advocates on these pages, especially involving Nicola Scafetta who no doubt will be making an appearance in 5, 4, 3... , I have agreed that there could possibly be a link due to gravitational gradients, but that I doubt the argument can be made compelling enough for widespread acceptance. I will also go out on the limb a little and make a perhaps novel suggestion that causation could be the reverse -- that solar activity, resulting in increased solar radiation pressure, might perturb planetary orbits. Satellites at geosynchronous orbit drift significantly due to this factor, as well as due to gravitational perturbations from the Sun, Moon, and Earth, and their orbits have to be periodically corrected via stationkeeping maneuvers to maintain position. If solar radiation pressure were the primary driver of the correlations between solar activity and planetary motion, it might explain stochastic variation in the phases and amplitudes of the cycles. In any case, the bottom line is that the cycles exist regardless of the mechanism. The warmist line is that the existence of such cycles must depend on some kind of unknown, and unlikely, deterministic driver, and those pointing to coincidence with planetary cycles are ceding the high ground in the battle to the opposition by accepting this premise. But, the premise is flawed. The danger is that the advocates of planetary influence may find evidence which proves the naysayers wrong, but they may not, and the naysayers will then claim that the hypothesis is disproved when, in