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causes the Ice Ages
by Miles Mathis
First posted January 18, 2011
Since I am not a geophysicist, I had never really studied the math for the ice age cycle. I only stumbled across it when I was writing my latest paper on the Sun. At Wikipedia, I found this enticing tidbit on the "Sun" page:
A recent theory claims that there are magnetic instabilities in the core of the Sun that cause fluctuations with periods of either 41,000 or 100,000 years. These could provide a better explanation of the ice ages than the Milankovitch cycles.
Yes, they could, since, as I will show presently, the Milankovitch variables are garbage when it comes to explaining long-term cycles. However, any theory that proposes magnetic instabilities in the core of the Sun as a mechanism for ice ages would have to explain the cause of the magnetic instabilities. I have studied the "recent theory," and in that regard it is a ghost. The theory is not really a theory, it is a model, because it shows effects but not causes. This is the theory of Robert Ehrlich, who had an article in the January 2007 JASTP.* He bases his theory on nothing but a computer model, by which he shows that magnetic instabilities could cause small temperature fluctuations in the core of the Sun. I have nothing against his model (at this time), and it may well be correct in its outlines, but he offers us no good cause of the magnetic instabilities, which I think we can all agree is a big hole in the theory. Others have proposed quantum effects (of course!) to explain these instabilities, but they are worse than ghosts. They are, as usual, flights of fancy and bad math. I will show with simple math and mechanics that the variations in the Sun are caused by outside influences, not by processes within the Sun itself.
The theory that Ehrlich is trying to improve upon is called the Milankovitch theory, a theory from around 1914. It is based on long-term cycles in the Earth's eccentricity, tilt, precession, and so on. Strangely, though we are told on the "Milankovitch cycle" page at Wiki that "the theory has overwhelming support," it is admitted on the "Ice Age" page that Milankovitch cycles "probably cannot start an ice age." This is because the longer term cycles, though larger, are said to be caused by smaller variations. For example, it is admitted that eccentricity has a smaller effect on so-called Solar forcing, and yet eccentricity is the variable that matches the 100,000 year number. Obviously the ice ages are the largest effect. How could the largest effect be caused by the smallest cause?
A bigger problem, not admitted at Wiki or anywhere else, is that variables like eccentricity cannot cause anything, since they are field effects not causes. In other words, there is and can be no "Solar forcing," since the Earth does not force the Sun to do anything. It is the other way round, of course. It is the Sun that does any forcing. It is variables transmitted by the Sun that cause all the terrestrial variables, including eccentricity, tilt, and so on. Smaller bodies do not force larger bodies; larger bodies force smaller ones. I will be reminded of the old equal-and-opposite rule, but if the Earth responds to the Sun in kind, that response will still be swallowed up and ignored. All effects, whether gravitational or E/M from a body the size of the Earth to a body the size of the Sun are negligible. They cannot cause these large effects seen in the ice core samples.
The Milankovitch cycle has many, many problems, most of which are admitted, but the greatest problem is that all the proposed effects together can't come near explaining what we see. The theorists then propose feedback mechanisms to increase the effect, but it is much more likely that the effects from these variations are actually damped by other variations (like greenhouse gasses), rather than amplified. This is admitted even on the Wiki page, where one of the strongest causes of variation, axial tilt, is admitted to be resisted by other environmental variables, including greenhouse gasses.
It became apparent to me very quickly that this question was like all the others in physics and geophysics: the current answer was very poor, everyone seemed to recognize that in moments of candor, but the current answer was nonetheless guarded as a precious thing, since so many careers had been built on it. I could tell at a glance that the Milankovitch cycles were jerry-rigged and pushed, since they had no structural soundness from the first tap. Math is a lot like architecture. You don't have to study the Louvre for many weeks or years to see that it is more structurally sound than the Pompidou, for example. You can tell at a glance. It is the same with the math of these theories. Good theories are simple, and the math has no tape on it. Bad theories are full of paste-overs, pushes, and props, and they always come with a long list of assurances, insurances, and apologetics. They also come with complete their own cops, who will threaten and bully anyone who points out the tape and the props. Good math and theory doesn't need cops: it is its own recommendation. Only bad theory needs to intimidate you to believe it.
I was also amazed at how simple the right answer was, as usual. The right answer had been missed not because it was so complex and esoteric, but because the current physicists had preferred to bury their heads up their own black holes one more time. As I will show in just a moment, the answer depends only upon seeing influences from outside the Solar System, and we should know of those influences. We are not ignorant of the galactic core and its incredible power. So an impartial observer will ask why physicists are so blindered when it comes to admitting input from beyond the Solar System. The math and mechanics I will show you are hardly revolutionary. But physicists don't want to go there because this input must come in on the charge field, and present physicists are allergic to the charge field in celestial mechanics. They don't want to even consider it, because it will mess up all their work, all the way back to Laplace. Yes, they will have to re-do centuries worth of math, and they don't want to do that, the truth be damned.
But the mechanics is fairly simple. It takes about 240 million years for us to circle the galactic core. If we divide that by 100,000, the time between ice ages, we get 2400. So the Earth does something 2400 times in every galactic orbit, and that something causes either cooling or heating. What could it be? I suggest a Solar System alignment with the galactic core, which would align the galactic charge field with the Solar charge field. For the galactic core to augment the Solar field like this, the ecliptic either has to be in the same plane as the galactic plane, or the nodes have to be perpendicular to the galactic core. Since the ecliptic is now at a large angle [60o] to the celestial equator, those planes don't match. Instead, we must study the nodes.
Some will think this is astrology, due to the terminology, but it isn't. It is straight mechanics. The nodes I am talking about are just the two points on the circles where the ecliptic meets the galactic plane, as in this illustration.
This illustration is from the Wiki page on the ecliptic, not from an astrology site, so stay calm, please. It is showing the plane of the Solar System relative to the Earth's equator, but we can pretend "celestial equator" means galactic plane if we like (since I couldn't find a diagram of that, this will do). We just change the angle from 23 to 60. To be even more precise, we would change the ecliptic plane to the equator of the Sun, since there is a 3o difference, but the angle doesn't actually matter in this problem so I will skip all that. All we need to know for now is that there is an angle and that the nodes travel.
It also doesn't matter if the Sun is actually in the main galactic plane or not. All we need for this theory is the actual plane between the galactic core and the Sun, since points outside the main plane receive charge just as do points in the main plane. They don't receive as much, but they receive plenty. We are told that the Sun travels from below the plane to above it over very long time scales, but that also doesn't matter here. It won't affect this paper. It may answer even longer timescale problems, but it doesn't affect this one.
As it turns out, the nodes move in the same sort of precession that the precession of the equinoxes does, since this precession causes that precession. That is why I can use this diagram. It is currently believed that so-called lunisolar precession is caused "by the gravitational forces of the Moon and Sun on Earth's equatorial bulge, causing Earth's axis to move with respect to inertial space," but that is false. Since I have shown elsewhere that gravity is a motion, not a force, precession cannot be caused that way. Einstein showed that gravity was not a force, and although current physicists accept that, they haven't let it sink in too far. They browbeat us with that fact when it suits them, and then flagrantly ignore it the next moment when it suits them, as you see. If gravity is not a force, it cannot cause precession in this way. But this probably deserves another paper, since I haven't addressed it yet. You may simply notice for now that if I am correct, this motion of the Solar plane relative to the galactic would cause a precession of the equinoxes with no real motion of the Earth's tilt. To decide the question, we only have to study the Solar precession of other planets. If I am right, they should all precess on the same timescale. I found data on other sorts of precession for the other planets, but none on this. Either it isn't known or it isn't widely publicized.
Now, go back to the diagram. We will use their nodes, as a convenience. As you can see, one of the nodes I am talking about used to point at Aries, hence the name. It now points at Pisces. It travels through the zodiac, taking about 23,000 years to do so, we are told. When I say that the Solar System should be perpendicular with the galaxy, in order to cause a charge conjunction, I mean that the line running through the two nodes is perpendicular to the galactic core. Since the galactic core is in Sagittarius, this means the nodes would be pointing roughly at Pisces and Virgo (right angles to Sagittarius). Since the nodes are pointing at Pisces right now, we are in an interglacial period. In other words, I will show now that we are in an interglacial period because the nodes are pointing at Pisces.
It is actually very simple, and completely mechanical, but to explain it simply and visually is a bit tricky. I suggest you grab two CD's or DVD's or other small disks. Hold one in one hand and one in the other. Hold the one in your left hand horizontal, or flat to the ground. That will stand for the galaxy. The one in your right hand is now the Solar System. The Sun is at the center of the disk and the Earth is part of the way out, orbiting. Now, the Solar disk is not flat to the ground. It is at an angle. Over time, we will let this angle stay the same, but we will move the high point. Start out with the high point of the disk pointing toward the galaxy disk. When that is the case, the nodes are not pointing at the galaxy disk. You can see this if you bring the disks together. If you could superimpose them, as in the diagram above, the nodes would be pointing to the sides. Now let the high end of your Solar disk go ¼ turn either way. In that case, the nodes are now pointing at the galaxy disk. I will show that when the nodes are perpendicular the charge conjunction is at a maximum.
Over time, the high end of the Solar disk makes a full revolution, returning to its original position. This is one cycle, and it is this cycle that takes about 23,000 years. But the nodes will be in line with the galactic core in two positions: when the high end is at ¼ and ¾. Or, if the galactic core is north, the nodes will line up with it when the high end is east or west. And so we get an alignment every 11,500 years or so. Alarms should be going off in your head now, because that number is already an important one in the history of ice ages. According to the math of many, interglacials have lasted about 11 thousands years. This is where that number comes from. 11.5 is half of 23.
If that were all there were to it, then we would get a warming from this alignment every 11,000 years. Actually, we do. If you study the ice core chart from Vostok in the Antarctic, there are, yes, 9 little peaks in each of the longer periods, and the peaks are an average of about 11,000 years apart. All of those peaks indicate a warming period. We aren't usually told this. We are told the interglacial periods are 11,000 years long, but we aren't told that there are 8 other (sub)interglacial periods, all of them also about 11,000 years long.
If you want to confirm this yourself, just take your ruler to the chart. You will find a very clear 3/16 inch gap between many of the adjacent minipeaks. This corresponds to about 11,000 years.
But we still have the longer period to explain. There must be another variation, because some of these warming periods are a lot larger than the others. Only one in nine of the warming periods is large enough to melt the glaciers and be called interglacial. And this 1 in 9 comes (almost) like clockwork.
What causes it? Jupiter. Jupiter causes a wobble in this cycle, sort of like the wobble in the tilt of the Earth, due to nutation. Jupiter provides what is called a libration to the motions above. Because of Jupiter, one of the nine conjunctions is cleaner than the other eight, and this causes a greater maximum in the charge field.
Remember that even mainstream physicists have pointed out that our system is almost a two-star system. Jupiter is nearly as large as many red dwarf stars, and he recycles nearly as much charge as a small star. Since we are studying charge here, not fusion, it doesn't matter that Jupiter is not fusing. Only the charge matters. Therefore a charge alignment must include Jupiter. The important fact here is that Jupiter is not precisely on the Solar plane or the ecliptic or the invariant plane or the Solar equator. Once again, we have a small angle. This angle causes the wobble. It causes it because it now matters where Jupiter is in his inclination cycle when the galactic alignment occurs. In other words, at each 11,000 year alignment, Jupiter is in a different place. When Jupiter is nearest the Solar plane, he most augments the charge maximum. When he is most off the plane, he least augments it. But because of the way his inclination matches up with the larger cycle, he is only at his nearest point about every 100,000 years.
Some will say the line is the invariant plane, in which case Jupiter is nearly on it already. But the charge field is not determined by the invariant plane. It is determined by the Solar equator, through which most of the charge in the Solar system is cycled into the system. Therefore, the system is most efficient when Jupiter is crossing the Solar equator or is nearest to it. Jupiter is currently 6o off the Solar equator, so charge efficiency in the system is not near the maximum in that regard (unless Jupiter is usually more than 6o inclined).
Again, I couldn't find good data on the precession of Jupiter's inclination, or his libration. I found some old theoretical numbers, based on Laplace and Copernicus, but since these had the actual inclination spread wrong, it is doubtful they would have the period correct. Since we now have real data from flybys, we should have new numbers. If anyone wants to send them to me, I will work on them. That said, it appears that the current accepted number for the cycle is about 50,000 years. That is nice, because it is half our long cycle. Both an old book on Google books and a new video on youtube used that number, though neither mention gave much detail. In neither place could I find out whether the number came from data or from theoretical models. In any case, we could have predicted we would find the number 100,000 or a simple fraction of it. Since Jupiter must be the cause, we know that the numbers will work out one way or the other.
Some will find that last statement peculiar, but once again I solved this one because I knew where to look (and where not to look). I knew the Milankovitch cycles couldn't explain this, because bodies don't cause effects upon themselves. Just as the Earth cannot be "forcing" the Sun, it cannot be forcing itself. Local mechanisms can affect eachother, and I am not denying it, but large long-term cycles like this cannot be caused locally. Milankovitch was looking in the wrong place from the start. His opening postulates were illogical. He was trying to explain effects via other effects, and that can't work no matter what you are looking at.
For some reason, humans are not yet adept at looking beyond their own environs for mechanical explanations. Our sight is still generally very limited. We know that the Sun causes everything here, and we should know that the galaxy causes the Sun to do whatever he does, but we aren't good at peering up the line of influences. Some of us have prayed to the Sun, but I don't know of a people who have prayed to the galactic core. My solution to this problem tells us that would have been the logical thing to do. Supposing that powers greater than us required prayer or worship, we should have been worshiping the great deity seated in or near Sagittarius, who plugs in our Sun and thereby powers everything in this system.
But enough narrative color. Let us return to the straight mechanics. I have some large questions yet to answer. The first one is, "Supposing you are right, how, precisely, does the charge field of the galaxy align with the charge field of the Solar system? You have a 60o angle, no matter what. Why should one configuration give us maximum input, and warming, and another configuration give us minimum input, and cooling?" Well, we need to know how the Sun acts as a conduit of this energy, to understand how the fields hook up mechanically. Before I discovered how the Sun worked, it could have been argued against me that the charge from the core of the galaxy simply arrived like other light does, coming directly from source to receiver. In other words, we don't require that visible light be cycled through the Sun. The light from Sagittarius goes directly from there to here, with no stopover in the Sun. But it turns out charge doesn't work that way. Charge is made up of lower energy photons, and these lower energy, longer wavelength photons do make a stopover in the Sun. They get sucked in by the charge vortex created by the Sun's spin and his charge potentials. A large number of them go in the Solar poles and are recycled. I don't know yet if the Sun borrows some of their energy, spitting them out at longer wavelengths than were emitted, although that is a good hypothesis. What I do know is that the Sun emits them more heavily at the equator, due only to angular momentum. The greatest velocities are at the equator. Therefore the charge is heaviest in the plane of the Solar equator, and that applies all the way out to Pluto. The planets live in or near this plane because that is where the energy is. The charge potentials push them there, and by being there they are constantly energized by the field.
Still, that explains very little, at first glance. We have that 60o angle to explain, and we cannot get rid of it no matter how we look at the input. No, we can't get rid of it, but we can discover how its influence varies. We can study our disks again, to see how the variation works. At first I thought the maximum conjunction would happen when the nodes pointed at the galactic core. When the nodes are pointing at the core, the angle isn't important. This is because the angle is sideways to the influence, and so it isn't really an angle in the field. To see this, just position your disks. If the galactic disk is N, let the high end of your Solar disk be east or west. In that case, you have an angle, but the galactic core doesn't see it. The two disks are tilted relative to one another, yes, but the angle is 90o to the field. When one field influences the other, the angle is "invisible." It won't affect the mechanics. If you don't like the word field, we can look at the photons. When the photons arrive from the galactic core to the Sun, they don't experience that angle. They don't have to travel through it. They don't care whether the Sun is tilted or not, since he is not tilted at them. He is tilted to the west, say, and they are coming from the north. Straight mechanics.
This is why I thought this configuration would cause maximum effect. The angle is put out of "sight." Normally, I would have been right. This configuration would have caused maximum conjunction of the fields. In the opposite configuration, the high end of the Solar disk is N or S, and the angle is pointing either directly at or away from the galactic core. So the core "sees" the angle. The charge coming from the galaxy hits this angle, and we have to take a sine of that angle to calculate the effect. That would normally produce a minimum.
But I had forgotten one very important thing. The plane of the Sun here, that we are representing as the disk, is the plane of the Sun's equator. But the Sun doesn't receive charge at the equator, he emits it there. Which means we need to align the galactic charge field with the Sun's poles, not the Sun's equator. This reverses everything we just assumed about the disks and the maximums. When the charge from the galaxy is coming in at the equator, the field conjunction is at a minimum. The emission of the Sun counters it, or damps it, and much less of its makes it to the poles. But when the angle is in line with the galactic core, we have a maximum. We have to take the cosine of the angle, to figure out how much of the galactic field actually pours into the poles, but that portion of the field is the most the Sun can possibly get. The Sun never tilts 90o to the galaxy, so he cannot receive the full dose. Cos60o is the best he can do.
To say it another way, let us look at the photons. If the photons from the galactic core arrive at the Solar equator, they are met by a heavy barrage of photons coming right at them. We get a lot of spin cancellations and potential cancellations, and the two fields of photons don't stack. Mathematically, they cancel. But if the Sun is tilted toward the incoming photons, they can more easily pour right into his pole. Not only do they experience less field traffic from emitted charge photons coming at them (since the Sun emits less nearer the poles), they also find a straighter path into the pole. It is almost like the Sun leans over to let them in the hole, you see. And this works either with the north pole or the south pole. In one case it is photons pouring in and in the other it is anti-photons, but neither the Sun nor the galaxy really cares which it is. The Earth doesn't care either, since we don't even know the difference here.
As you now know, this matches data, since we are currently in this second configuration. The angle is in line with the galactic core, since we know that the nodes are pointing at Pisces. And we know we are at or near a maximum, because we are interglacial. Jupiter must also be nearer his maximum, because we are still quite warm. We are at zero instead of 4 on the chart, but we are way above -9. We take this to mean that Jupiter being inclined to 6o is nearer his maximum than his minimum.
Next we have the mechanics of the Jupiter libration. I have done the overview but haven't explained to you the specifics. How does the charge field of the Sun meet that of Jupiter? Well, since Jupiter's poles are right side up, like the Earth but not like Venus, we assume he has the same charge profile as the Sun. Meaning, he is mainly matter not antimatter, and photons not antiphotons. If so, then he would amplify the charge from the Sun, both the magnetic component and the electrical component. The closer he is to the Sun's equator, the more he amplifies, since we have simple poolball mechanics here. I would say that is the best assumption at this time, but the reverse situation would also fit the theory. If we discover from data that the charge of Jupiter actually damps the charge of the Sun, then our maximum charge conjunction is when Jupiter is furthest from the line, rather than closest to it. Either situation creates maxima and minima, on the same timescale, so either would work.
As for the timescale, I can't analyze the data without knowing what it is. But let us assume for now that the inclination cycle is currently around 50,000 years. In that case we have to explain the extra 2 in the math. I suspect that the number 50,000 is for the move from maximum to minimum, not the full cycle, in which case our math is done. But there may be other easy explanations of the number 2, if that should turn out not to be true. For instance, since the Earth reverses polarity occasionally, Jupiter probably does too. These pole reversals might add a 2 to the field, since we would then have two possibilities over the long term: N and S. This would automatically double the long-cycle number. There are other possibilites, but I will not complicate this paper with more analysis. When I have firm data, I will do more work on this.
We are told that we are late for the next ice age, and if you study the ice core chart you quickly see where that conclusion comes from. However, if you study it with a bit more rigor, you will see that we have been late for the next ice age for more than 20,000 years. If we are just going on the ice core readings, and a statistical analysis, this current warm spell should have started around 40,000BC, and should have ended around 25,000BC. This means that Jupiter is not doing his old job like he used to. I would say that it is very likely that Jupiter is not exactly what he was 400,000 years ago, or even 100,000 years ago. In other words, it is very likely that the inclination cycle of Jupiter has changed in the past half million years, due to taking on new moons or to other Solar System changes. Since Jupiter is the cause of the long cycle, a small change in Jupiter's inclination would change the whole chart dramatically.
We also know from other charts that Jupiter cannot have been what he is now in the time of the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs existed for around 160 million years, so this ice core chart obviously doesn't go back that far. What I mean is, there couldn't have been ice ages every 100,000 years back then, so the conjunctions we have now are different than the conjunctions we had back then. Either Jupiter was more stable, with no or very little inclination variation, or the Sun was tilted more with regard to the galaxy, or something. As I will show in another paper, most likely the Sun was nearer the galactic plane proper, and so it received more charge all the time. Whatever the cause, we see that things change. Charts change, and charts change because bodies move. This ice core chart is telling us that things have changed in the past half million years. What happened before didn't happen this time, and our job is to find out why. Are the periods getting longer because Jupiter's inclination cycle is getting longer, or are we entering a period of no ice, like the Triassic, because the Sun is tilting more? Or is the Sun moving closer to the plane of the galaxy, or further away? These are the real causes of long-term temperature here on Earth, not global warming or anything else humans may do. We can only react in small ways to these changes. Burning all the fuel in the world can only delay a temperature change for a few years. If the ice age is coming, we may have delayed it for a couple of decades, but we cannot have delayed it for 20,000 years. According to the ice core statistics, it should have happened thousands of years ago, and we weren't doing anything then to delay it. From that alone we should infer our own unimportance.
We should cut our pollution so that we can breathe better, eat better, and live with fewer illnesses. And we should control our populations so that we don't all have to live in squalor (and so that other species can live, too, and not in our trash). But temperature is ultimately beyond our control. Unless we can move the Sun or Jupiter, we are out of luck.
That said, we had better begin studying more closely the inclination of Jupiter and the relation of the Sun to the galaxy. We can't continue to live in ignorance of the charge field, or the way the galaxy plugs into the Solar system. We can't respond to coming changes if we don't know what they are. I would say that currently we haven't got a clue. Since we are still explaining the precession of the equinoxes by gravitational magic, we must still be in the dark ages, mechanically. Since we haven't recognized the charge field, we must be living in the dark ages, mechanically. Since we haven't recognized the galactic input, which drives everything, we are in the dark ages, mechanically. It is way past time we quit larking around with black holes and the first seconds of the universe, which are problems way beyond us, and start looking at these problems that will affect us greatly, especially if an ice age is going to start any minute. We are told by various groups that we are either on the edge of a new ice age, on the edge of armageddon, or on the edge of a flood caused by warming, but none of these groups are doing anything about it (except proposing new taxes and building new jails). We hear a lot of urgency in voices, to create alarm, but we see no action. If things were as dire as we are told, we would expect people to be rushing into action, as in the movie Deep Impact or something. Instead, we see physicists blowing billions of tax dollars jacking around with colliders, looking for hypothetical Bosons to fill holes in their mattresses, I mean matrices. And these same physicists can't even tell you what charge is, much less locate it in the field equations.
Once again, I have shown you that mechanics is the answer. I haven't discovered the whole answer yet, and don't expect to. But I have shown you the framework for the right answer. Giving charge a real presence in the field, giving the photon a real presence in the field, and finding the charge field in the field equations of Newton and Einstein are the pillars of this framework. The fourth pillar is keeping that charge mechanical, by explaining every motion and every force and every interaction in terms of collisions—collisions that can be diagrammed. No borrowing from the vacuum, no broken symmetries, no virtual particles, no undefined fields, no forces at a distance, no hidden variables, no hiding behind the math.
For more on the ice core charts, you may now go to my new paper on the Mayan Calendar prophecies.
*http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0701117