On Monday, we started the week off with an illuminating discussion about a non-peer-reviewed paper that was getting some traction in the outermost fringe. Today, we’re ending the week with a (supposedly) peer-reviewed paper that’s no less flawed, but has found a bit more traction in mainstream media--if you consider Rupert Murdoch’s Australian to be mainstream.
The study, published in Scientific Reports, basically claims that wobbles in the Sun’s movement in space change the distance between the Earth and the Sun, and that movement is what’s responsible for warming- and will cause another 2.5C warming over the next few hundred years.
But is that really the case?
Dr. Ken Rice over at And Then There’s Physics (ATTP) has a post on the paper, pointing out a pretty glaring and fundamental error. Given that the lead author Valentina Zharkova is no stranger to denial, it’s not exactly a shock that there’s a problem, but the fact that it somehow got through peer review is certainly an issue. Fortunately, the journal’s going to go back and double-check the work, but until then, here’s the situation.
While the Earth orbits the Sun, the Sun itself doesn’t stay in one place. Instead, it orbits the solar system’s barycenter, the center of mass around which multiple bodies orbit. This study suggests that the Sun’s wobbles around the barycenter change the distance between the Sun and Earth, and that difference leads to a change in temperature, which makes sense.
But the Earth’s orbit changes with the Sun’s, because the same gravitational forces that make the Sun wobble (hi, Jupiter!) also affect the Earth. So while the Sun’s position in the solar system might wiggle around some, the apparently obscure concept unknown to Zharkova called gravity keeps the Earth relatively the same distance from the moving Sun. Both Earth and the Sun actually orbit the solar system’s barycenter, so anything that would influence the Sun’s orbit would similarly influence our own.
As Rice writes, this paper’s assertion that the Earth’s distance from the Sun changes because of the Sun’s wobbles, “violates some pretty basic orbital dynamics.” There are more scathing comments and some considerable back-and-forth with Zharkova over at PubPeer, if you’re interested in seeing how peer-review plays out in public.
But even if one assumes this report got it right, that doesn’t mean we don’t need to worry about fossil fuels causing warming. This paper doesn’t in any way disprove the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, so if it were true, it would only mean that we have even more of a reason to reduce carbon pollution: not only to undo the warming it’s causing, but also to balance out the natural warming from the Sun!
What’s more, as a commenter at ATTP points out, if these little wobbles are enough to change the climate as much as the authors claim, then that would mean the climate is even more sensitive to forces than already believed. So to accept the findings of this paper would also mean accepting that carbon dioxide changes the climate even more than what we already know.
Like many other studies that deniers hype, even if this one were true, it still wouldn’t reduce the empirical justification for reducing emissions.
And so the sun sets on another denier excuse.
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