Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Solar resonant diffusion waves

At the beginning of this International Heliophysical Year, Robert Ehrlich offers a new theory what is the main driver of terrestrial climate change:

in (peer-reviewed) Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics (URL). The diffusion waves modulate the dependence of various quantities on the distance from the center of the Sun; the relevant distance is between 0.21 and 0.25 solar radii. These effects are meant to account for fluctuations of the terrestrial temperature at the sub-megayear timescale.

The author uses various methods that will probably be difficult to understand for the scientific consensus - formerly known as the average and worse-than-average climate scientists - for example the Fourier transform. On page 15 you may see how his theory predicts three frequencies of the time-dependence very accurately. I am very impressed by the figure 2 and the simple formula behind it. Ehrlich predicts that the dominant frequencies giving peaks in the Fourier transform should be

  • fn = f1 n2

and his figure 2 shows a remarkable agreement with observation for "n=2,3,4". Now, the statement that some frequencies are proportional to a square of an integer sounds pretty fundamental - almost like the spectrum of the Hydrogen atom - and one should look carefully before dismissing such an interesting observation.

Ehrlich believes that his theory should supersede the conventional explanations based on the Milankovitch cycles - where the main driver is encoded in the quasiperiodically oscillating parameters of the orbit of our planet - and he enumerates some of these problems that could be solved in his setup.

Via Benny Peiser.