DRIFT, WOBBLE, TILT, AND MILANKOVICH
(no, that isn’t a daffy law firm name….)

With the current spate of wintery blasts hammering most of the country, someone, the other day, jokingly asked me….who’s the smartass who turned off global warming? When I replied, blame it all on Drift, Wobble, Tilt, and Milankovich, he looked at me blankly and said….what the hell is that? Some kind of daffy law firm? Taken aback by his question, it dawned on me that, like a lot of other folks who’ve been brain-washed by our global-warming evangelicals and climate change alarmists, he didn’t have a clue to what my own joking response to his was referring.

Milankovich was a Serbian mathematician who spent years researching and calculating how the various cycles of our earth’s orbital drift, axial wobble, and tilt, affected our global climatic conditions. Apparently he came up with some spot-on conclusions on how these three factors are the main driving mechanisms which cause climatic changes. Conclusions today’s scientists generally accept as definitive (only arguing about the relative relationships between those cycles). Compared to these factors, our human contributions to that process are minimal. If this seems heretical to current conventional wisdom about the subject, so be it. Milankovich just makes more sense.

Simply put, over a cyclic period of some 100,000 years, the earth’s circular rotation around the sun progressively drifts outwards to become an elliptical one, and back again. Combined with that drift, the earth’s axial wobble, and axial tilt, cause the earth to receive progressively less sun radiation for the first part of that cycle, and then, progressively more sun radiation for the second part of that cycle. Thus, average global temperatures rise and fall according to which phase of that cyclic process is in motion. Right now, earth appears to be reaching the cusp end of that warming phase (analogous to –slack tide-), thus, perhaps, getting ready to reverse itself back towards another cooling phase. So, instead of Hawaiian shirts, Bermuda shorts, or sarongs and bikinis, we may be looking forward to long-johns, furs, and mukluks, instead.

Breaking it all down, we find that it takes some 50,000 years for the rotational drift to reach out to its furthest extent, and another 50,000 for it to return to its circular path around the sun. Meanwhile, it takes some 41,000 years to complete the circuit of its axial wobble, and some 22,000 years for its axial tilt to reach almost 3 degrees, and back again to near vertical. Intriguingly, these time frames correlate closely to our glacial and interglacial periods. Even more intriguing, the time frames for both the axial wobble and axial tilt cycles are a very close match to the Mayan and Aztecan calendar cycles. Had they figured these things out before Milankovich did? Alas, thanks to the conquistadors….we’ll never know.

CENTURION