Suspect GRL Letter on claimed polar shift, a hockey stick again

Figure from preprint

From

Chen, J.L., C.R. Wilson, J.C. Ries, B.D. Tapley, Rapid ice melting drives Earth’s pole to the east, Geophys. Res. Lett., DOI: 10.1029/2013GL056164, 2013
GRL Letters site

A Letter in GRL makes a fuss about about earth polar shift, where of course some new toy is involved, GRACE in this case. Unfortunately for the authors they also deal in a dataset where I know far more than most, polar wobble.

Chris Hadfield: Space Oddity aboard the ISS

@cmdrhadfield has been putting together a tribute to Bowie and the human ingenuity that is the ISS. Nifty guitar work Chris!

Wayne Jackson: Atmospheric mass not composition is the key to the greenhouse effect

Following the marathon thread about Willis Eschenbah’s ‘steel greenhouse’ concept, Wayne takes the discussion of real planets and the way their energy balance points are considered in a new and promising direction.

Earth TSI, 1362 W/m² / 4 = 340.5 * (1-0.3022 Bond albedo) = 237.6 OLR & also solar input

Venus TSI 2614 W/m² / 4 = 653.5 * (1-0.9000 Bond albedo) = 65.35 OLR & also solar input

Earth surface temperature 289.1 K per TFK2009

Venus surface temperature 735.4 K, 0.3°C greater than the VIRA (Venus Int’l Ref. Atm.) data

Tom Van Flandern: Was the planet Mercury once a moon of Venus?

This is an essay written some years ago by the late Tom Van Flandern  which was included in his book ‘Dark Matter, Missing Planets & New Comets’. Tom, who worked for many years at the U.S. Naval Observatory, was an out of the box thinker who covered a wide range of astronomical topics, many of them well outside the mainstream. His methodology was a bit similar to my old dad’s approach to cryptic crosswords. “The clue doesn’t give you the answer, but it helps confirm you got the right answer once you’ve got it”. Leif Svalgaard says he was a crank, which in my view means he’s well worth a read. I think this article, tied in with his other solar system formation concepts, deserves to be republished for the assessment and re-appraisal of the talkshop cognoscenti and the interested visitors here.

Let us examine in detail what the consequences would be of assuming that Mercury originated as a satellite of Venus. If that were so, we might presume that Mercury formed in close orbit about Venus, perhaps by fission^a. But Mercury is four and a half times more massive than the Moon. So the interchange of energy through tidal friction between Venus and Mercury would have been enormous. Mercury’s original spin would have been halted fairly rapidly by Venus, leaving Mercury spinning once per revolution around Venus, always keeping the same face toward Venus, as for our Moon.

A Personal Appeal to Britain’s Politicians: Wake-Up From Your Warm Dreams! Fuel Poverty is Killing People

“The most revolutionary thing one can do always is to proclaim loudly what is happening.”
Rosa Luxemburg

There are times when I find it hard to speak politely. I left school at sixteen and worked on the shop-floor of a large engineering works for ten years, gaining a higher national qualification in mechanical and production engineering along the way before getting the chance to study for a degree in the History and Philosophy of Science. While I worked in heavy industry, I learned some choice ways of expressing myself which are basic, direct, and hurt the sensibilities of those who have spent their lives in polite company, although they got the job done effectively. So I sometimes struggle to find the right tone at those times when a message needs communicating forcefully to people in a position to influence policy, but without having them recoil and ignore things they don’t want to contemplate.

But the time for niceties has passed. Britain’s people face a looming disaster of epic proportion. Britain’s political class needs to act swiftly to minimise the damage which cannot be wholly averted at this late stage. Successive governments have set the stage for the impending denouement, so this is not a partisan rant, but a cross-party appeal to common sense. People are dying by the thousand as a direct result of botched energy policy and we must act to save lives. Now.

Let’s clear some of the undergrowth so we can see the shape of the problem. Firstly, we’ll deal with the climate scare.

Another Wind Turbine Blows Over: In a 50mph Wind

After last week’s symbolic collapse of a wind turbine in Kyoto province, here’s news of another downed bird mincer in Donegal, Ireland. From the Donegal Daily:

DD EXCLUSIVE: An investigation is underway after a 80 ft wind turbine came crashing to the ground in strong winds near Ardara.

The windmill is one of nine located at Maas on the backroad near Ardara.

It is believed the wind turbine came down overnight when winds were gusting in the area to 80km/hr (50mph).

However the fact the turbine crashed in conditions it should otherwise have easily coped with has puzzled experts.

Photo of the week: Kyoto wind turbine hits the deck

Is it just me or is there a delicious symbolism in the location of this downed bird chopper?

Ismael Bullialdus: Finder but not keeper of the Inverse Square Law of Gravitation

Looking for the origin of the idea that the Sun’s gravity diminishes as distance increases, I found this on Wikipedia:

Ismaël Boulliau
Astronomer
1605-1694

Ismaël Boulliau known as Bullialdus was a friend of Pierre Gassendi, Christiaan Huygens, Marin Mersenne, and Blaise Pascal, and an active supporter of Galileo Galilei and Nicolaus Copernicus. It is for his astronomical and mathematical works that he is best known. Chief among them is his Astronomia philolaica, (published 1645). In this work he strongly supported Kepler‘s hypothesis that the planets travel in elliptical orbits around the Sun, but argued against the physical theory the latter had proposed to explain them.^[1] In particular, he objected to Kepler’s proposal that the strength of the force exerted on the planets by the Sun decreases in inverse proportion to their distance from it. He argued that if such a force existed it would instead have to follow an inverse-square law:^[2]

As for the power by which the Sun seizes or holds the planets, and which, being corporeal, functions in the manner of hands, it is emitted in straight lines throughout the whole extent of the world, and like the species of the Sun, it turns with the body of the Sun; now, seeing that it is corporeal, it becomes weaker and attenuated at a greater distance or interval, and the ratio of its decrease in strength is the same as in the case of light, namely, the duplicate proportion, but inversely, of the distances that is, 1/d².^[3]

Brilliant deduction, but then he dropped the ball. Wiki continues:

Andrew Cooper: Were the recent asteroid flyby and Chelyabinsk meteor strike events linked?

An interesting comment has been placed on the 2012DA14 flyby thread by talkshop regular ‘Scute’ (Andrew Cooper) which investigates the possibility that the Russian Meteor was indeed related to the asteroid. This was dismissed at the time but Scute’s investigation of the orbital dynamics seems to raise doubt about this:

The Chelyabinsk Meteor and a possible link with 2012DA14

I think the idea of the Russian meteor being related to 2012DA14 should be resurrected. I say resurrected because the idea was so roundly slapped down by NASA within hours of the impact and never discussed again. Most of the information below was gleaned from NASA’s own JPL Horizons ephemeris for 2012DA14.

Let me begin by addressing a few myths that seemed to sew it up regarding the lack of any link between the two

Firstly, the direction of approach was not on the night side of the earth but on the day side (2012DA14 flipped under and up round the back only in the last 5 hours) and the radiant was not, as variously described, “the South Pole” or -81 degrees (implied by the above as being -81 to the night side), but at -69 degrees on the sunward side.

A remarkable discovery: All Solar system periods fit the Fibonacci series and the Golden Ratio

Many other people have noticed Phi relationships in the solar system in the past, from Kepler onwards, and there are several websites which cover this interesting topic. But up until now, so far as I know,  no-one has been able to find a single simple scheme linking all the planets and the Sun into a harmonious whole system described by the basic Fibonacci series. A couple of weeks ago while I was on holiday, I had a few long ‘brainstorming sessions’ with Tim Cullen, and decided to roll my sleeves up and get the calculator hot to test my ideas. What I discovered is laid out below in the style of a simple ‘paper’. Encouraged by an opinion from a PhD astrophysicist that this is “a remarkable discovery”, I will be rewriting this for submission to a journal with the more speculative elements removed and some extra number theory added to give it a sporting chance of acceptance. For now, this post establishes the basics, but there is much more I have discovered, and I will be using some of that extra material in my presentation at the conference in September we are setting up to discuss Solar System Dynamics, the Solar-Planetary Theory, and Solar Terrestrial relations. There will be an update on the conference with booking details etc very soon.

Relations between the Fibonacci Series and Solar System Orbits

Roger Tattersall – February 13 2013

Abstract

The linear recurrence equation: a_n = a_n-1 + a_n-2 with the starting conditions: a₁ = a₂ = 1 generates the familiar Fibonacci series: 1,1,2,3,5,8,13… This paper will use the first twenty terms of the sequence to demonstrate a close match between the Fibonacci series and the dynamic relationships between all the planets, and two dwarf planets in the Solar System. The average error across the twenty eight data points is demonstrated to be under 2.75%. The scientific implication of the result is discussed.

Introduction

Since it was noticed that five synodic conjunctions occur as Earth orbits the Sun eight times while Venus orbits thirteen times, many attempts have been made to connect the Fibonacci series and it’s convergent ‘golden ratio’ of 1.618:1 to the structure of the solar system. Most of these attempts have concentrated on the radial distances or semi-major axes of the planet’s orbits, in the style of Bode’s Law, and have foundered in the inner solar system.