Lunar Warming
Research into the earth’s natural climate system often goes unexamined due to the social pressure to define every bit of the climate as caused by human activity that, it is claimed, must necessarily result in planetary catastrophe. There are, nonetheless, interpretations from researchers either retired from the academic disciplines around climate science or who come to the field interested amateurs. They are often the ones keeping the basic research alive outside academia, by proposing hypotheses and testing them against available data about how the climate system can change all on its own.
Judith Curry’s website is one place where these scientists can meet and share their research, debating systems, causes, and effects. One recent article there serves as an excellent exemple: “The 2015 major El Nino was predicted years in advance using a lunar cycle” by Javier Vinós.
When astrophysicists discuss the abundance of potentially habitable planets around Sun-like stars, they often overlook a crucial fact: Earth’s formation was probably an incredibly rare event. About 4.5 billion years ago, our planet was born from a chance collision between early Earth and a Mars-sized planet. This serendipitous event explains two extraordinary features of Earth that may be exceptionally rare among other Earth-like planets. The first remarkable feature is Earth’s large metallic core, which generates a strong magnetic field despite the planet’s size. This magnetic field plays an important role in protecting our atmosphere from the solar wind, preventing the loss of light gases. The second unusual aspect of Earth is that it has an unusually large satellite for its size. Normally, the mass ratio between a planet and its satellite is about 1:10,000. However, the Earth-Moon system has a mass ratio of only 1:81, so close that it is sometimes referred to as a double planet.
The earth-moon system amounts to two rocky planetoids revolving around one another. The moon keeps the earth’s rotation on its axis stable, and this stable axis keeps us in regular seasonal cycles—predictable enough to be amenable to life.
As the article further explains, the lunar pull may have a lot more to do with global climate change than previously understood by virtue of its tidal pull alone. As every schoolchild should know, the moon is responsible for the tides of the earth’s oceans. These tides serve to mix more than just nutrients essential to life in the water. The researchers here propose and examine the possibility that the tidal effects are even more profound. They may be what drives the deep oceanic circulation system that is capable of absorbing atmospheric heat and warmth, and then releasing it back into the atmospheric system decades or centuries later. The researchers used the theory to make certain predictions about climate change, and the observations have provided support for the theory—so far, at least—by behaving in a fashion similar to the predictions.
The earth’s climate is much more interesting than the cartoonishly simple equation of manmade climate cataclysm driven solely by carbon dioxide emissions, which appears to be a belief enforced as an ideology today.
I usually avoid the subject of politics in this space for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that there's more than enough politics to go around elsewhere. However, every now and then something happens that raises my non-partisan hackles enough that I feel compelled to speak of it in whatever venue may be available at the time. And with a former President and Commander in Chief now having called soon-to-retire General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a traitor, while not-so-cryptically suggesting he should be executed, and a single U.S. Senator continuing to double down on his hamstringing of top-level military promotions, and the top and most visible members of the political party to which these two men belong failing to push back on any of this bullshit in any *meaningful* way whatsoever, I do have something to say.
Only a fellow named Matt Labash essentially says it better than I can, though his words do not directly address those of the former Commander in Chief's vis a vie Gen. Milley, since this was published a few days ago. Still, I find them relevant to that, as well as to what we should expect from our political leaders overall when it comes to the men and women who, at the risk of their own lives, do so much to ensure our lives may continue to be led free of the yokes of tyranny that threaten us from beyond our own borders.
So, I refer anyone interested to this: https://mattlabash.substack.com/p/no-respect
It's a long read. (You can save a bit of time by skipping the first paragraph about a subscription give away, if you wish.) The first part is Labash writing in the present to set up a long form piece of journalism he wrote 20 years ago. Reading all of it will take a few minutes. And it will, perhaps, make you a bit uncomfortable.
And if it does make you uncomfortable, good. It should, by my lights. I know it made me a good bit *more* than uncomfortable, and if after reading it you'd care to know *exactly* what my reaction was to it, that can be found in the Slack Tide comment section.
This is not a plug for Labash or his Substack. I like the guy and the majority of his writing and have "plugged" him and it elsewhere from time to time in the past. What this is is a plug for respect. And for common sense. And for the notion that while our enemies abroad are always a threat that needs to be defended against, the more serious and immediate dangers to our freedom and liberties lie much, much closer to home. And there are more than just a few of them employing the freedom and liberties our military gives our nation the ability to afford them to attempt to gain the reins of power that will allow them to diminish that same freedom and those same liberties for all the rest of us. And I do mean every single one of us.
Unless, of course, you're on their "side". The problem is that that "side" will easily and readily change the definition of who *you* are when it suits their own narrow purposes.
In the Catoggio piece just out, I made a little joke that a few people liked. And J-C-J got off a really good one, in a short post in which he coins the acronym SPINO and mentions spineless crustaceans.
I'll enjoy today's G-File, presumably with more travel updates, after I take care of a couple of other things, though probably not before some trolls make their little contributions. By the way, does anyone know where this Billy Zammit is coming from?