing science anymore.
Mary Kuhner ==> Zharkova et al do not say “that the motion of the Sun around the solar system barycenter causes the Earth/Sun distance to change drastically.”
They say (with some minor corrections to the numbers in the correction): “Since the Sun moves around the solar system barycenter, it implies that it also shifts around the main focus of
the Earth orbit being either closer to its perihelion or to its aphelion. If the Earth rotates around the Sun undisturbed by inertial motion, then the distances to its perihelion will be 1.47 × 108 km and to it aphelion 1.52 × 108 km. The 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.”
“Significantly:, with a range, is not the same as “dramatically”.
Kip, several things – the aliasing issue appears quite real, and reproducible, the link at ‘And then There’s Physics’ demonstrates it well, and explains how it came out. Second, your two comments about distances – the original reported difference between perihelion and aphelion is 5 million km, the revised distance is 750,000 km, which strikes me as having marked diminution of effects.
One point still remains to be seen, that point being the 2028-2032 date put forth by Zharkova and her team. If. What she claims is true then her theories have merit. Like she said,”we won’t have long to wait”
It wouldn’t matter, we have been in a grand solar minimum since 1975 [ https://twitter.com/AstroMikeMerri/status/1151528692209868801 ]. While the AGW effect is both going in the other direction and from PCA analysis not due to solar irradiation anyway.
The link mentions other problems with the retracted paper and/or erroneous climate claims.
And it goes something like this (cut-n-past from ATTP’s blog) …
“The GSM might actually happen, but this paper isn’t proof, it is more like Roulette, enough people bet and the table is 100% covered, someone will always win, and that is what this is all about, someone will get lucky and unfortunately famous for guessing correctly.”
So no. their theory has exactly zero merit. The Earth-Sun distance calculation of their’s is wrong (temporal aliasing of the annual cycle). Their baseline magnetic field calculation, as presented, is wrong (temporal undersampling of their curve fitting equations). Both of these are due to temporal aliasing issues. I have just enough of their digital data to prove both.
But, you say, what if they guessed correctly? Then that is all you have, that being that they made a lucky guess, and like gambling, with Mother Earth being the house, Mother Earth always wins.
No one will remember this paper for its merit, as it has none, but they will remember this paper for its demerit.
This is another instance of gremlins & leprechauns.
Gremlins: some effect is claimed to account for global warming, but it is either nonexistent or is measured to be far too small or relies on some mechanism that violates physics … Skeptical Science includes many such in this list, of which the very first is “It’s the Sun”.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/fixednum.php
But that’s not enough, one needs another magical effect, say leprechauns, who somehow exactly nullify the effects of all greenhouse gases, which tends to require disproving conservation of energy, well-known absorption-emission spectra, etc.
What is this “blaming the sun for global warming” crap title 🙂 ?
That person obviously did not read/understand the paper.
In one aspect of things we should be very happy the Sun is warming things up, otherwise none of use would be around to read this.
On the other hand the paper is pointing to the contrary; that we are on our way into a Solar Minimum period with a colder climate.
Paper by Zharkova rt al, 2019 https://solargsm.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Zharkova_et_al-2019-Scientific_Reports.pdf
This paper was retracted on 4 March 2020 on the unexplained grounds that solar inertial motion cannot cause the shift in Sun-Earth distances.
The authors have expressed our objection below the retraction note, extracted paper and on my personal website https://solargsm.com.
Furthermore, in July 2020 V. Zharkova processed the JPL ephemeris of the Sun-Earth distances for every day from 600 to 2600.
The S-E distances from the ephemeris have shown a clear proof that the Sun is shifted from the focus of ellipse as Zharkova et al, 2019 suggested in the paper Zharkova et al, 2019. Zharkova demonstrate that this Sun’s shift owing to the large planets approaches 0.011 au in the millennium 1600-2600 and thus, leads to the increase of the terrestrial temperature.
Read the archive paper by Zharkova here https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.00439.pdf and the appendices shown the pats of the S-E distances here https://solargsm.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Appendix-1.pdf and solar irradiance variations imposed by these distances here https://solargsm.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Appendix-2.pdf
These are the proofs that the original paper retraction has been motivated only by the AGW people trying to cover the main source of the increasing temperature on the Earth which is caused by the Sun moving closer tot he Earth.
How much are worth those empty declarations and accusation from the AGW people, who did not learn the basics of the Earth and other planet rotation about the Sun and their gravitational effects on the Sun itself and other planets?
Kind regards
Valentina Zharkova
Crickets…
A layman here (just an engineer with a working knowledge of physics). Where are all the detractors – to reply to the points made (above) by Valentina Zharkova? I have watched her video on YT and read her online website. I see no flaw. I only see a lot of criticism which isn’t backed up when replies are made. It would appear she is very much onto something which some won’t council. If we are to spend trillions on climate change, didn’t we ought to know the real reasons? We will only justify the enormous expense if we really do know the real reasons. Talk to a climate expert on the subject and you come away with the thought that we don’t know very much at all! It saddens me that the usual suspects came out to shout the paper down.
Barry, her video and website are heavily curated, focusing on her points and ignoring or minimizing criticism. You can find equally persuasive evidence on perpetual motion and the flat Earth from similar sources. Attribution work is nicely described in the IPPC (detailing how we know it’s changes in heat leaving the atmosphere, not energy coming in), and check the links mentioned to the And Then There’s Physics blog, written by people who do this work for a living, and know the pitfalls involved.
In March 2021 V. Zharkova have published the book chapter Millennial Oscillations of Solar Irradiance and Magnetic Field in 600–2600 https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/75534 using the real ephemeris of the daily Earth-Sun distances with the confirmation that our results reported in paper Zharkova et al, 2019 are correct. The variations of Sun-Earth distances hinted in the paper were confirmed by the S-E distance ephemeris (see Figs. 5-9 in the chapter).
These variations lead to the increase of solar irradiance deposited to the Earth and other planets and terrestrial temperatures in the past centuries after Maunder Minimum that will last until 2500-2600. This are variations of solar irradiance called Hallstatt’s cycles with a duration about 2100-2200 years. There were many of such the Hallstatt’s cycles happened in the past, which led to the regular millennial variations of the terrestrial temperature recorded in the historical records.
Therefore, the paper Zharkova et al, 2019 has been retracted without any grounds!
Valentina Zharkova
So how does this respond to the attribution work which indicates its variation in heat leaving the Earth, not heat incoming, that is driving current warming?
Physics Nobel Prize Winner 2022 says the IPCC is CORRUPTED, follows dangerous pseudo science.
Dr. John F. Clauser, joint recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, has criticized the climate emergency narrative calling it “a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people.”
https://joannenova.com.au/2023/07/another-skeptical-nobel-laureate-of-physics-climate-science-has-metastasized/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=another-skeptical-nobel-laureate-of-physics-climate-science-has-metastasized
Heat is not “coming in”. Solar radiation is coming in. I am not a physicist, but I do understand some basics.