Nicola Scafetta is a
research scientist
A scientist is a person who conducts scientific research to advance knowledge in an area of the natural sciences.
In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, philosophers engaged in the philosophic ...
at the
University of Napoli Federico II. He was formerly at the
ACRIM Lab group and an
adjunct assistant professor in the physics department at
Duke University.
His research interests are in theoretical and
applied statistics
Statistics (from German: ''Statistik'', "description of a state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industri ...
and nonlinear models of complex processes.
[ He has published peer-reviewed papers in journals covering a scatter of disciplines, including ]astronomy
Astronomy () is a natural science that studies celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and evolution. Objects of interest include planets, moons, stars, nebulae, g ...
, biology
Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...
, climatology
Climatology (from Greek , ''klima'', "place, zone"; and , ''-logia'') or climate science is the scientific study of Earth's climate, typically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of at least 30 years. This modern field of study ...
, economics
Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyzes ...
, medicine
Medicine is the science and practice of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, treatment, palliation of their injury or disease, and promoting their health. Medicine encompasses a variety of health care pr ...
, physics
Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...
and sociology
Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation an ...
.[
]
Early life and education
Scafetta was born in Italy. He received a Laurea
In Italy, the ''laurea'' is the main post-secondary academic degree. The name originally referred literally to the laurel wreath, since ancient times a sign of honor and now worn by Italian students right after their official graduation ceremony ...
in physics from the University of Pisa
The University of Pisa ( it, Università di Pisa, UniPi), officially founded in 1343, is one of the oldest universities in Europe.
History
The Origins
The University of Pisa was officially founded in 1343, although various scholars place ...
in 1997 and a Ph.D.
A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...
in physics from the University of North Texas
The University of North Texas (UNT) is a public research university in Denton, Texas. It was founded as a nonsectarian, coeducational, private teachers college in 1890 and was formally adopted by the state 11 years later."Denton Normal School, ...
in 2001.[ His doctoral thesis was titled ''An entropic approach to the analysis of time series''.
]
Career
Scafetta was a research associate in the electrical and computer engineering department at Duke University from 2002 to 2003 and then a research scientist in the physics department from 2003 to 2009.[ He has been a visiting lecturer at ]Elon University
Elon University is a private university in Elon, North Carolina. Founded in 1889 as Elon College, Elon is organized into six schools, most of which offer bachelor's degrees and several of which offer master's degrees or professional doctora ...
and the University of North Carolina
The University of North Carolina is the multi-campus public university system for the state of North Carolina. Overseeing the state's 16 public universities and the NC School of Science and Mathematics, it is commonly referred to as the UNC Sy ...
.[ Scafetta was a research associate at the ACRIM Lab group and an adjunct assistant professor in the physics department at Duke University for a few years after 2010.][ He is currently affiliated with the University of Napoli Federico II in ]Naples
Naples (; it, Napoli ; nap, Napule ), from grc, Νεάπολις, Neápolis, lit=new city. is the regional capital of Campania and the third-largest city of Italy, after Rome and Milan, with a population of 909,048 within the city's adminis ...
, Italy.
He is a member of the American Physical Society, American Geophysical Union
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization of Earth, atmospheric, ocean, hydrologic, space, and planetary scientists and enthusiasts that according to their website includes 130,000 people (not members). AGU's a ...
and the American Association of Physics Teachers
The American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) was founded in 1930 for the purpose of "dissemination of knowledge of physics, particularly by way of teaching." There are more than 10,000 members in over 30 countries. AAPT publications includ ...
.[
]
ACRIM
Scafetta argues that the total solar irradiance (TSI) measurements gathered by satellites since 1978 are flawed because the Space Shuttle ''Challenger'' disaster prevented the timely launching of the ACRIM 2 satellite, which he worked on, to replace ACRIM 1. This results in a two-year data gap in the ACRIM time series, which scientists bridge with overlapping data from several other satellites. They conclude that heating from the Sun
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect ball of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core. The Sun radiates this energy mainly as light, ultraviolet, and infrared radi ...
did not increase between 1980 and 2002 and does not significantly contribute to the global surface warming over that period. Some ACRIM investigators, including principal investigator Richard Willson (Columbia) and Scafetta, disagree and argue for a significant upward trend in average solar luminosity during the two-year data-gap in the ACRIM time series. The Duke University student newspapers report that Scafetta and West's interpretation of Richard Willson's analysis is that "the sun may have minimally contributed about 10 to 30 percent of the 1980-2002 global surface warming."
Scientific contributions
Scafetta developed "Diffusion Entropy Analysis", a method of statistical analysis which distinguishes between Levy Walk noises and Fractional Brownian motion In probability theory, fractional Brownian motion (fBm), also called a fractal Brownian motion, is a generalization of Brownian motion. Unlike classical Brownian motion, the increments of fBm need not be independent. fBm is a continuous-time Gauss ...
in complex systems. Scafetta used this method in a 2002 analysis of teen pregnancy.
Views on climate change
Scafetta has argued, "At least 60% of the warming of the Earth observed since 1970 appears to be induced by natural cycles which are present in the solar system." According to Scafetta, the only reasonable explanation is that the climate system is modulated by astronomical oscillations. Natural cycles known with certainty are the 11 ( Schwabe) and 22 (Hale
Hale may refer to:
Places Australia
*Hale, Northern Territory, a locality
*Hale River, in southeastern Northern Territory
Canada
*Hale, Ontario, in Algoma District United Kingdom
* Hale, Cumbria, a hamlet near Beetham, Cumbria
*Hale, Greater Man ...
) year solar cycles, the cycles of the planets and luni-solar nodal cycles. Jupiter
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, but slightly less than one-thousandth t ...
has an orbital period of 11.9 years while Saturn has an orbital period of 29.4 years. These periods predict three other major cycles which are associated with Jupiter and Saturn: about 10 years, the opposition of two planets; about 20 years, their synodic cycle; and about 60 years, the repetition of the combined orbits of the two planets. The major lunar cycles are about 18.6 and 8.85 years. Scafetta's climate model is based primarily on a numerological comparison of secular periodic changes of global surface temperature and the Sun´s periodic movement around barycenter of the Solar System caused by the revolving planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Periodic modulation of Moon´s orbital parameters by these planets and subsequent modulation of lunar tides is also discussed. According to Scafetta, who provides no physical explanation of that process, "external forcing of celestial origin simply drives the adjustment of the natural rhythms by letting their own energy flow with the same frequency of the forcing. It just passes to the climatic system the ''information'' of how it has to oscillate, not the entire energy to make it oscillate. The effect of a periodic external forcing, even if weak, may become macroscopic and all components of the system gradually synchronize with it".
In 2009, Scafetta faced criticism for failing to disclose the computer code required to reproduce his research. Scafetta responded by saying that the code in question had been submitted to a scientific journal and that if "the journal takes its time to publish it, it is not our fault."[
In a 2011 article published in ''The Open Atmospheric Science Journal'' ecologist Craig Loehle of the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement (a forest industry institution) and Scafetta forecast that the world climate "may remain approximately steady until 2030-2040, and may at most warm 0.5-1.0°C by 2100 at the estimated 0.66°C/century anthropogenic warming rate".
In 2020, Scafetta proposed a 60-year cycle in the amount of interplanetary dust entering Earth's atmosphere, modulated by variations in the orbit of Jupiter's eccentricity, as causing variations in the relative abundance of cloud cover and thus being a driver of climate change by affecting variations in albedo.]
Selected publications
* Nicola Scafetta, Patti Hamilton and Paolo Grigolini, "The thermodynamics of social process: the teen birth phenomenon," Fractals, 9, 193-208 (2001)
* Nicola Scafetta, Sergio Picozzi and Bruce J. West, "An out-of-equilibrium model of the distributions of wealth" Quantitative Finance 4, 353-364 (2004).
* Nicola Scafetta and Bruce J. West, "Multiresolution diffusion entropy analysis of time series: an application to births to teenagers in Texas" Chaos, Solitons & Fractals 20, 119 (2004)
* Nicola Scafetta, and Paolo Grigolini, "Scaling detection in time series: diffusion entropy analysis," Phys. Rev. E 66, 036130 (2002)
* Nicola Scafetta, Richard Moon, and Bruce J. West, "Fractal Response of Physiological Signals to Stress Conditions, Environmental Changes and Neurodegenerative Diseases," Complexity 12, 12-17 (2007)
* Nicola Scafetta, and Bruce J. West, "Phenomenological reconstructions of the solar signature in the NH surface temperature records since 1600." J. Geophys. Res., 112, D24S03, (2007)
* N. Scafetta, "Empirical analysis of the solar contribution to global mean air surface temperature change," Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 71, 1916–1923 (2009),
* Nicola Scafetta and Richard Willson, "ACRIM-gap and Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) trend issue resolved using a surface magnetic flux TSI proxy model", Geophysical Research Letter 36, L05701, (2009)
*Craig Loehle and Nicola Scafetta, "Climate Change Attribution Using Empirical Decomposition of Climatic Data," The Open Atmospheric Science Journal, 2011 5, 74-86
Full text
Loehle & Scafetta Supplemental Info
See also
* List of University of North Texas alumni
References
External links
The climate oscillations: analysis, implications and their astronomical origin
Presentation at the JAFoS Symposium, December 2010
{{DEFAULTSORT:Scafetta, Nicola
University of North Texas alumni
21st-century Italian physicists
Italian climatologists
Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)