2012 Hype or Hope?  End of the world or new era? Get the facts and decide for yourself!

What Al Gore thinks he knows about global warming is amusing if not so far from the truth. Having spent way too many winters in Topeka, Kansas, I was interested in the fact that every year I could count on a warm snap around January 15th. Every year without fail it happen. What was up with that? And then I discovered Serbian civil engineer and mathematician Milutin Milanković. Who?

We give credit to Copernicus (the Catholic church sure didn’t) for the heliocentric principle over the geocentric madness that prevailed until the Enlightenment or thereabouts.

As a kid I was amused at the way a spinning top worked. Give it a hard twist and it stood almost upright as it spun though you could detect that the very top point was moving around in the circle. As the top began to slow down, the point would extend further out until the spin was more a wobble and then it fell over.

Who spun the earth into precession?

Precession refers to a change in the direction of the axis of a rotating object. What’s amazing is that though Hipparchus gets credit for understanding precession and the fact that the universe is one giant clock, cultures way before 200BCE got it. The Egyptians, Babyonians, Sumerians, Atlanteans, and maybe even the Lemurians were savvy to precession.

The Milankovitch eccentricity cycle (one of three) reminds us that the earth’s orbit around the sun isn’t a perfect circle. What Milankovitch figured out is that there’s a larger cycle than the 26,000 year one that the Mayans understood. There’s a 100,000 year eccentricity cycle that could account for the ice ages, and other catastrophies.

You see, when the earth’s orbit around the Sun is nearly a perfect circle, there’s only about a 3% variation in distance from the sun anytime of the year (and a 6% variation in received solar energy). Guess when we get that extra 6% boast (in recent modern times)? That closeness, known as perihelion is around January 15th for those in the Northern hemisphere. Bingo! My warm mid January mystery solved! No thanks to Al Gore.

Ah, now for the interesting facts.

When the earth’s rotation around the sun moves from a perfect circle to a more elliptical one as it does every 100,000 years, our planet receives 20-30% more and less solar energy. Thus when the elliptical pattern is at aphelion, we receive 30% lees solar energy. Can you say ICE AGE?em> You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free……and help us as we move closer to several probablilities for 2012.