I am no expert, but I am skeptical because the paper results looks way too perfect to be true.
Then instead of doing statistical analysis with things like p-values or probabilities, they make wildly out of scope assertions like this:
> "Considering all pandemics with obtained extremum points, we can conclude that sunspot extrema coincide with the pandemics’ first appearance probably because of mutation on virus DNA or generation of a new virus."
They are claiming both sunspot minima and maxima, not just one or the other (which seems more intuitive?) somehow cause pandemics due to virus DNA mutations, even for pandemics that were caused by bacteria.
I am all for using statistics and data science for discovery of new phenomena, but I suspect this one is total bunk.
Forbush effect, in geophysics, an occasional decrease in the intensity of cosmic rays as observed on Earth, attributed to magnetic effects produced by solar flares, which are disturbances on the Sun
There are so many visible red flags in this one and my priors are sturdy enough that I think it's safe to call it nonsense with barely a skim. This seems like somebody that came to a spurious conclusion and then decided to write a paper justifying it by spamming statistical techniques until something fit.
That seems kind of extreme. While I wouldn't take this paper as proof that the sun is causing pandemics, the correlation is an interesting bit of trivia.
"Interesting" is subjective, but "trivia" is just information that is insignificant or of little use. Here are some other correlations you might find more interesting that are just as trivial as the one linking solar activity to pandemics:
When compared to the average person, people who prefer Miss Piggy over Kermit are more than twice as likely to have tattoos.
As the number of computer programmers in Kansas decline so do US burglary rates
Global average temperatures are correlated with the how many pirates there are
No, correlation alone is not interesting at all. If you were right we should be studying how the reduction in piracy over the last few centuries is strongly correlated with the increase in global warming. Pure nonsense.
Correlation is always interesting, and until you study it, you can’t even prove that it’s “correlation alone” and nothing else. Yes correlation is not always causation. But, correlation often opens up an entry point for new research. Most of modern medicine is heavily dependent on correlation.
The discussion here is not whether correlation is causation, but rather correlation is interesting because it opens an opportunity for you to explore whether it is causation or not.
That coincidence plot in the paper is amazing. I wonder what the criteria was to include a pandemic episode.
In the last link I don’t see any correlation at all, these are are completely different time scales? And even if there was, it’s meaningless as you can probably find a dozen random graphs (price of milk, number of eggs laid per chicken, left-handed births or whatever) that happen to be a near-perfect match to solar cycles.
