Re: Global Warming #2

Sat, 28 Feb 1998 22:50:21 -0800
William Kirk (wkirk@wml.prestel.co.uk)

Maybe I will get somewhere here with the topic being Global Warming.

I read in New Scientist in the year 1982 about the Planetary Synod,
whereby all the planets gather on a 180 year cycle and the effect is the
gravitational displacement of the earth off its elliptic orbit - the
resulting ellipse is asymmetric about the sun, it becomes ovoid. Since
the velocity of the earth about the sun follows Kepler's Law, and with
the synod occurring in the winter, the earth is drawn towards the sun the
sun-earth radius decreases, resulting in a slower velocity. What this
meant was that the northern hemisphere had four more days winter - if the
sun sets due west at the equinox then in 1982 the event would have been
two days late at the vernal equinox and two days early at the autumnal
equinox. The effect was stated to have built up over a fifteen-year
period prior to 82 and would have gone by now.
The article gave historical back up to the event, 1802, 1622 and 1442, or
near to that seemed convincing.
A few years ago I wrote to New Scientist asking for an update. With no
response I wrote to the author, John Gribben, and again got no reply. A
further letter was ignored. In al I sent four letters, and I telephoned
to check to see if the letters had been received. Now it seems as if I
was mistaken, having asked New Scientist via their web site it now looks
as if I was imagining all of this - there is no such thing as a synod and
the article was never published. This is the reply I was given.

==============================================================

Subject: Re: Help. I cannot find a back issue.
Date: Mon, 24 Nov 1997 12:05:32 -0500
From: Celia_Thomas@IPC-KRT-NS.CCMAIL.compuserve.com
To: "INTERNET:wkirk@wml.prestel.co.uk" <wkirk@wml.prestel.co.uk>
Dear William Kirk,
I have been trying to follow up your enquiry re: article in
New Scientist on the Planetary Synod, but I can find no record of such an
article. The closest that I can come is an article that was published in
the magazine on 4th November 1982 entitled "The Great Quasar Odyssey".
Sorry that I don't seem able to assist you more than that.

If you need more information, then I will be more than happy to
help. Unfortunately, when I entered details of the Planetary Synod into
the computer, it showed no records.

Yours sincerely
Celia Thomas
==============================================================

I then asked her to look in the previous issue, I am waiting for a reply.
Or is this just a case of me making up stories in my head - has my
paranoia led to some other strange disease? Such as making all of this up
and then believing I read it somewhere?
Now, I shall give something that looks very much like the effect.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nature, 390, 18/25 December, 1997, page 676.
A resonance in the Earth's obliquity and precession over the past 20 Myr
driven by mantle convection.
Alessandro M. Forte & Jerry A. Mitrovica.
The motion of the solar system is chaotic to the extent that the precise
positions of the planets are predictable for a period of only about
20Myr.1 The Earth's precession, obliquity and insolation parameters over
this time period 1-6 can be influenced by secular variations in the
dynamic ellipticity of the planet which are driven by long-term
geophysical processes, such as post-glacial rebound.5,7-10 Here we
investigate the influence of mantle convention on these parameters. We
use viscous flow theory to compute time series of the Earth's dynamic
ellipticity for the past 20Myr and then apply these perturbations to the
nominal many-body orbital solution of Laskar et al.5 We find that the
convection-induced change in the Earth's flattening perturbs the main
frequency of the Earth's precession into the resonance associated with a
secular term in the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn 5, and thus
significantly influences the Earth's obliquity. We also conclude that
updated time series of high-latitude summer solar insolation diverge from
the nominal solution for periods greater than the past ~5 Myr. Our
results have implications both for obtaining precise solutions for
precession and obliquity and for procedures that adopt astronomical
calibrations to date sedimentary cycles and climatic proxy records.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
It isn't possible to get recent or detailed information from this, the
graphs are much too small, showing insolation changes over ten thousand
year periods. Jupiter and Saturn will have the greatest gravitational
effect, the author says this so perhaps there is some sort of synodic
effect.
Is it possible to get data on the asymmetry of the ellipse? I have looked
for this but not being an astronomer it is easy to look in all the wrong
places.
Aside to that, I am convinced there is some cover up going on with all of
this data, for example, if the northern hemisphere had a series of long
winters, then the southern will have had longer summers - and perhaps
warmed up the southern Pacific Ocean. But then, fifteen years on, it will
have cooled down, so back to normal, everything is just fine.
Now here comes the kind of stuff I make up myself and you won't see in
any journal. If the synod is real, has it, because of global warming,
'kick started' some sort of weather aggravation that we aren't supposed
to hear about? I mean, the southern Pacific isn't as cool as it should
be, everything is far from being just fine. Like, in the early 1800's the
Thames froze over a good number of years, but had not done so in the
1980's.

William Kirk.