For those people out there who don’t know what all the commotion is about, it all started with an astronomer out in Minnesota (I know, random) who mentioned something about a commonly accepted astronomical phenomenon in an interview with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
Parke Kunkie, a member of the board of directors of the Minnesota Planetarium Society and astronomy professor at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, told the Star-Tribune that the Earth’s relation to the Sun has changed since the Babylonians first created the zodiac. THIS IS NOT A NEW STORY!
Astronomers and astrologers alike have known about this phenomenon since Hipparchus first realized it occurred back around 130 BC!
- that’s a millennium and a half before most people accepted that the Earth was round or realized that the Earth was not the center of the solar system.
The story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune was a poorly written article that has snowballed to insane proportions; Twitter and and other social media, and of course, modern day journalism (such as the Daily Mail) - who were of course the first newspaper to get hold of the information which is over 1000 years old!
The twelve commonly accepted zodiac signs were selected out of the 88 constellations because they basically form a line through the sky. If you look at this sky chart you can see the curve that the bold zodiac constellations make through the sky, this curve follows what astronomers know as the ecliptic plane, or the plane of our Solar System (that dashed line running through the bold constellations in the chart).
The orbits of all of the planets in our solar system occupy basically the same plane in space due to the conservation of angular momentum as the solar system formed. Because of this fact, when we look out at the Sun and other planets in plane of the solar system from Earth they appear to follow a line through the sky, the ecliptic.
Now Earth doesn’t sit exactly straight; in fact, the 23.5 degree tilt of its rotation axis with respect to the ecliptic plane is what causes the different seasons on Earth
We all know that the Earth rotates like a top on its axis once every 24+ hours, but think about what happens as you spin a top. First, you start with a nice tight spin, but as the spin starts to slow, the top begins to loosen the tightness of its spin and "precess" outwards before it falls; this is what Earth’s rotation is doing because of the gravitational effects of the Moon, Sun, and other planets.
Because the stars in the sky are in a fixed position with respect to Earth (for the most part over extremely long time periods) we don’t see them move in relation to one another and the stars and the constellations themselves won’t change as the Earth’s orbit precesses.
What will change though throughout the 26,000 year cycle of the precession of the Earth’s axis is how the stars seem to move through the sky. The north and south celestial poles are imaginary lines which extend out into space along Earth’s rotational axis; they indicate the point in space around which the sky seems to rotate every night.
The north celestial pole points almost directly at Polaris, the North Star. It’s because Polaris sits so close to the north celestial pole that it is so special; it does not move in the night sky as the Earth rotates under it (and the rest of the stars in the sky appear to move around it). But the north celestial pole hasn’t always pointed towards Polaris and it won’t continue to; in other words, Polaris isn’t always the North Star.
Over time, as Earth’s rotational axis precesses, instead of the stars appearing to rotate around Polaris, they’ll appear to rotate around other stars and for most of the time no particular star at all.
So yeah, I'm not going to go delve into it anymore.. I suggest you look into astrology, before you believe the rumour mill of Twitter and the Daily Mail.
However, if it does happen, and we magically get a 13th Zodiac, I take all this back, and will probably lose all faith in astrology which I have had a great interest in since I can remember.. You have my word.
Monday, 14 March 2011
Wednesday, 2 February 2011
The Climate Change Con Trick -
Imagine how wonderful the world would be if man-made global warming were just a figment of Al Gore’s imagination. No more ugly wind farms to darken our sunlit uplands. No more whopping electricity bills, artificially inflated by EU-imposed carbon taxes. No longer any need to treat each warm, sunny day as though it were some terrible harbinger of ecological doom. And definitely no need for the $7.4 trillion cap and trade (carbon-trading) bill — the largest tax in American history — which President Obama and his cohorts are so assiduously trying to impose on the US economy; and soon to be, the EU economy.
Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at Adelaide University, has recently published the landmark book Heaven And Earth, which is going to change forever the way we think about climate change, for those of you who have read it, you will know exactly what I am talking about.
‘The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology,’ says Plimer, and while his thesis is not new, you’re unlikely to have heard it expressed with quite such vigour, certitude or wide-ranging scientific authority. Where fellow sceptics like Bjorn Lomborg or Lord Lawson of Blaby are prepared cautiously to endorse the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) more modest predictions, Plimer will cede no ground whatsoever. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory, he argues, is the biggest, most dangerous and ruinously expensive con trick in history.
They’re only interested in the last 150 years. Our time frame is 4,567 million years. So what they’re doing is the equivalent of trying to extrapolate the plot of Casablanca from one tiny bit of the love scene. And you can’t. It doesn’t work.’What Heaven And Earth sets out to do is restore a sense of scientific perspective to a debate which has been hijacked by ‘politicians, environmental activists and opportunists’. It points out, for example, that polar ice has been present on earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time; that extinctions of life are normal; that climate changes are cyclical and random; that the CO2 in the atmosphere — to which human activity contributes the tiniest fraction — is only 0.001 per cent of the total CO2 held in the oceans, surface rocks, air, soils and life; that CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food; that the earth’s warmer periods — such as when the Romans grew grapes and citrus trees as far north as Hadrian’s Wall — were times of wealth and plenty.
All this is scientific fact — which is more than you can say for any of the computer models turning out doomsday scenarios about inexorably rising temperatures, sinking islands and collapsing ice shelves. Plimer doesn’t trust them because they seem to have little if any basis in observed reality.
Plimer’s uncompromising position has not made him popular. ‘They say I rape cows, eat babies, that I know nothing about anything. My favourite letter was the one that said: “Dear sir, drop dead”. I’ve also had a demo in Sydney outside one of my book launches, and I’ve had mothers coming up to me with two-year-old children in their arms saying: “Don’t you have any kind of morality? This child’s future is being destroyed.’’’ Plimer’s response to the last one is typically robust. ‘If you’re so concerned, why did you breed?’
One of the things that so irks him about modern environmentalism is that it is driven by people who are ‘too wealthy’. ‘When I try explaining “global warming” to people in Iran or Turkey they have no idea what I’m talking about. Their life is about getting through to the next day, finding their next meal. Eco-guilt is a first-world luxury. It’s the new religion for urban populations which have lost their faith in Christianity. The IPCC report is their Bible. Al Gore and Lord Stern are their prophets.’
Reading Plimer’s Heaven And Earth is at once an enlightening and terrifying experience. Enlightening because, after 500 pages of heavily annotated prose (the fruit of five years’ research), you are left in no doubt that man’s contribution to the thing they now call ‘climate change’ was, is and probably always will be negligible. Terrifying, because you cannot but be appalled by how much money has been wasted, how much unnecessary regulation drafted because of a ‘problem’ that doesn’t actually exist. (South Park, as so often, was probably the first to point this out in a memorable episode where Al Gore turns up to warn the school kids about a terrible beast, looking a bit like the Gruffalo, known as ManBearPig.)
Has it come in time to save the day, though? If there’s any justice, Heaven And Earth will do for the cause of climate change realism what Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change alarmism. But as Plimer well knows, there is now a powerful and very extensive body of vested interests up against him: governments like President Obama’s, which intend to use ‘global warming’ as an excuse for greater taxation, regulation and protectionism; energy companies and investors who stand to make a fortune from scams like carbon trading; charitable bodies like Greenpeace which depend for their funding on public anxiety; environmental correspondents who need constantly to talk up the threat to justify their jobs.
If you’d asked any scientist or doctor 30 years ago where stomach ulcers come from, they would all have given the same answer: obviously it comes from the acid brought on by too much stress. All of them apart from two scientists who were pilloried for their crazy, whacko theory that it was caused by a bacteria. In 2005 they won the Nobel prize. The “consensus” was wrong.
Ian Plimer’s Heaven And Earth: Global Warming — the Missing Science is published by Quartet (£25).
Related:
Lord Monckton addresses Greenpeace Activist On Global 'Warming' Facts
Sunday, 27 June 2010
Evidence Points To BP Oil Spill Corporate False Flag
- Sales of shares and stocks in days and weeks beforehand
- Halliburton link, acquisition of cleanup company days before explosion
- BP report cites undocumented tampering with well sealing equipment
- Government uses disaster to push for Carbon Tax, Nationalization talk committees
______
Troubling evidence surrounding the Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20th suggests that the incident could have been manufactured.
On April 12th, just over one week before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, Halliburton, the world’s second largest oilfield services corporation surprised some by acquiring Boots & Coots, a relatively small but vastly experienced oil
well control company.
The company deals with fires and blowouts on oil rigs and oil wells. It was responsible for putting out roughly one third of the more than 700 oil well fires set in Kuwait by retreating Iraqi soldiers during the Gulf War.
The deal itself is still under scrutiny with Boots and Coots facing an ongoing investigation into “possible breaches of fiduciary duty and other violations of state law”
Where this information gets really interesting is with the fact that Halliburton is named in the majority of some two dozen lawsuits filed since the explosion by Gulf Coast people and businesses who claim that the company is to blame for the disaster.
Halliburton was forced to admit in testimony at a congressional hearing last month that it carried out a cementing operation 20 hours before the Gulf of Mexico rig went up in flames. The lawsuits claim that four Halliburton workers stationed on the rig improperly capped the well.
As the New York Times noted on May 26th, “BP officials chose, partly for financial reasons, to use a type of casing for the well that the company knew was the riskier of two options,”
Workers from the rig and company officials have said that hours before the explosion, gases were leaking through the cement, which had been set in place by the oil services contractor, Halliburton. Investigators have said these leaks were the likely cause of the explosion.”
According to a 2007 study by Minerals Management Service, cementing was a factor in 18 of 39 rig blowouts in the gulf between 1992 and 2006.
Another intriguing connection Boots and Coots has to the Deepwater Horizon explosion comes via Pat Campbell, the man BP has employed to cap the well beneath the ruined rig. Campbell worked for Boots and Coots as general manager for many years.
BP has admitted to buying Yahoo and Google keywords in an attempt to control publicly available information in the wake of the catastrophe. It seems that the company is taking all the flack for the spill while the Halliburton link is being roundly ignored.
BP's prepared testimony briefing, which has since leaked online, also intriguingly notes that the Hydraulic Control System on equipment designed to automatically seal the well in an emergency was modified without their knowledge sometime before the explosion.
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