The Breaking Point

by James Dale Davidson

  Solar-planetary theorist Ken McCracken, working with Jurg Beer and Friedhelm Steinhilber, claims that the paleoclimatic record over the last 9,400 years reveals twenty-six Grand Minima similar to the Maunder Minimum. McCracken, Beer, and Steinhilber claim that the Grand Minima in the Holocene, including the Maunder Minimum, all occurred during disordered phases of the Sun’s motions. Most of these Grand Minima appeared in clusters of two to seven Grand Minima in sequence, with intervals of up to 1,200 years in which there were no Grand Minima.3 They marshal evidence from Carbon-14 and Beryllium-10 galactic cosmic ray proxies documenting variations in cosmic ray intensity and solar activity. They find four strong correlations with the motions of the Jovian planets. Assessing these together, they calculate the probability of them occurring by chance at less than one in 100,000.

  McCracken, Beer, and Steinhilber report that Helio cosmic ray intensity decreases during the first sixty years of the approximately 172-year Jose Cycle and increases in the remaining 112 years “in association with Barycentric anomalies in the distance between the Sun and the center of mass of the Solar System.”4

  Barycenter Anomalies and Solar Inertial Motion

  Note that low cosmic ray intensity is associated with higher solar activity and warmer temperatures, while a high flux of cosmic radiation occurs when there is an inactive Sun and climate is cooler.

  Low cosmic ray intensity was measured when Uranus and Neptune were in superior conjunction (mutual cancellation), while high intensities (lower solar activity) occurred when Uranus and Neptune “were in inferior conjunction” (additive effects).5

  To better understand the argument for planetary forcing of variations in solar output, consider that the commonplace observation that the Earth orbits around the Sun is not precisely true. In fact, the Earth (as well as the Sun itself) orbits the “barycenter,” or center of mass, of the Solar System. This center of mass sometimes lies within the Sun, and sometimes is outside its surface, depending on the alignment of the giant Jovian planets, particularly Jupiter (318 times the mass of the Earth).

  The center of mass of the Sun and Jupiter lies just above the surface of the Sun at 1.07 solar radii (462,743 miles) from the center. The center of mass of the Sun and Saturn is 0.58 solar radii (250,833 miles) from the Sun’s center. Therefore, when you have a “syzygy”—an out-of-town word (from the Greek syzygos—“yoked together”) that refers to a straight-line configuration of three or more celestial bodies—with Jupiter and Saturn on the same side of the Sun, the center of mass is 1.65 solar radii (713,575 miles) from the Sun’s center. Add Uranus (0.18 radii) and Neptune (0.32 radii), and the center of mass of the Solar System can be offset by as much as 2.15 solar radii (929,810 miles) from the Sun’s center.

  The four Jovian planets that exert the greatest gravitational pull in moving the center of mass (barycenter) of the Solar System only return to the same position (within two degrees) every 4,267.25 years. However, there are many shorter cycles that some astronomers associate with more frequently occurring barycenter anomalies. As they see it, all solar Grand Minima as recorded in climate and paleoclimatic records during the current Holocene Epoch coincide with planetary alignment-caused angular momentum perturbations of the Sun.

  Focusing first on the grand planetary realignment cycle, it is notable that solar physicists have correlated proxy climate records (dendrochronology: Carbon-14 and Beryllium-10 solar activity proxies from the Arctic and Antarctic) with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s tabulation of the barycenter coordinates of the Sun, the eight major planets, and Pluto.

  These records show that the Solar System is indeed a “system” that involves complex planetary synchronization. The plot of planetary alignments coincides with repeating, sometimes almost identical, patterns of climate change as reflected in the solar activity proxies.6

  Data from the Little Ice Age (LIA) that followed the Medieval Warm Period offer a powerful “tell” if you wish to understand climate. The LIA—one of the colder Grand Minima of the Holocene climate epoch that began 11,700 years ago—had a “twin.” Proxy records, centered on a period around 3500 BC, show almost identical solar radiation patterns. When the two series are overlaid, the difference in the curves is practically imperceptible.7

  What accounts for this? The precise answer is still unclear. As the planets move in different configurations in their counterclockwise orbits around the Sun, the barycenter oscillates in a range of repeating trefoil patterns. It seems evident that certain planetary alignments coincide with barycentric anomalies that disrupt normal solar radiation. Solar theorist Geoff Sharp states that those associated with Grand Minima entail a disordered Solar System barycenter. “Large excursions of the inner loop are required for significant solar disruption.”8 Is he right? The world’s governments really don’t want to know. An authoritative answer might disrupt their plans to combat a trumped-up climate catastrophe.

  A powerful graphic representation of the correlation between solar inertial motion and solar-terrestrial climate cycles was published by Czech astrophysicist, Ivanka Charvatova. She writes:

  The solar inertial motion (SIM) (motion of the Sun around the mass Centre of the Solar System) is caused by the varying positions, predominantly of the giant planets (José, 1965). The varying positions of the giant planets (Jupiter (J), Saturn (S), Uranus (U), Neptune (N)) force the Sun to move inside a circular area which has a diameter of 0.02 AU (astronomical unit) or 3.106 km or 4.3 solar radii. The SIM is computable in advance, a great advantage that opens up a possibility of establishing predictive assessments.9

  It Even Eluded Newton

  Stick with me here. This analysis can easily be introduced on the basis of a college astrophysics class. But a fully comprehensive explanation of the mechanism by which the various planetary configurations perturb the Sun’s dynamo, as well as the way this perturbation informs changes in Earth’s climate, remains the province of one or more high-performance solar physicists. It is beyond me. It even eluded Sir Isaac Newton, in his 1678 Principia. Newton unrealistically failed to account for the elliptical orbits of the planets; according to Newton’s third law, “all bodies must attract each other.”10 Yet Newton only hinted at a solution to what is now known in celestial mechanics as the “n-body problem,” the problem of the mutual gravitational attraction of three or more celestial bodies.

  Another point of note, Newton worked on the Principia during the Maunder Minimum, a period when sunspot activity was negligible. This was hardly a propitious time to analyze the impact of planetary alignment on the Sun’s dynamo. Its most visible manifestation was not readily apparent then, from 1645 to 1710. Also Newton worked long before Herschel discovered Uranus and almost two centuries before Neptune was discovered on September 23, 1846. As you may know, Neptune is the densest of the massive Jovian planets, and the third largest by mass.

  Astronomer Geoff Sharp has identified a planetary configuration with Jupiter, Neptune, and Uranus within fifteen degrees of alignment on one side of the Sun and Saturn opposite that is associated with solar cycle slow down or shutdown that occurs in every case. When Uranus and Neptune are close together, there is an average of three chances for Jupiter and Saturn to form this configuration, which will happen around every 208 years. This is a complex, rather than a simple, oscillation that includes periods of retrograde motion. As the Sun orbits around the center of mass of the Solar System, it loops back on itself, causing it to move through to its own previously generated magnetic fields. This affects the Sun’s angular momentum, which sometimes turns negative. For reasons of basic physics, angular momentum is transferred to the Sun’s internal rotation. Australian astrophysicist Ian Wilson and colleagues proposed that changes in this rotation rate are synchronized with changes in the Sun’s orbital motion about the barycenter.11

  Conservation of angular momentum is an absolute symmetry of nature. The Sun exists in a plasma state and behaves like a very heavy fluid undergoing thermonuclear reactions—the perturbations of angular m
omentum appear to be sufficient to disturb the normal patterns of solar radiation. Wilson suggests that the perturbations of angular momentum mainly affect the outer layers of the Sun’s convective zone.12

  Among the reasons that recurring Grand Minima of solar activity associated with planetary forcing have not been widely recognized is that the grand planetary realignment cycle stretches much further into the past than does human recognition of the extent of the Solar System. There are no instrument-monitored records dating that far back.

  Obviously, no one was correlating bad weather with the planetary alignments of Neptune and Uranus 4,267.25 years ago. Neptune was only discovered 168 years ago. Further to that, due to orbital drift, the return of the four outer planets to the same position every 4,267.25 years is not identical, and the accuracy of proxy records is not precise enough to confirm whether the planetary alignment return falls within two degrees each cycle.

  Note that Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, argued in the Astrophysical Journal that Neptune and Uranus used to be twice as close to the Sun as they currently are and actually changed places about four billion years ago.13 The astrophysical arguments about the formation of the gas giants are not immediately crucial to our inquiry, but Professor Desch’s argument does underscore the issue of orbital drift that helps disguise the recurring patterns of solar Grand Minima.

  $100 Billion for Climate Research Propaganda

  The ongoing quest for understanding the natural causes of solar cycles highlights the bogus nature of the $100 billion, or more, invested by the world’s governments, purportedly for climate research, but actually for propaganda to rationalize the institution of an ecofascist world system. If they were actually interested in cultivating better understanding of the drivers of climate, an allocation of even 20 percent of the resources squandered on global warming propaganda could have gone a long way toward illuminating the natural basis of solar cycles. But the IPCC explicitly limits its inquiries to consideration of only human-caused global warming—incredible intellectual dishonesty.

  The irony is that the invention of ecocatastrophe as “a subterfuge” for the rich to maintain their dominant status was only of interest to the powers-that-be if the catastrophe was hypothetical, not genuine. A bogus catastrophe, like anthropogenic global warming, could serve to rationalize political cartelization of precious hydrocarbon energy. An actual ecocatastrophe, such as another Little Ice Age that some solar physicists believe could soon begin, would have the opposite effect.

  It would kill the whole bogus enterprise of controlling anthropogenic global warming by clarifying that climate change is determined by the rhythms of nature, not by political diktat. In a real ecocatastrophe, the $1 billion a day being spent to combat global warming by reducing CO2 emissions would have to be undone. Laws and treaties to the contrary, mothballed coal-fired plants would have to be reopened in an effort to raise ambient CO2 levels to facilitate the growth of crops in a suddenly colder world.

  Notes

  1 Taylor, Peter J., The Way the Modern World Works: World Hegemony to World Impasse (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), 216.

  2 https://www.scribd.com/document/16745228/New-Little-Ice-Age-Instead-of-Global-Warming.

  3 McCracken, K. G., J. Beer, and F. Steihilber, “Evidence for Planetary Forcing of the Cosmic Ray Intensity and Solar Activity throughout the Past 9400 Years,” Solar Physics 289 (March 20, 2014): 3207–29.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Ibid.

  6 Ibid.

  7 Sharp, Geoff, “Calibrating the Dendrochronology and Carbon Dating Record via Astronomical Alignments,” February 10, 2014, http://www.landscheidt.info/?q=node/323.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Charatova, Ivanka, “The Cycle of 2402 Years in Solar Motion and Its Response in Proxy Records,” GeoLines 11 (2000), http://geolines.gli.cas.cz/fileadmin/volumes/volume11/G11-012.pdf.

  10 Newton, Sir Isaac, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. Andrew Motte (New York: Danieal Adee, 1846).

  11 Wilson, I. R. G., et al., “Does a Spin-Orbit Coupling between the Sun and the Jovian Planets Govern the Solar Cycle?,” Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia 25 (2008), 85.

  12 Ibid., 91.

  13 See http://www.space.com/4755-trading-cosmic-places-neptune-uranus-swapped-spots.html.

  Chapter Eleven

  Deconstructing the “Greatest Lie Ever Told”

  40 million people are now already at risk of severe coastal flooding. That number could well triple within the next half-century or so. Even wealthier countries are not immune to the impacts. In the United States, for example, particularly vulnerable areas are: Miami Beach, the Chesapeake region, coastal Louisiana, and coastal Texas . . . This will have implications that extend right up to the steps of our nation’s Capitol. A recent study found that sea level rise of only a tenth of a meter would lead to $2 billion in property damage and affect almost 68,000 people in Washington, D.C.

  —Al Gore, 1993

  You have heard this sad story umpteen times before. Even if you were not tuned in to see Al Gore on the Today Show on May 24, 2006, you have a pretty good idea of what he told Katie Couric. He said then that if his global warming carbon abatement agenda were not enacted, within fifteen to twenty years, “Yes, in fact the World Trade Center memorial site would be underwater.” In short, this is the cartoon version of The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich’s 2004 climate disaster movie, but without the sex appeal of Emmy Rossum.

  The scenario of melting polar ice caps flooding the world is an impossible exaggeration that meshes with Al Gore’s other efforts to Hollywoodize your understanding of climate. Remember the catchy graphics in Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, showing all of South Florida and much of San Francisco disappearing under water? This geophysical counterfactual provides one of the prime rationalizations for the campaign to spend tens of trillions of dollars—of which Gore stands to pocket many millions—to prevent global warming supposedly caused by carbon dioxide emissions.

  The idea that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels was propagated so that you would not resist efforts to have our pockets picked under the guise of “saving the planet.” You were told that the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps were destined to melt and that warmer oceans would expand with catastrophic results, threatening shore dwellers the world over, particularly around important areas of the United States where rich people live and among poor, low-lying island nations.

  Without a doubt, inundation by rising sea levels has become the catastrophe of choice in the twenty-first century. Not the least reason is that rising sea levels are to this point an almost entirely hypothetical menace. In a 2007 report, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that by the 2080s, many millions more people than today are projected to experience floods every year due to sea level rise, particularly those in densely populated and low-lying megadeltas of Asia and Africa, along with those on small islands.1

  If you are going to be smitten by catastrophe, it is more rewarding and convenient to have your million-dollar oceanfront villa in Hilton Head—much less your two-bit tropical country—forecasted to be swamped by rising sea levels some sixty or seventy years in the future than it is to fall prey to an actual hurricane, much less an earthquake or a volcano, today. For one thing, hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes are dangerous. They kill people. And cleaning up after them involves lots of work. Your car could be washed away or buried in ash. Volcanoes spew out gases like sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, hydrogen fluoride, and even mists of hydrochloric acid. Clouds of these gases, emitted by actual volcanoes, sometimes settle in low-lying areas and asphyxiate people and livestock.

  By comparison, inundation by rising sea levels is tidy. No one has to breathe noxious gases, or even get wet. It is all a matter of computer simulations, like a video game. That is why the president of the Maldives and the prime minister of Tuvalu, among others, have opted to be vict
imized by rising sea levels experienced through computer simulations rather than wait for some actual catastrophe that might justify supplication for compensation from wealthy countries.

  “Sheer Nonsense”

  Professor Niels-Axel Mörner, the former head of the Institute for Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics at Stockholm University, a world expert on sea level changes and coastal evolution, reports that, in recent years, former Maldivian president Mohamed Nasheed maintained that the Maldives would be submerged under the sea. Mörner refers to this claim as “sheer nonsense.”2 A decade ago, while Mörner was the president of the INQUA commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, he conducted a sea level research project in the Maldives, finding that the sea level was not rising and had been stable for the last thirty to forty years. He stated that the 1970s sea level even fell by approximately twenty centimeters.

  Former president Nasheed is not alone in seeking to win compensation for a projected rise in sea levels. In a July 2014 interview with CNN, Anote Tong, the former president of Kiribati, stated that rising sea levels, due to global warming, would lead to the total annihilation of the thirty-three coral islands in the Central Pacifica that make up Kiribati.3

  Part of the explanation for the eagerness of the leaders of small island countries to proclaim that they have no future is that they are responding to the promise of lots of money to say so. According to the Climate Policy Initiative, global North-South climate cash flows were estimated at between $39 billion and $62 billion as of October 2013.4 In addition, they were promised up to $30 billion more at the Copenhagen and Cancun climate talks in exchange for backing for international treaties to completely revamp world energy markets. As reported in the Guardian, details of this bribe were included among the revelations released by WikiLeaks. One tantalizing tidbit said that the accord promised $30 billion in aid for the poorest nations hit by global warming they had not caused. Within two weeks of the Copenhagen meeting, the Maldives foreign minister wrote to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, expressing the country’s eagerness to back the plan.5 Strangely, for a country whose leaders believed it had no future, the Maldives are now planning to build sixty-four resorts, at an estimated cost of $40 million each, along with eleven new airports.