climate change

“2010’s World Gone Wild”

wild weatherBloomberg reports:

This was the year the Earth struck back.

Earthquakes, heat waves, floods, volcanoes, super typhoons, blizzards, landslides and droughts killed at least a quarter million people in 2010 — the deadliest year in more than a generation. More people were killed worldwide by natural disasters this year than have been killed in terrorism attacks in the past 40 years combined.

“It just seemed like it was back-to-back and it came in waves,” said Craig Fugate, who heads the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency. It handled a record number of disasters in 2010.

“The term ‘100-year event’ really lost its meaning this year.”

read more here…

This is not surprising astrologically, since the charts for the equinoxes and solstices are often used as tools for weather prediction.  The chart for the Summer Solstice was closely tied into the Cardinal Drama that we’ve seen over the past year was an intense one (see the details in this earlier article), suggesting climactic summer weather around the globe.   The chart for the Fall Equinox featured the square of Saturn to Pluto aligning with the Equinox Sun and portending more crisis (Saturn) and upheaval (Pluto), as well as dramatic change (Jupiter conjunct Uranus and the Moon) likely in the realm of water (all three signs in Pisces).  Not to mention the ongoing influence of the Chiron/Neptune conjunction which has had the effect of lancing a painful boil on the face of the earth to see what might erupt there and ultimately be healed from the experience.

It looks like we won’t get any respite this winter since the chart for the Equinox includes a lunar eclipse  and a lineup in Capricorn that includes Mars and Pluto […]

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By |2019-11-10T19:49:52-05:00December 20th, 2010|Life|3 Comments

Are we heading into another “little ice age?”

Maybe the solar warming skeptics are on to something.  As you probably know, we are in a very deep solar minimum, with over 700 days with absolutely no sunspot activity since 2004. In fact, some scientists are beginning to speculate that sunspots may be gone for good:

“Sunspot magnetic fields are dropping by about 50 gauss per year,” says Penn. “If we extrapolate this trend into the future, sunspots could completely vanish around the year 2015.”

This disappearing act is possible because sunspots are made of magnetism. The “firmament” of a sunspot is not matter but rather a strong magnetic field that appears dark because it blocks the upflow of heat from the sun’s interior. If Earth lost its magnetic field, the solid planet would remain intact, but if a sunspot loses its magnetism, it ceases to exist.

read more here…

Between 1645 and 1715 or so, another spotless period later became known as the  “Maunder Minimum,” and happened to coincide with the beginning of the “little ice age” that spread through Europe causing bitterly cold winters.  However, the cold spell lasted well beyond the end of the Solar Minimum period, leading many scientists to dispute the correlation.

Much of the panic over 2012 and the end of the Mayan calendar also relates to the idea that this will be the year of the peak solar maximum.  If the solar cycle behaved as it was supposed to, we would be peaking during the period from 2011 to 2012.  Some scientists are predicting an even stronger peak because of the minimum.

The fact is, no one knows.  And isn’t that one of the exciting mysteries of life!

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By |2019-05-11T07:34:49-04:00September 13th, 2009|Astronomy|Comments Off on Are we heading into another “little ice age?”

13 things scientists don’t understand

I love a good mystery, and you probably do too.  Check out these 13 THINGS SENT TO TRY US from Michael Brooks via New Scientist – it’s almost enough to make you think there is more to this Universe than scientists can understand:

1.  Radiation left from the Big Bang is still glowing in the sky – in a mysterious and controversial pattern.

2.  Something unseeable and far bigger than anything in the known universe is hauling a group of galaxies towards it at inexplicable speed.

3.  Tens of millions of years ago, the average temperature at the poles was 15 or 20 °C. Now let’s talk about climate change!

4.  Space probes using Earth’s gravity to get a slingshot speed boost are moving faster than they should. Call in dark matter.

5.  The fusion of two distinct evolutionary lines is not supposed to work – but the seas are teeming with chimeras that prove it can.

The other 8 mysteries and more details on each one here…

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By |2009-09-03T08:28:03-04:00September 3rd, 2009|Mysteries, Science|Comments Off on 13 things scientists don’t understand

Jupiter/Saturn, sunspot cycles, and 2012

Thanks to John and Susan Townley for finding this article about the research of the late Rhodes Fairbridge of the effects of Jupiter on our earthly climate. It has been known for some time that Jupiter has an effect on sunspots which correlate to changes in our climate, but no one really understood why. It turns out the answer may be in the relationship between Jupiter and Saturn.

At times, the sun is at the solar system’s centre of gravity. Most often, this is not the case– the orbit of the planets will align planets to one side or another of the sun. Jupiter, the planet with by far the largest mass, most influences the solar system’s centre of gravity. When Uranus, Neptune and especially Saturn — the next largest planet — join Jupiter on one side of the solar system, the solar system’s centre of gravity shifts well beyond the sun.The sun’s own orbit, he found, has eight characteristic patterns, all determined by Jupiter’s position relative to Saturn, with the other planets playing much lesser roles. Some of these eight have orderly orbits, smooth and near-circular. During such orbits, solar activity is high and Earth heats up. Some of the eight orbits are chaotic, taking a loop-the-loop path. These orbits correspond to quiet times for the sun [solar minimum], and cool periods on Earth. Every 179 years or so, the sun embarks on a new cycle of orbits. One of the cooler periods in recent centuries was the Little Ice Age of the 17th century, when the Thames River in London froze over each winter. The next cool period, if the pattern holds, began in 1996, with the effects to be felt starting in 2010. Some predict three decades of severe cold.

I wrote on […]

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By |2018-07-16T12:08:06-04:00November 15th, 2007|Science|0 Comments

Revolution and Revelations

digital art from www.paulsquire.com

Mercury turned direct on Saturday after a three-week period of missed appointments, crashed computers, and conversations that began “I thought you said…” For some time Mercury has been marching in lockstep with Uranus, the planet of revolution and radical departures from ordinary thinking, and this combination has brought with it a groundswell of revolutionary activity as well as some surprising revelations. The buildup of energy as we approach the Aries New Moon solar eclipse on Wednesday will likely encourage an increase in aggression (Aries) and bravado resulting in a higher level of violence and action/reaction across the globe. Pent-up emotion erupted in the public arena this weekend:

Demonstrators in Belarus were clubbed and their leader arrested during an increase in violence on Saturday, about a week after a widely-questioned election on March 19 left the current administration in power.

Over half a million protesters in Los Angeles were accompanied by tens of thousands more in other cities such as Denver, Phoenix and Milwaukee in marches and speeches protesting the anti-immigration bill that is before the US Senate this week.

Riots in France over the past week came to a head as students snubbed efforts of the Prime Minister to quell the violence.

And then there were some surprising revelations:

The Pentagon claimed that Russia had provided classified information to Saddam Hussein as the US invasion of Iraq unfolded.

Scientists in Ethiopia found the skull of a new human ancestor that could be the long-sought missing link.

The journal Science published two studies on Friday revealing that global warming is occurring much more quickly than previously thought, resulting in significant earth changes by the year 2100.

You may be experiencing the intensity of the upcoming eclipse on a more personal level as well. Change […]

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By |2019-08-26T14:02:48-04:00March 26th, 2006|Conspiracy, Planetary cycles|Comments Off on Revolution and Revelations