Requiem for Relativity

Dr Joe, Extinction might be related to CO2 levels because photosynthesis requires CO2. It might be some plants only thrive when CO2 levels are just right. Kill the plants and mammals will die and lots of mammals died out ~15,000 years ago. As to how ice age cycles occur; it is clear to me science has no clue as yet why ice comes and goes. As you might know it takes a lot of energy to run the ice cycle and no one has ever determined how much energy or why it flows one way for thousands of years and then reverses. This process has nothing to due with Earth's orbit or CO2.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Jim</i>
<br />Dr Joe, Extinction might be related to CO2 levels because photosynthesis requires CO2. It might be some plants only thrive when CO2 levels are just right. Kill the plants and mammals will die and lots of mammals died out ~15,000 years ago. As to how ice age cycles occur; it is clear to me science has no clue as yet why ice comes and goes. As you might know it takes a lot of energy to run the ice cycle and no one has ever determined how much energy or why it flows one way for thousands of years and then reverses. This process has nothing to due with Earth's orbit or CO2.
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This is the best summary of the situation, that I've ever read. On careful consideration, I agree with every single thing you say here. The last sentence is an especially bold one and I agree with it!

Dr Joe, You are the first person to have a favorable comment on my views about the ice age cycle and climate issues. It is quite clear to me the cycle involves a flux of ~10E14 watts just to make(and unmake) the ice. This energy has to come from the Earth itself from the mantle and easily explains everything about the ice cycle and climate. The mantle flux has been ignored and clearly it is vital to everything on the surface of our planet.

The cause of the Ice Ages

As described in Goldstein's "Classical Mechanics" sec. 5.6, or the similar chapter in Synge's mechanics text, a solid spheroid might rotate, not about any of its principal axes, but rather about a body axis which slowly revolves around the pole of the spheroid. For Earth, the axis might revolve in a period of 297 days, because Earth is flattened by 1/297.

If the circle described on the spheroid by the revolving axis, is far from the spheroid's pole, the spheroid will be much less flattened. The actual spheroid, will be the average of all the spheroids that there would be if the axis stayed at one point. Elementary integral calculus shows that if the spheroid is flattened by 1/297 when it rotates about a fixed axis, but the circle of axis revolution is 20.6deg from the spheroid's pole (i.e. latitude 69.4deg), then the average spheroid is flattened about 1/365.

With this amount of flattening, the axis revolves with period one year. So the axis is always over, say, Canada in December and over Siberia in June. Canada then has an arctic winter; but though it is at temperate latitude in summer, the insolation is about the same as an arctic summer. (Elementary integral calculus shows that for an axis tilt of 23.45deg, the summer solstice insolation at latitude 90 - 2*20.6 = 48.8deg, is 8% less than at the pole.) Basically Canada gets an arctic winter and a temperate summer, adding up to an arctic amount of insolation. Likewise Siberia gets a temperate winter and an arctic summer, adding up to a temperate amount of insolation. The axis doesn't exactly move to Canada; rather, it moves to Canada when it counts, namely every winter.

My addition to Goldstein's or Synge's text, is to realize that Earth's flattening becomes somewhat less when the axis revolves yearly, too quickly for Earth to adjust. Then the usual spheroidal shape is averaged over the year and is less flattened. This also affords an estimate of the present latitude line along which the axis will revolve.

I don't know what instigates such a change, but here are some possible clues:

1. In December this year (2012) the New Moon occurs very near perigee, an unusually close perigee, also near Earth's perihelion. Luna's Declination then (either at the New Moon or at the perigee or at the extreme Declination, all of which occur within an interval of 9h) is -20.9, differing only 0.3 degree from the 20.6 estimate found above. This might trigger the change somehow.

2. The ratio 297/365 = 0.8137, where the last one or two digits are not significant. The ratio of the Mayan Long Count to the Barbarossa period (discussed by me above on this thread) is 5125.257/6339.36 = 0.8085. These numbers are close to the number (also discussed by me above on this thread) for which the ratios of the magnitudes of the Legendre polynomials tend to be whole powers of 2.

Dr Joe, I order to understand why the ice cycle exists the energy required needs to be explored. It is grasping at straws to accept the motion of Earth to explain why energy flows in one direction for a while and then reverses the flow direction. On average to Earth always is one AU from the sun and that indicates the solar flux is constant. The real cause is much better understood by accepting as fact or possibility the mantle of Earth is forcing this cycle as well as some climate changes.

Hapgood's estimated pole positions

"Hapgood's examples of recent locations for the North Pole include Hudson Bay (60N, 73W) , the Atlantic Ocean between Iceland and Norway (72N, 10E) and Yukon (63N, 135W)."

- Wikipedia article, "Pole shift hypothesis"

The mean latitude of these points is 65 = 90 - 25 +/- SEM 3.6, vs. my 90 - 20.6 = 69.4 predicted. If I fit a circle (neglecting Earth's oblateness) to these three Hapgood pole points, the center of the circle (which I will call the "Hapgood center") is lat 80.9N, long 90.1W. The opening angle (one might say half-angle) of the cone with vertex at Earth's center and through this circle, is 21.5deg, in good agreement with my calculated 20.6deg (see my previous post) for the circle of yearly axis revolution in force-free rotation.

According to the U.S. government data at

www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag/data/poles/NP.xy

the geomagnetic N pole (i.e. equivalent dipole)(not quite the same as the "magnetic" a.k.a. "magnetic dip" pole) passed nearest the Hapgood center in late 1999, being 3.0deg "West by South" (i.e. azimuth ~255deg) of the Hapgood center at 2000.0AD. It was also during 1999, that the rate of geomagnetic pole movement suddenly increased to its present high value: from 1990 through 1998, the movement was never more than 0.0065 radian/yr (much faster than earlier in the 19th & 20th centuries or even in the early 1990s) but from 1999 through 2009, never less than 0.0083 rad/yr, though trending slightly downward from the fastest motion, 0.0113 rad/yr, which is the rate that occurred during 1999.

When I randomly choose 5 of the 21 geomagnetic pole points, 1990.0-2010.0, excluding the 2000.0 point which is taken as the origin, and (to get good spacing) requiring that no pair of points be from adjacent years, I find that 80% of the time, the fitting conic is an hyperbola rather than ellipse, using the gnomonic (i.e. azimuthal from Earth's center) projection to map the geomagnetic pole points onto a plane. So, the "Hapgood center" is a plausible repulsive focus (i.e. focus on the convex side of the curve) of the geomagnetic pole path.

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Venus' rotation period: another Mayan Long Count correlation

Tne new article by NT Mueller et al, Icarus 217:474, 2012, correlates 1990-1992 Magellan probe data with 2006-2008 Venus Express probe data, to find Venus' sidereal rotation period as 243.023 +/- 0.002 d, averaged over 16 yr. Mueller mentions in his abstract that the Magellan probe value was 243.0185 +/- 0.0001; I read in the recent [London] Daily Mail article, that this actually was based on four years of Venus' rotation.

If the variation is mainly real, then the values should be weighted according to the duration observed:

(243.0185*4 + 243.023*16)/20 = 243.0221 (this is within Mueller's error bars)

and this best estimate shows that

Mayan Long Count / Venus rotation period
= 360d*5200/243.0221d = 7703.003

where the whole number 7703 is a prime number.