Evaporation           

Evaporation is the key to the land ocean cycle.  When solar radiation reaches the Earth's surface it evaporates water.  Stephen Schneider wrote in one of his books that 85% of incident solar radiation evaporated water, 90% over ocean.  Simple algebra suggests about 90% of the 71% water covered surface and 73% of the 29% land covered surface would give the overall 85% figure.  That leaves 10% for direct warming on the ocean and 27% for direct warming on the land.  Modern estimates suggest 67% evaporation, which if that figure was measured over land, would tend to support the above calculation.  Whatever the numbers, it's clear that land warms faster than ocean, three times faster by these numbers, but whatever the numbers clearly land has less water to evaporate than the ocean does.  Then the fact that the land heavy Northern Hemisphere has three times the seasonal variation in temperatures as the Southern Hemisphere would support these estimates.  The last 150 years the land has warmed about twice as much as the ocean.

Temperature Mapping

When you spend endless hours poring over annual temperature variations over various large sections of the Earth you can eventually discover where the 54 year cycle comes from.  First you notice that a variety of multi-year averaged temperature sets have a common year for peak and valley dates.  For the United States, these dates come every 27 years between peak and valley.  Then you notice the hotter Hemisphere alternates between North and South on a 108 year cycle.  Then you notice the Northern Latitudes take a big leap in temperature when the next North cycle begins as the South cycle ends.  Approaching the peak, major droughts occur, at the peak major floods start, signaling the reclaiming of the out of control land by the ocean.  For the US, when the North land 48 year cycle was peaking the two major droughts were interior.  When the South ocean 60 year cycle was peaking, there was only one major drought interior with three large coastal states caught in seven year droughts, showing how the South ocean Hemisphere in ascendency changes the pattern of the second 54 year cycle.  The global temperature peak in the North cycle came in 1944 while the global peak in the South cycle came in 1998, with those two peaks exactly 54 years apart.

Event Mapping     

My first event mapping was after the 1988 drought 52 and 54 years after the 1936 and 1934 drought, when Jim Hansen reported the US temperature and precipitation history back to 1895.  Those are the three major US droughts of the twentieth century.  Now I have 56 major events on my latest chart, with Hurricane Sandy flooding the battery in New York in 2012, for the first time since 1960 52 years before, the last major addition.  Of the 56 peak to peak events, 20 are exact to the year.  Overall, the 56 events are 1.5 years off a perfect 54 year cycle, about 95% accurate if you divide the error range of three years by 54.

Economic Growth

The general rule in transferring the natural cycle into the economic growth cycle is that the economy is stronger when it is cooling and weaker when it is warming.  There are at least four main levels of proof of this relationship.  First there is a study in the dry cleaning industry, similar to Maxwell Taylor's railroad study in the 1890's, that shows productivity decreases as temperature exceeds the normal office temperature of 72 degrees Fahrenheit.   That NASA (dry cleaners not space) study shows that productivity decreases 37% at 95 degrees F. and 18% at 85 degrees F. Second, using the Hansen drought study temperature data, clustered into five year periods, in 15 of 18 periods of the US economy, when it cooled the economy increased faster and when it warmed the economy worsened.  The one clearest case of greatest change was the late twenties to the early thirties, when warming increased half a century's worth in one five year period to the next, and the economy went into the Great Depression.  Third, it's obvious that temperate zone economies have generally done better than tropical economies.  In America and Europe, the Northern states and countries outperform the Southern states and countries, generally.  America, with a larger summer winter temperature swing than Europe, has generally done better.  Fourth, Bouman and Jacobsen (2002) have shown that every stock market in the world does better November to April than May to October.  Those six coldest months in the United States outperform the six warmest months by about 6% in a twenty year study by Finance Professor Pat Brown of UW Madison circa 2011.  So the general rule in 54 year economic cycles is the 27 years of relative cooling do better than the 27 years of relative heating up.  The US economic growth rate peaked in 1898, bottomed in 1928, and peaked in 1952 and bottomed in 1982 according to most multi year moving averages.  2006 is the next peak in that pattern, as the economy did peak in 2007 just before the Great Recession of 2008-2009.  The 24 year up cycle and 30 year down cycle resembles the 48 year North cycle and 60 year South cycle of the natural world.  In general, up cycle is clearer and stronger than down cycle.

War Cycle

The war cycle is a combination of the temperature cycle and the economic cycle.  Civil Rights and other political events also tend to be in the cycle, but the war cycle is the clearest to measure and understand.  In general, a secondary war leads the major war, by about 18 years in the US and 15 years in Europe.  The start date and deaths are the best measures to use.  The secondary war tends to be a testing war in the middle of the economic growth period.  This tends to be a mismatch, with a stronger country taking on a weaker country.  For America, this usually happens about the same year of the long term growth peaking.  The major war then comes at the end of the economic growth cycle when wealth is maximized, and the growth has helped create a new economic order among nations.  Then the strongest tendency is for the number one national economy to take on the number two national economy.  Hence the war is major and very bloody.  Coincidentally, this happens after a two or three year cooling leading to the coldest year of a period of time.  That coldest year is the start of war year in most of the major cases in the last 150 years or so.  Perhaps this cooling increases hubris into a danger zone.  This timing also comes about 3 or 4 years after the peak growth cycle has statistically ended by long term standards.  So a sense of waning power enhances the tendency of politicians to distract the public away from economics and substitute war fever instead.  So this time period is unique in a number of ways that combine to build the pressure to go to war.  Into such a tinderbox, all you need to do is throw in a lighted match.

Summary

The long cycle starts in nature and affects the economy ultimately leading into war.  Hence the natural cycle and its events, the economic cycle and its events, and the war political cycle and its events are all interrelated. Because we really have two different Earths, one on the land, and one on the ocean, we have long overlooked the important interaction between these two giants of the Earth system.  We readily recognize other astronomical effects, such as the rotation that produces the day and night cycle.  Then there is the tilt of the Earth spinning on its axis that produces the annual seasons.  Then there are the very long spectrum of effects that produce the coming and going of ice ages.  In between the short term cycles and the geological time frame cycles lies a little noted and studied 54 year cycle.  Kondratiev, a Leninist Marxist economist studied this cycle in pig iron production in 1926.  Unfortunately that burden of the communist label, despite his execution by Stalin in 1938, has allowed Western economists to largely ignore his work. Then there is Klyashtorin who broke down 1400 years of ice core data from Greenland into its La Place transform frequencies, finding a very strong result for the 55 year cycle.  In the Americas, both the Quitlcastl and Aztec civilizations had long noticed a 52 year cycle of natural events, even building pueblos with four levels of 13 units each, and rotating around the maypole 13 times with 4 strands coming out.  So the long cycle has been noticed studied and worshipped by many peoples over the centuries.

This link takes you to the 56 modern events of the cycle:

https://www.academia.edu/4101856/EVENTS_Weather_Economy_War_List56_54yearCycle

This link gives you a broader understanding of the natural cycle with extra documents:

https://www.academia.edu/6002772/WEATHER_CYCLE_9p._2014