NOTE:  I am [biased, enthusiastic] about her presentation, given that essentially everthing she says is in earlier [modelling, studies, documents] that I have produced (see below).   I saw the same 1h34m video presentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_yqIj38UmY&feature=youtu.be) last 05Nov2018, becasue it was mentioned in that day's 5 minute solar news video that I watch every day (https://www.youtube.com/user/Suspicious0bservers/videos), or it popped up in YouTube when watching the solar news. 

Zharkova is an extremely rare, thinking scientist, rather than being an "intellectual robot" as with essentially all [government, academic] scientists (eg - essentially all university professors).  She has done a nice job of pulling together a small subset of concepts that actually describe climate, notably :

• Charvatova's barycentric models (Sun-Earth motions rount the center of gravity of the solar system)
  
• Svensmark's [cosmic, glactic] rays and cloud etc (based on ealier work back to the 1940's?)
• Jack Eddy's work on Maunder minimum - he is seldom cited, so this is nice to see
• I forget some of her other solid background material...
  

Why are Zharkova's [papers, presentations] having an effect NOW?
It is strange for me to see the "somewhat sudden" prominence of Zharkova's work in public fora (albeit still in non-mainstream fora), as the core ideas have been there for decades, and have been ignored for decades.   So why now?  Her solar cycle 24 forecast sucess is one reason, but others have said that before : 

• Theodore Landscheit (AcadiaU, NB Canada) -  ?1960's-1980s?)
• Ivanka Charvatova (1988-modern)
  
• Early 2000s  - ?Abdusamatov?, Cornelieus Kees de Jager - to a lesser extent (he & Sylvia Duhau now expect Dalton-like or smaller minimum, with subsequent rise)
  

Science, as with [religion, politics, etc], is a process of "programming the intellectual robots", notably starting with the intellectuals.  I do NOT agree with Thomas Kuhn (paradigm shifts) or Karl Popper (disprovability) (nice ideas, but of very limited use).

So what is "flipping the robots", and how?  This is a long-term theme of interest to me.  Marketing and politics already have many keys to it, whereas science seems oblivious to its own [long-standing, recurring] failures.


What might this mean to Wheatland county?
While the [naive, lunatic, one-dimensional] theory of my father and I for history (the rise and fall of civilisations over the last 7,500 years) is scarier, even the more "complacent" hints from my 2008 presentation are scary enough (see below).  

Can this happen again? For sure, and much, much worse is expected "on the long term". 
Will it happen soon?  It is safest to assume that NOBODY can predict the sun for more than a cycle, perhaps not even Charvatova (it appears to me that her work may be the [key, solid] base of Zharkova).    But the Charvatovan-based theory of history by my father and I lurks in the background...



Bill Howell
Volunteer firefighter, Member of Hussar Lion's Club & Sundowners
1-587-707-2027     www.BillHowell.ca
P.O. Box 299, Hussar, Alberta, T0J1S0



*****************************
Some of Howell's work, in the context of Zharkova's presentation
I've simply pasted below links and comments from http://www.billhowell.ca/Howell%20-%20blog.html
You can go into more detail online.

***********
Climate and Food Production - with a [short, incomplete] Palliser triangle (Wheatland County) perspective
My 2007 presentation covers failures of the "CO2 as the primary driver of climate since 1850" theme, some alternative thinking, plus some details on the Palliser triangle.   Strangely, in spite of several advances by non-mainstream scientists, it is still relevant today, a decade later.   Note that the basis of the presentation came from my much earlier work (other than the pPalliser triangle stuff).

The only time my mother (and an aunt) almost beat me up was my flippant remark that the "...   dirty thirties was one of the mildest and shortest real droughts on record for the last 3,000 years in the Palliser triangle   ...".   My mother, her three sisters and brother were broken apart and adopted across Canada when their family farm in Hilendale SK (~10 km north of Val Marie) was destroyed.  A haunting reminder is the 1.5 bare naked sand dunes in the Great sand hills provincial park that my mother and I saw 4-6 years ago, and the reminder of the permanent area of drifing sand dunes up north (?Lake Athabasca? - I forget).  

11Dec07 Climate and food production - this is based on preparations for a presentation to the Alberta Potato Growers Association 13Nov07. Only a third of the slides were shown during the meeting, given the time available, and several slides have been updated. A solar-centric perspective dominates (again given the time available), and key failures of the Kyoto Premise are pointed out, which leads into a questioning of "thinking versus belief systems" by a vast majority of scientists.

***********
Ivanka Charvatova -  world's best solar forecaster on century-to-millenial timescales going back perhaps 7,500 years?


21Aug08 Solar activity, climate and history over the last 7 ky using Charvatova's hypothesis and 14C & 10Be radio-isotopes - Will we be able to forecast solar activity 3,000 years into the future?? Climate?? The course of human history?? Probably not with what we have at hand, but we can try.
This paper and its supporting files are in a very incomplete, preliminary draft. However, Figure A.2 in Appendix A is especially interesting, as it suggests at least a "phase synchronization" between Solar Inertial Motion (SIM) and solar activity, with the 2,402.2 year Charvatovan "long cycle".

15Jun08 An Independent verification of Charvatova's Solar Inertial Motion (SIM) hypothesis - I've provided a detailed, but non-quantitative, verification of Charvatova's graphs of SIM curves from 1990, 2000, and 2008, plus of the timing of susnpot series related to distinct SIM periods. While the hypothesis that planetary motions has been re-proposed for 150 years without a solid statistical and phenomenological base, the relations are still suggestive, and Charvatova's approach is exciting.

***********
The two fools who rushed in :

The chart linked below shows the [naive, lunatic, one-dimensional] theory of my father and I for history (the rise and fall of civilisations over the last 7,500 years).  It is missing comments and tables referrring to the ancient Mayan calendar and one or two other points that are hand-scribbled on the chart in my kitchen.  Our early historical charts (not those shown in the linked graph) were used in a book :

Steven H. Yaskell 2013 “Grand phases on the sun: The case for a mechanism responsible for extended solar minima and maxima”  Trafford Publishing www.trafford.com,  195pp ISBN 978-1-4669-6301-6

who acknowledged my father and I as the "two fools who rished in".  <big grin!>

I never wrote a paper on this, in spite of the huge amount of underlying calculations and analysis.   It stopped when I suspected that the classical "multibody problem in physics" (specifically, planetary motions - eg ephemeris programs) is incorrect, and in need of corrections (big hints from ancient calendars).  My suspicions are unusual, as most put uncertainties ONLY on the proxy data of [archaeology, paleontology, geology].   But then again, my current project in fundamental theoretical physics looks at work that at least questions, and probably destroys, the foundations of General Relativity and Quantum mechanics.  And that arose from my questioning the historical results of ephemeris programs.


08Aug07 Mega Life, Mega Death, and the invisible hand of the sun: Towards a quasi-predictive model for the rise and fall of civilisations. This is an update of our document first posted ~05May07, still in early draft, incomplete stage but lots of fun stuff! The underlying theme in "poetry form" is "Butterflies in the clouds, and the Milankovic wandering of greener pastures and glaciers" Forget that little butterfly in Indonesia that destabilized the thinking of a whole generation of scientists merely by flapping its wings :-), and find out about the real "Monster buttlerfly of solar chaos" and other chaotic processes that compliment more regular, predictable astronomical processes.



Not my work - but wild beyond any!  :

07Dec2015 Alert! awesome, beautiful paper! : Puetz, Prokoph, Borchardt, Mason 01Apr2014 Evidence of Synchronous, Decadal to Billion Year Cycles in Geological, Genetic, and Astronomical Events - It's rare that I put an "Alert" on a posting, but this one may deserve it. Based on Glenn's neo-mechanical assumptions (the 10 Assumptions of Science), and at odds with several "Great Religions" of modern scientists, this paper provides a breath-taking model for [astronomical, geological, genetic, climate, etc] cycles from 57 ky to 14 Gy - a vastly greater span than I've seen before. Furthermore, the concept seems likely to be extensible to much shorter times-scales. For example, authors do discuss sunspot cycles, and I'll take a wild guess that this will work at least down to semi-annual timescales, but likely to tiny fractions of seconds (ad-inifitesimal?).

• Puetz, Stephen J., Prokoph, Andreas, Borchardt, Glenn, and Mason, Edward W., 2014, Evidence of Synchronous, Decadal to Billion Year Cycles in Geological, Genetic, and Astronomical Events: Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, v. 62-63, p. 55-75
• Puetz SJ, Prokoph A, Borchardt G (2015). Evaluating alternatives to the Milankovitch Theory. Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, in press, uncorrected proof.
• Puetz SJ and Borchardt G (2015). Quasi-periodic fractal patterns in geomagnetic reversals, geological activity, and astronomical events. Chaos, Solitons Fract (2015) 81:246-270.

Comments:

• The Bill Howell in the acknowledgements is NOT me. Apparently he is a friend of Glenn Borchardt's, possibly a geologist.
• Both Prokoph (one of the authors) and Paul Vaughan do great wavelet transform analysis. Vaughan (see elsewhere on my website) does what I consider to be the best modelling of short-term climate (<=150 years) of anything that I've seen in detail. It will be very interesting to see the application of Puetz etal to timescales <57 ky, and whether Paul Vaughan will have important critiques of, and contributions to, that analysis.
• Although the Borchardt's underlying concept is based on fractals, I don't think the authors have addressed "fractional order calculus", a growing topic of interest to me. Paul Vaughan has addressed that in his own way.
• Human [history, markets, etc] effects are of interest to the authors.

(first posted 07Dec2015, incomplete quick comments)

************

What is missing from Zharkova's thinking?
Here are a [few, random, scattered] themes that are missing :

• Large-scale cycles versus changes of [state, phase]
• Milankovish (and [earlier, later] theories!)  - clearly wrong on many points, but a [good, handy] rule of thumb and context (caveat emptor)?
• Carbon 14 data >7,500 years ago - out of sight.  Ergo - everything being talked about is trivial (including biblical!), what about the hits on other timescales which kind-of-look-about-due-or-not?  (One cannot ignore very long timescales)
  
• the astronomy is WRONG?
• Electrical theories in plasma physics versus myopic gravitational thinking and magnestism-only thinking
• [Statistics,  small-world universal function approximators]  - making even useless theories fit the data, mathematical proofs within [context, frameworks, assumptions] versus "real proofs", and the extreme [constraints, limitations] of the latter
  
• Primitive Fourier series versus wavelet transforms, but most of all fractional order calculus!  I'd have to re-check to see if she even pays attention to "SARIMA-like" issues (Seasonally Adjusted Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average) , even though ostensibly Fourier-type series should account for that (but often do not!).   But nowadays, neither Fourier nor wavelet approaches should be considered to be adequate as there are far more powerful techniques, but as they say "start simple, and add power and complexity only if needed".   It is needed ... but these old tools are a good starting point.
  
• Time series prediction as normally through of is inadequate.  Changes in [phase, state] are key.  de Jager & Duhau attempt with chaos tools, Paul Vaughan (amateur in Vancouver) did best job I've seen with wavelets built
  

************
Lies, Damned Lies, and Scientists

What used to be "con-artist" - the "art of the con", has evolved into the far more powerful and destructive "con-scientist" - the "science of the con".  This is far beyond "Lies, damned lies, and statistists".  If I remember correctly, Mark Twain attributed that saying to British PM Disraeli, but the origins actually seem obscur.  It wouldn't surprise me if similar sayings existed in ancient [Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Harrupan] civilisations (and of course in the much more recent ancient Greece society (not a civilisatian by Toynbee standards)).

While modern climate science is an easy and very illustrative example of the catastrophic failure of [rational, logical, scientific] reasoning by essentially ALL [government, academic] scientists, it is not an exception - it follows the rule across all areas of science that I look at, and I therefore assume all [science, homo-sapiens].

By the way, I'm not religious.  As usual, I'm a bit extreme and consider essentially all [scientists, atheists, etc etc] to be religious thinkers compared to my own thinking.  That includes high profile people like Richard Dawkins and the like...


31Mar2015 Howell Lies, Damned Lies, and Scientists - Summary & context This document is a rush job to clarify a context for my dark and foreboding "Principle of Generality", that relates to the catastrophic failure of [rational, logical, scientific] thinking of essentially all government and academic scientists in high-profile areas of high public interest. This is characterised by [dishonest, dysfunctional, delinquent, hypocritical, back-stabbing, cowardly] * [thinking, behaviours] that one think should be clear to all, but perhaps not to religious disciples of science fashions that have progressed through the cult stage to become full-fledged religions. Furthermore, this situation seems to be the rule rather than the exception, and persists for [years, decades, centuries, millenia].
I don't believe this concept, nor do I believe that mainstream scientific consensus lives up to its claimed process and standards in many high-profile areas of interest to the public. I do like science and scientists, so this is a somewhat unsuccessful attempt to explain and reconcile my thinking on the matter. (posted 01Apr2015)


30Dec10 Lies, Damned Lies, and Scientists
Something is rotten in the state of science. Or perhaps what is dreadfully wrong, and what scientists illustrate in a spectacular fashion, is that there is something rotten with our image of ourselves, or more to the point, with how we would see others see us. We are not GENERALLY good at [rational, logical, and scientific] thinking, and there are very good reasons for that. For example - [rational, logical, and scientific] thinking isn't GENERALLY appropriate, especially outside ofthe realm of [simple, dead] systems, and certainly not in GENERAL for living or human systems. While my analysis may initially appear dark and ugly, I actually think that this leads to a more realistic, encouraging and ultimately positive view of homo sapiens and the "small worlds" we've built.


-------- Forwarded Message --------

Subject:	Fwd: Professor Valentina Zharkova Breaks Her Silence and CONFIRMS "Super" Grand Solar Minimum - Electroverse
Date:	Mon, 26 Nov 2018 04:44:40 +0000
From:	Ben Armstrong <>
To:	Bill Howel /fire Fighter <>

What is this about