The global warming denier Richard Lindzen from MIT came up with a theory for the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (QBO) of stratospheric winds (think jet-stream altitude) in the 1960's. As far as I can tell, his theory has not really been debunked. But since Lindzen is a crackpot known for other outlandish theories (such as his insane Iris cloud theory), it is likely that his QBO theory is of crank quality as well.
So it is apropos to report that Lindzen's 50 year old theory is debunked completely in this blog post.
What is slick about the new theory is it follows the long-term cycle of ocean tides, which are essentially controlled by lunar forces. The alignment between lunar months and QBO harmonics is striking, stretching back to the early 1950's, and able to extrapolate tidal action to 1900. Check out the following figures.
To understand why and how this simple a model has been overlooked, you only have to understand the psyche of Lindzen. The new analysis only depends on understanding how aliasing of lunar months onto strong yearly cycles impacts the gravitational forcing of stratospheric winds. But why would Lindzen admit to this simple mechanism when it would shred his credibility for good?
I have a suspicion that the scientists at NASA JPL know that this is the case; I uncovered a proposal that they submitted from a few years ago where they talked about just this kind of mechanism.
C. Perigaud, “Importance of the Earth-Moon system for reducing uncertainties in climate modelling and monitoring.”, 2009. ftp://lavezzi.cerfacs.fr/...
Hopefully this project was funded and the results they find substantiate what I discovered (also how it describes the El Nino pattern). And then we can put Lindzen out to pasture for good.
( and to DK troll Lenny Flank, up your "correlation does not equal causation" :)