“She says that the earth-Sun distances are discussed in an appendix (A1) but the link isn’t working. A2 is working, but not A1. I suspect (but am not sure) that it’s these earth-Sun distances that she got wrong by using the wrong length of the sidereal year in the simulation. But maybe I’m wrong. If you find a working link to A1 I’d be interested. I’ll have a look too.”
Think this is it:
Cheers
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
etc, etc.
It’s green and pleasant because it has a temperate climate where it pisses down with rain most of the time (but for some reason the UK is still unable to grow its own food).
From what I hear, in July the UK had summer weather for 3 or 4 days, with temperatures no different from previous decades. Now it’s back to pissing down with rain (and for some reason they are now talking about water shortages).
The British obsession with the weather is because you don’t really have weather.
It’s just crap most of the time.
Yes, sure, except my “likely” is an honest opinion, not a pretence to justify whatever war aims or other agendas the elites want to achieve.
As I’ve mentioned previously, one has to be very wary of the actions or solutions offered. In particular, I think some sort of cost/benefit analysis should be done (as should have happened for the covid measures).
Hi ED
Gravitational n-body simulations are extremely well understood, and very accurate. It’s what allows us to land tiny spacecraft onto similarly tiny orbiting comets. Zero room for error there. Not even Zharkova is claiming these are wrong, as far as I can see, as she is using exactly these sorts of n-body simulations to determine the movement of the Sun’s orbit around the solar system centre of mass. Where she went wrong (initially) is that she didn’t do that for the earth, and made assumptions about the earth orbit that turned out to be wrong.
Incidentally, just to clear this point up
That’s not how an n-body sim works. It doesn’t assume anything about orbits - it calculates the orbit based on the theory of gravity. You don’t put in an assumption about the orbit, you put in the masses of the planets, the starting conditions, the gravitational constant, and the orbits are calculated by the sim using gravity. If the earth orbited the centre of mass of the solar system, the n-body sim would show you that - no need for assumptions about what orbits what.
Newton, Einsten and the theory of gravitation have to be wrong for n-body simulations to be wrong… that’s quite unlikely(!)
I don’t think that is her argument. She is not taking issue with n-body sims - she’s using them herself. She is saying that she has noticed something that everyone else has missed. Unsurprisingly, other astronomers didn’t agree. And in the end neither did the editors of the journal that pulled the paper.
I think given the circumstances, Zharkova really sunk her credibility here. But that’s just my opinion (and a bunch of astronomers who tried to show her where she went wrong).
It now looks (from the latest version of the appendix of of her paper - thanks) that she’s made some changes, and shrunk down the amount that she claims the earth-sun distance changes by a significant amount. This looks more realistic, and is close to an already understood cycle called the Milankovitch cycle, and the implications for such cycles are fairly well understood, and are already accounted for (along with sunspot cycles btw) in the later climate change models.
So just how does this affect anything to do with our current.understanding of climate change? As far as I can see it hasn’t changed a thing. She made a claim about earths orbit, was shown that was wrong, then revised her claim down to something that is basically already known and accounted for.
None of the actually measured fingerprints of the current warming epoch (some of which I already mentioned) are explained by her theory. It really adds nothing to our understanding of climate change. Not even a thumb tack, let alone a nail!
On the final point re:retraction, if the editors of the journal that published the paper now say the paper is retracted, I’m not inclined to argue with them. That feels like semantics.
Cheers
PP
The Heartland institute.
The
Heartland
Institute.
The actual same bunch of paid charlatans and corporate shills who worked tirelessly to lie, fake and otherwise muddy the science that showed the 100% clear link between smoking and lung cancer. They are doing exactly the same now with the clear link between CO2 and climate change.
When I said, a few weeks ago, that the same corporate forces that tried to hide the link between smoking and cancer were also trying to hide evidence of climate change these were the exact people I was talking about. How many deaths are the heartland institute responsible for? How many more will they now be responsible for?
If you’re on the same side as the Heartland Institute, you’re definitely, unquestionably on the wrong side. They have made careers out of corrupting actual science. It’s like being on Dick Cheney’s side on the Iraq war. You should really have a think about your position here, CJ.
And you have the utter audacity to claim that the climate scientists are biased.
Chutzpah doesn’t even come close.
PP
PS - I’m still interested in your answers to the basic questions I’ve asked you two or three times now. No pressure though.
Hi again PP
I didn’t say she claimed the N-body sims were wrong. I’ve no doubt I expressed it inaccurately as I lack a real understanding of this stuff; however I did read 150 posts in the big thread, and there was definitely an issue with the assumptions on the orbits as I roughly described. She says several times, why should the earth just follow the sun while the other planets don’t. There was to-ing and fro-ing on this point, mostly entrenched. Be my guest and correct my description. I’ve not got a horse in this race and don’t feel it’s worth the time reading it all again just to correct my language.
According to Zharkova the changes that could be made to accommodate the editors criticisms would not change the conclusions of the paper. This is very important.
So until the revision is contextualised I don’t feel it’s justified to claim the paper makes no difference.
It’s surely also relevant that Zharkova et al were not asked to change the paper - the journal simply wanted it deleted. It’s hardly semantic to object to this - deleting opposing views in a discussion is called cheating. I’ve not seen a single comment that agreed with the deleting of the paper from the journal.
As a mathematician you aren’t obliged to use incorrect language that other people use; the word ‘retraction’ changes the meaning of the word. It misleads journalists, for example.
To talk in terms of credibility doesn’t add anything to the question of who is right. BTW there were two professors and two PhDs wrote the paper.
Cheers
ED
Hi bwana. V quick add falling asleep now
This is exactly the kind of thing you never expect a prof of astronomy to say. There is nothing special about the earth’s orbit. It behaves like all the other orbits do (bar uranus if I remember). They follow the laws of gravity.
Zharkova didn’t need to argue. She just had to run the simulation and check it for herself. Several people suggested she did that and in the end they did it for her.
That is the answer to her hypothesis about the orbit of the earth… why she didn’t do it herself, just believing instead that the earth’s orbit was fixed while the sun wobbled about, is an unsolved mystery…but it’s unusual in a professor of astronomy.
Right, that’s it from me. My other points more our less remain. There’s nothing in this paper that I can see that changes our understanding of AGW.
Cheers
This report was conducted under the control of Anthony Watts who only became a senior fellow at Heartlands in 2019 and so has no Heartlands baggage (I haven’t looked at this organisation’s past so I don’t comment unless others comment with appropriate unbiased sources), he authored a similar report in 2009 and 2015.
I’m not on any side I am merely trying to air the work of people who have no connection with the IPCC crowd because the latter have no opposing view in the MSM and other media outlets.
No subject ever has just one viewpoint, I am now reading Don Easterbrook’s work which at first blush seems to support Watts on corrupted temperature data and Zharkova on Solar causes of climate change. He seems quite an interesting geology professor. I’m just waiting for your inevitable dismissive response free of unbiased sources of course.
A quote from Pepe Escobar, paraphrasing Rumi, on gaining understanding (note in particular the three words in parenthesis!) 
:
“In the first stage, one tries to find God by intellectual proof (failure is inevitable). In the second stage, one may be tuned in to divine secrets. In the third stage, one is able to see Reality and understand It spiritually. That’s a path not dissimilar to reaching enlightenment in Buddhism.”
This insight probably applies to understanding climate, as well as to finding God.
Re. the Heartlanders: sure, ratfinks the lot of them; money-dishonesty-and-lunacy-driven shills. But - er - setting aside the foulness of the messenger, is that message worth consideration? Might it be true? As Chris avers, ad hominems against opposing arguments don’t really cut it. The source may be iffy, but a given statement may still be true.
Dogmatic certainty about what the climate is going to do is simply not justified - or justifiable. Upheavals? Bet on it. How much, which direction, what details? Does not compute.
Not just that we don’t know; it’s simply not knowable in advance, in principle. We are - fairly certainly - in for some nasty shocks. But we may also witness some fortunate reliefs which no-one foresaw - or was even able to foresee. Climate really is a very complex system. Best not to indulge in despair and panic.
In any case, is hom sap actually going to do anything collectively which addresses these fears adequately? Over and above coteries of gic money-grubbers attempting to monetise them, I mean? (No.)
So - be prepared, but don’t obsess pointlessly. 
PS: Physicist Steven Kooning speaks with Joe Rogan, on the subject:
It was meant as a reducto ad absurdum of what her opponent were saying.
“She just had to run the simulation and check it for herself. Several people suggested she did that and in the end they did it for her”
I can’t answer your point but she has. She said it was built into the model.
Who is right? I can’t tell.
“There’s nothing in this paper that I can see that changes our understanding of AGW.”
But if the change make no difference, doesn’t the paper imply temperature changes caused by bigger cycle in solar radiation (or swap with other phsyics word to suit )?
It seem to me you rely on wording - the way you take aim at the people…you’re going through a lot of professors! (3 and counting).
More objectively, to draw your conclusion you need to be able to say the paper with the corrections’ is not valid.
Cheers
PPS: Steven Koonin is adamant that more trees is the best single thing we can do to counter too much anthropogenic CO2. Love it!
Hi @RhisiartGwilym , in his “Unsettled” book he references this paper from Hermann Harde who says this about anthropogenic CO2:
“ So, with a CO2 induced global warming of about 0.3°C over the last century not more than 0.05°C should be caused by human activities.”
last sentence of his discussion and assessment 5.4
cheers
Yes I saw that. No idea who’s right. That’s the central problem: WhoTF is right? Is anyone? How do we judge? One thing I do get more sure about though: I’m definitely drifting into the ‘we don’t trust the technocrats’ camp; an attitude which looks set to grow - just as JMGreer predicts.
Still, for all this, wait and see is OK, because we’re not going to do anything about climate shift - except, as Steven says, adapt, as and when we must, mostly at local levels. So wait and see, and make incremental personal changes when you just must, seems to be the default strategy that we’re adopting, without really deciding to.
I have zero confidence that anyone - apart from the gics - is going to do anything effective about the alleged crisis; and the gics are only going to attempt whatever seems likeliest to increase their WealthPowerStatus, and the baronial control of everything which they think will go with that; they’ll do nothing else. I also have zero confidence that anyone at all has a sure-fire reliable forecast of the climate outcome; though many are fanatically sure that they have, clearly.
One thing that does strike me, though, listening to all the argy-bargy: No-one at all, in their peering into climate futures, seems to be taking much notice of that other, much more obviously real crisis: the Limits, and the Long Descent which they mandate. That’s going to have a big effect on anthropogenic everything: less of us around, with a lot less per-capita energy to throw around, to make mayhem.
All of that sobering change looks likely to be organised for us, by forces well beyond our control, without us having to make any decisions or exercise any disciplined management of the situation. Whenever anyone predicts what will happen with the climate, they all seem to assume that constantly-growing startrekkytechietechie industrialism, with constant economic growth, and persisting big overshot population figures, will all be permanent parts of the equation; whereas none of those assumptions are at all likely.
And as all those human-made things fall apart, it will be possible for the trees to take matters into their own boughs, and re-stabilise all those on-planet parts of the climate complexity which don’t depend on subtle variations in the movement of distant heavenly bodies.
I expect that to be the default outcome. I hope I can get re-incarnations timed to allow me to watch - and celebrate - the return of the forests; and the tall-grass prairies/steppe/pampas/etc, enjoying the slightly warmer climate, and the welcome - to them - increase in available atmospheric CO2 (still only a few hundred ppm, even then, natch, just as it’s been many times before, in periods of great thriving of life on Earth…)
CJ
Any chance you might answer the questions I asked you?
I’m still waiting. How do you know if someone agrees with Zharkova when you have apparently no idea what she’s actually saying?
How about trying to engage with the points I’ve made about Zharkova’s errors? I’ve even provided some links
You cannot talk about bias and then cite papers from known liars and corporate prostitutes with a track record like the Heartland Institute. Sorry… That’s just hypocrisy. You have sided with the most biased source there is.
It’s a bad look.
I see you’re already trying to move onto the next person, and you’ve not responded to any of the points I’ve made about Zharkova. This pattern you have of shooting and running away is a tad frustrating. If you really believe in what Zharkova says, why not actually discuss or defend her POV?
Instead here we go, onto a new person, exactly as I predicted in my very first comment in this thread.
Frustrating…
No, Rhis. Would you trust anything the Heartland Institute had to say about cancer and smoking? No. They are the worst kind of corporate prostitutes. All opinion bought and paid for by billionaire donors, big pharma (pfizer is a big donor), big oil (shell, Exxon) and big tech.
Their stated aims are to distort the science and keep the corporate profits rolling in to their donors no matter how many people they kill along the way. They are 100% suspect, and nothing they are connected with should be trusted.
The hypocrisy of someone who blathers on and on about bias then quotes the HI as a reliable source is pretty laughable.
Anyone who is connected to HI is totally compromised and simply cannot be trusted. Especially these days, having witnessed how HI had consistently acted to prevent the truth getting out fir over 40 years.
What kind of honest broker would hitch their wagon to such scum?
PP
Hi PP. It’s getting a bit hectory again… 
Zharkova told New Scientist
" “The close links between oscillations of solar baseline magnetic field, solar irradiance and temperature are established in our paper without any involvement of solar inertial motion,” Zharkova told New Scientist."
So some people - who are already committed in opposition to the conclusions - want the paper cancelled because of alleged ‘errors’ that according to Zharakova would not change the conclusions anyway.
It’s clear from the NS article (it’s headline was “Journal criticised for study claiming sun is causing global warming”) that the journal was pressured into withdrawing the paper.
That’s not a political dynamic that is commensurate with good science. In terms of the ethos of this site, it comes under ‘flak’.
(btw I think we should resist extending it to our own discussions ).
Have ‘errors’ been found in many of Zharkova’s 200 publications?
Professor Valentina Zharkova.
I want to be able to see what people like Zharkova and her 3 associates are saying.
This just isn’t the way science should be discussed, in my view! “Ah - we were wrong about Galileo, but we are right this time…”.
Cheers
P: read over what you wrote above. Trifle over-authoritarian, perhaps?
I don’t care who said it, the comment may still be sound, even when the speakers are as cess-pitty as the Heartlanders.
Probably the only cess-pit to which I’d give no quarter is Wikideceivia. But that’s just a particular bee in my bonnet, I dare say. Wikideceivia delenda est!
The fact remains: authoritarian over-certainty cannot be justified regarding the climate. We really don’t - and can’t - know for sure what’s going to happen.
Things might even turn out a lot less bad than we’ve been fearing: I mentioned in an earlier post the observation that so much of the climate prediction output seems to rely on the assumption that techno-socio-economic BAU will continue right through the time of the alleged upcoming climate catastrophe, and that sound conclusions can still be drawn about what will happen, despite that BAU delusion.
If you wanted to make a case that that crisis - the Long Descent - is pretty nearly proven beyond dispute, more so than the climate predictions, I’d be inclined to agree (though with the usual caveat that ALL predictions are inherently tricky and iffy). The way TLTG has held up since its publication in the early '70s encourages confidence in its continuing accuracy.
So - people trying to foresee climate behaviour should surely factor in the braking effects that the Long Descent will have on the anthropogenic climate effects in the near future.
But no: compartmentalised as usual, the climate predictors seem content not to notice at all, let alone to factor in, the effects of the Descent on climate trends.
And this is to say nothing of the steadily-surfacing insight that cosmic cycles, of varying wave-lengths, seem to have a lot of overall influence on Earth climate; possibly much bigger than anthropogenic effects.
I sense that this whole evolving argument is a manifestation of growing public mistrust of technocracy generally, and therefore of the haughtily over-confident pronouncements of the technocratically-inclined. Justified mistrust, as the past 28 months of particularly monstrous fiddling by the technocrats has demonstrated…
As ever, P, even whilst disagreeing with you, I do so without the least hint of hostile personal animus to you, friend. Be confident about that! Cheers!
Oh but, PS: Concerning egregores. Yes, seriously folks!
For those unfamiliar with the idea, these are collective-unconscious memes/thought-forms that communities of people can generate - almost without noticing. (Solo individuals can generate them too, though to have the same power as collective examples requires both the native talent of a gifted shaman, plus the long-dedicated specific magic-making work of a really serious mage.)
Often, stray, unmanaged egregores are generated by accidental communities of thought without ever intending - or even noticing - what they’re doing. A lot of that will be going on right now, with the wave of stampeded emotions surging about the world.
But what I’m sketching here is the idea that - deep in our profoundest alter-conscious (I don’t believe that anything is ever wholly un-conscious!) - there is a permanent connection to the - well, let’s just call it The Great Spirit, for now - which prods us to say to ourselves:
“Oi, wake up! Can’t you see what you’re doing with all this calamitous, and gratuitous, worrying: you’re actually helping the worries to happen; you’re helping to gestate the egregore!”
So it’s some comfort to me that I think I begin to sense the surfacing of a counter-current which says: “Look, we really don’t and can’t know for sure just how this hugely-complex, probabilistic system is going to jump. But what we can do is to note all the actually-mollifying straws in the wind, and grab them, to start forming a healing and resolving egregore, to nudge events towards a better outcome.”
This is what, in my personal lexicon, I call ‘coincidence magic’: it all works out in ways that allow any fanatically-sceptical reductive-materialist to declare: “Oh pooh-pooh! That was all just pure coincidence, with absolutely no teleological component in it. Obviously! I mean: obviously!”
But meanwhile, the better-informed (because better-experienced) actual practitioners of shamanic/ceremonial magic are confident that such unobtrusive work has real effects in the world. The work of the current generation of professional psi-researchers, such as Dean Radin (qv!), have demonstrated these realities to a six-sigma degree that would gladden the heart of any committed numeracy-addicted technocrat.
So - I think I can sense the awakening of a countervailing egregore, which says:
“Wait! Let’s not aid and abet the stampede into Chicken Little panic! Let’s notice that the situation is still eminently salvageable, even though the bulk of our fellow humans are not going to do anything very active to salvage it. Nevertheless, committed mages/shamans can work to alleviate it, both singly and in cooperating circles. As we who have earned our AATREC - our acclimatisation and track-record - in magical disciplines already know from experience, such work can, and commonly does, have profound ‘happy-coincidence’-generating effects. Here’s to our lustily-growing benign-resolution egregore for the climate crisis!”
It also happens that once such a vanguard of pioneers has proclaimed the better egregore, the deep alter-conscious awareness of it grows in many minds, and quietly, in the modest way that is all that most of us can manage, lots of previously uncommitted souls hop aboard the healing band-waggon, in their rem-sleep dreamtime, if nothing more than that; and once the tide turns, that all adds bulk, size and power to the egregore.
Materialists are hereby encouraged, for the sake of their emotional comfort, to go on kidding themselves that all the above is loony moonshine, and we have to get with the emergency geo-engineering, pronto!!!
But - wait and see, sweeties! 
Hi @RhisiartGwilym , I watched the Rogan interview with interest, like his book Unsettled , Koonin holds back on the edge when being asked about percentage increases in temperature added by man-made CO2 - unlike Hermann Harde who I mentioned earlier.
But in passing during the interview with Rogan SK mentioned some agreement the BBC had entered into to limit publication of certain views , I tried to find it afterwards but couldn’t, but I did find this on line re :
BBC policy on climate change:
“What’s the BBC’s position?
The document concludes with a list of “common misconceptions” produced by the Science Media Centre (SMC). The list appears to be an adapted update of a document (pdf) published by the SMC in 2012.
The SMC was established in 2002 and seeks to “provide, for the benefit of the public and policymakers, accurate and evidence-based information about science and engineering through the media, particularly on controversial and headline news stories when most confusion and misinformation occurs”.
SMC seems a very shady operation from an initial glance, has this been looked into anywhere?
SMC Funding: over 100 funders mainly corporate, note highest Welcome Trust and UKRI ( which gets 7.9 billion pounds p.a. from UK Government department of Business Enterprise under KK ( see latest UK column news on this operation:
)
https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/about-us/funding/
SMC Governance:
https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/about-us/governance/
SMC working with journalists :
“The Science Media Centre provides journalists with what they need in the timeframe they need it, from interviews with leading experts to timely press briefings on topical issues. We provide journalists with information about science and its related disciplines, making it easier for them to get access to the best evidence and expertise. Given our focus on science in the headlines, the SMC works mainly with science and news journalists in the UK’s national news outlets.”
https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/working-with-us/
And of course SMC is not confined to the UK - its going global:
https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/international-smcs/
The steps being taken these days to limit climate change discussion in the MSM and on line is amazing - SMC and UKRI are up to their necks in propaganda to this end but they don’t stop at Climate Change they’re looking at all areas of science! Is this one of the Technocracy tentacles at work!
cheers
The connection between Wickipedia and the Heartlands “scum” comment seems clear. We’ve heard the slur against Heartlands - even though I pointed out that the US temperature project is an Anthony Watts ( with help from volunteers on his popular website WattsUpWithThat, apparently the most widely viewed blog on climate Change!) project backed up by people and resources from Heartlands and follows on from his totally independent analysis of the same subject in 2009.
But leaving aside the fact that Heartlands had little control over the recent analysis of the US temperature processes, if it was only Heartlands, how do people normally assess such an organisation - they go to Wikipedia and according to Heartlands they get rubbish:
It starts like this:
“ What’s Wrong with Wikipedia?
By Joseph L. Bast
President, The Heartland Institute February 18, 2016
In recent months, left-wing activists have hijacked The Heartland Institute’s profile at Wikipedia, removing objective descriptions of our programs and publications and replacing them with lies, errors, and outright libelous claims. Our efforts to correct the site have been rejected by the editors of the self-described “free encyclopedia.”
Their website has this on tobacco:
“ policy on tobaccos
https://www.heartland.org/Alcohol-Tobacco/index.html
tobacco control
“Smoking poses well-known health risks. Smoking is habit-forming and isn’t healthy, and kids shouldn’t smoke. But government regulators have gone well beyond reasonable measures to discourage smoking and protect nonsmokers, and they are now waging all-out war on smokers. That’s wrong. Federal, state, and local government in the United States have used excise taxes, smoking bans, and other regulations in an attempt discourage cigarette use, but those are having little effect on smoking rates.
Many anti-smoking activists attack alternatives that could save smokers lives. While going cold turkey or using nicotine replacement therapies work for some smokers, they don’t work for all. Another option is to reduce the harm by shifting to less-hazardous products that provide similar enjoyment such as “snus,” heat-not-burn tobacco, or e-cigarettes. Electronic cigarettes and vaporized nicotine products (VNPs) offer many advantages to current tobacco smokers: They eliminate the dangerous chemicals and toxins found in tobacco smoke, and thus are great products to reduce the harm current tobacco smokers face. Unfortunately, opponents want to impose overzealous regulation and excessive taxation on these products even though they are a proven harm reduction tool.”
This is a point of view we never see in the msm , is it because debate is harmful? Or are there other agendas in play, have we looked at the impact of other pollutants alongside smoking , transport exhaust, agricultural products, building materials, heating products, kitchen products or combinations of these? We were often propagandised by the Tobacco lobby to look at examples of very ancient smokers who didn’t die of lung cancer but I don’t recall any mentioning a known link between smoking and heart and circulation problems. It’s all in the devil detail isn’t it!
My advice , don’t start but if you do stop as soon as you can, and if you can’t then don’t smoke much! But hey what do I know I haven’t done the science. On this, we have questioned Covid science from every angle and recalled pharma disasters of the past - thalidomide- so medical and big pharma science can no longer carry a gold standard badge of approval automatically, sometimes debate and questioning of settled science needs to be done.
I speak as an ex smoker for over 16 years.
I don’t recall the lobbyists for the obesity making industries being called scum - and yet what they do maybe almost as bad as the Tobacco industry - or is it? Hmm maybe we should debate these.
It’s a totally mixed up world once we start witch hunts based on wikipedia pages. But straight debate of the facts as we can independently discover them seems the way to cut through it all - not censorship of one side of the argument. I am a firm believer in free speech on anything provided the speaker has no malicious intent ( this is supposed to be the US constitutional position on free speech afaik, not the UK one! )
cheers