via NASA

A controversial paper claiming that fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field could be driving global warming has been retracted — prompting protests from most of the authors, who called the move

a shameful step to cover up the truthful facts about the solar and Earth orbital motion reported by the retracted paper, in our replies to the reviewer comments and in the further papers.

The 2019 article, “Oscillations of the baseline of solar magnetic field and solar irradiance on a millennial timescale,” appeared in Scientific Reports and was written by a group of authors from the UK, Russia and Azerbaijan. The first author was Valentina Zharkova, a mathematician/astrophysicist at Northumbria University, whose group reported having received funding for the work from the U.S. Air Force and the Russian Science Foundation.

The paper purported to find that fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field are making the earth hotter:

These oscillations of the baseline solar magnetic field are found associated with a long-term solar inertial motion about the barycenter of the solar system and closely linked to an increase of solar irradiance and terrestrial temperature in the past two centuries. This trend is anticipated to continue in the next six centuries that can lead to a further natural increase of the terrestrial temperature by more than 2.5 °C by 2600.

The article immediately received a barrage of criticism, including commenters who pointed out mistakes in the analysis. The controversy reached the science press, including this article in New Scientist, which reported:

Ken Rice of the University of Edinburgh, UK, criticised the paper for an “elementary” mistake about celestial mechanics. “It’s well known that the sun moves around the barycentre of the solar system due to the influence of the other solar system bodies, mainly Jupiter,” he says. “This does not mean, as the paper is claiming, that this then leads to changes in the distance between the sun and the Earth.”

Not surprisingly, the paper also garnered attention from climate change skeptics — some would say denialists — some of whom saw critiques of the work as evidence of left-wing scientists taking aim at any findings that threaten the dominant climate change narrative.

Scientific Reports evidently concluded that the critiques of the research had merit. According to the notice:

After publication, concerns were raised regarding the interpretation of how the Earth-Sun distance changes over time and that some of the assumptions on which analyses presented in the Article are based are incorrect. The analyses presented in the section entitled “Effects of SIM on a temperature in the terrestrial hemispheres” are based on the assumption that the orbits of the Earth and the Sun about the Solar System barycenter are uncorrelated, so that the Earth-Sun distance changes by an amount comparable to the Sun-barycenter distance. Post-publication peer review has shown that this assumption is inaccurate because the motions of the Earth and the Sun are primarily due to Jupiter and the other giant planets, which accelerate the Earth and the Sun in nearly the same direction, and thereby generate highly-correlated motions in the Earth and Sun. Current ephemeris calculations [1,2] show that the Earth-Sun distance varies over a timescale of a few centuries by substantially less than the amount reported in this article. As a result the Editors no longer have confidence in the conclusions presented. S. I. Zharkov agrees with the retraction. V. V. Zharkova, E. Popova, and S. J. Shepherd disagree with the retraction.

‘We wish to declare our protest’

S.I. Zharkov is Sergei Zharkov, of the University of Hull, Zharkova’s son. Zharkov did not respond to our request for comment. However, in a lengthy response to our queries, Zharkova told us:

We wish to declare our protest against such the [sic] actions by the Chief Editor R. Marscalek to retract the paper with the new ground-breaking results on some minor corrections. We wish to record this protest with their Editor’s message retracting the paper. We consider these actions by Mr Marszalek, Deputy Editor in chief, as an attempt to reduce our paper [sic] importance and the authors’ scientific standing.

Zharkova provided a link to a corrected version of the article, and claimed that:

The Editor retracts our paper based on the minor correction of the distance between Sun and Earth based on solar inertial motion mentioned in the last section.We have proven that the Editor’s statement of the reason for retraction is not a correct recollection what was said in this single paragraph of the paper, which was used against us to retract the paper (see the archive paper with the amended paragraph marked in blue https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020arXiv200206550Z/abstract). We said that the Sun-Earth distance would change UP to 0.02 au not that it would change BY 0.02 au.

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