The Danger Of Short Datasets
17 hours ago Willis Eschenbach
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
A couple of months ago, I came across another claim that the solar sunspot cycle affects weather down here at the earth’s surface, in particular, ocean temperatures in the El Nino region of the tropical Pacific Ocean. The paper is called Evidence of solar 11-year cycle from Sea Surface Temperature (SST), by Mazza and Canuto, hereinafter MC2021. I wrote about it in my post “CEEMD Versus Joe Fourier”. In this post, I thought I’d expand my analysis a bit and clarify one of the reasons why the MC2021 claims are not true.
Now, folks who read my work may be aware that I started out as a true believer in the idea that sunspots affect surface weather. As a kid, I’d read about William Herschel’s 1801 claim that sunspots affected wheat prices in England. So I thought it would be very easy to find evidence that the variations in solar energy caused by sunspots actually changed surface weather.
But when I first went to actually look at the data, I found … nothing. So I kept looking. Since then I’ve looked at dozens and dozens of claimed correlations and found … nothing. Well, that’s not exactly true. I did find a scientific paper called “On The Insignificance Of Herschel’s Sunspot Correlation“, wherein the author looked for hard evidence to back up Herschel’s claim and found …
Nothing.
So, I was interested in the MC2021 paper. It says:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/03/18/the-danger-of-short-datasets/
