Climate change as noted by one who lives on the land
For years as a farmer, I have watched as sunrises and sunsets determine the hour of the day and the change of seasons. It rises in the east and sets in the west and for this steady rule I am thankful. I have done extensive studying on the tumultuous history of the earth and even marveled at the formations the earth has and the wonder of how great a force it would take to make those changes, mountains and structures like the Grand Canyon and Mount Everest. I have traveled to Iceland to understand the great divide of the Atlantic Ocean as well as to Ecuador to validate what I am about to tell you.
I live in a very beautiful part of the world, the finger lakes of Central New York. The sun sets as seen from my back porch, behind a horizon that is very level and is miles away.
📷SMLXL 📷
We first built our new house on this location in 2001. In the summer of 2002, my husband Rick, and I, stood on the porch on June 21st and watched as the sun was about to set as far north as it does: The Summer Solstice.
Rick asked, “I wonder what the angle would be?” I said “What angle?” “The Angle between the longest day of the year and the shortest day of the year.” Rick asked. I proceeded to run to the basement and fetch 2 - 3 inch finishing nails. I came back to the porch, which had a 4 inch flat railing on it. I pounded one nail on the east side of the railing and lined it up with the setting sun. I waited until the sun was ½ way through setting then lined that second nail and the first nail with the center of the setting sun. I pounded it in. This began a study that #1 was most timely and noticeable and #2 interesting on how intimate farmers are with the earth.
On the next page is the drawing of nails on my porch through the following 6 years. The earth during this time was very active in ways I will describe in this paper.
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As I look at this railing, I am looking west by southwest. North would be at about 5 o'clock, or to the lower right corner.
To get the angle my husband wanted, the angle between the setting position of the longest day ..June 21, 2002 and the shortest day December 21, 2002, I needed to be out on the porch on Dec 21, 2002 at sundown with a 3“ finishing nail.. wait til the sun was ½ down and site it in with the apex nail on the east.. pound a nail in lining up the apex nail with the winter solstice sunset and then measure the angle.
Done. Angle .. just shy of 90 degrees.. 88 degrees. The sun set in those positions as we made a ritual out of checking them on solstice days through Dec 21, 2005. Remember, there had to be clear skies in order to get those sightings.
On December 26, 2005, the Earthquake and ensuing tsunami in Indonesia and the Indian Ocean was the first in recent History that we were able to see live on the news. The tsunami killed many people along the coast line as huge waves came ashore and cause flooding and drowning.
This tsunami happened 5 days after the solstice, so I had already checked the sunset and never gave it a thought that the Tsunami would affect this.
The news was sad, but the earth had spoken.
In January, they said the tsunami in Indonesia was strong enough to make the earth wobble. I logged that info in my brain and just waited. Fast forward to May 29, 2006. Rick and I were eating dinner when the sun was about to set. I knew the dip in the horizon that the sun set in the last years since I had pounded those nails in. On May 29th, 2006, I jumped from the table and ran to the porch.. Rick said, “what’s the matter?” “The sun is setting where it should on June 21, a whole three weeks ahead of schedule.” I said.
I waited with great anticipation until June 21, 2006, when I knew I needed to be on the porch with another nail.. I prayed for a sunny day. Bingo! I pounded the nail and measured the change. I even went back out each night for the next week to make sure that I had gotten the longest day. There were just too many variables in this to neglect anything.
The sun was now setting 3 degrees further north than it had ever before in my recollection. The teenage boy that was there to witness this change said, “Now what?” I said, ”We must wait until December 21, 2006 to see where the sun sets for the winter solstice.” The sunset in December never made it as far south as it had the year before. People were out playing Golf that day in Upstate NY, it was so warm . I was simply happy there were clear skies.
So in 1 years time, the earth had rotated on its axis 3 degrees. The sunsets were now north of where they were just a year ago. Other things had changed as well: the weather was not predictable as it had been. The ocean currents were unstable.
Living with this knowledge of this change was gut wrenching. I kept watching my nails on the solstices. I had contacted many universities to see if they had noticed any change. I even emailed the British Stonehenge to see if they felt something was off. I was told to have another glass of wine, or maybe my house was settling, or a car hit my porch. One professor even said, “We need something a little more scientific than a porch railing.”
So I kept my secret.. logged it in my brain as Unusual Facts and just waited. Then there was an earthquake in Chile.. 6.0 .. and miraculously all the universities I had contacted said like choir boys “That earth quake was strong enough to tilt the earth up 1 degree on its axis”.. REALLY? No car hitting a porch this time? So June 21, 2009 I was on my porch waiting. Yep they were right: the sun set a whole degree north of where it had the year before. So now I figured the earth was off by 4 degrees.
It was still turning in a 24 hour rotation and the revolutions were still 365 days plus or minus.
I began to think of the complexity of this situation: we have a planet that is ¾ water on its surface and the entire core of the planet is liquid magma. Two forms of liquid: both working as stabilizers of a sort. Once the magma comes to the surface, in the form of a volcano or is displaced by a shift in the plates of the earth’s surface, then the whole earth stands down to be reset to a new normal. We were about to experience this and were probably in the throw of finding out what it takes.
Other things I noticed were not as they were
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If you flattened the earth, this is what nighttime looks like from space. In the summertime,, this was taken on June 19th 2009. I noticed that the earths shadow was a little bit further south, exposing more of the north pole during the summer.
The opposite was true for winter solstice on south pole. The picture below taken 12.20.2009. you can see much of Alaska is not dark the whole shadow is shifted southward, more correctly the earth has righted itself on its axis so that the north pole is exposed to more light while the south pole remains darker
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Point of interest: As of October 1, 2018, this website has been removed from the internet. That happens to many other websites that are about what I am interested in.
One other thing I kept track of was the shadow on my barn from the nearby windmill.
In the mid-winter, this shadow would climb the wall of my barn and almost touch the peak of the roof. Come spring, the shadow moves off the barn. The date at which this shadow drops off the barn is earlier now. The higher the sun, the lower the shadow on the barn.
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So the earth quieted down for a bit. I wrestled with laws like “a body in motion tends to stay in motion” and watched the sunsets like a hawk. I also followed the changing of the climates in Europe: Spanish houses that had mold on them from too much rain, the drought that hit England and I even went to Scotland, in July thinking it would be their normal 55 degrees and it was 85 everyday. Things just weren’t making sense according to the “norm”.
I began to get alerts from the Inuit Eskimo in the North Pole that the snow banks were not in the same direction that they had been. This caused great despair as the Eskimo used the direction of the snow banks, formerly north to south, to find their way back home in the dark. Now the snow banks were going from East to West. The darkness of the winter months was not as long either. Web sites that contained this information and live interviews were quickly taken off the internet. One account of them speaking has been hidden on a BBC website and is the last part of a Nirubu video. It quickly changes subject to the darkness of the south pole followed by then observations of Inuits.
the website is:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xrocnj
In March of 2011, Japan was rocked by an earthquake a few miles out to sea. It caused great damage to the coast not from the earthquake but rather from the ensuing waves of the tsunami, killing thousands of people. The destruction of a nuclear power plant caused many problems and eventually the trash and rubbish from Japan had followed the currents to the west coast of the United States.
On June 21, 2011, I stood on my porch to see if this tsunami/earthquake combo had any effect on the tilt of the earth according to my porch and prolonged logging of sunsets. I was shocked that when the Solstice came, I realized that the earth had moved yet another 5 degrees off the 23.5 degree tilt it “normally” had from straight up and down. So when combined, three events, happening from December 2005 to March 2011, had shifted our earth 9 degrees on its axis, making it turn more upright toward the sun.
Certain sectors of people noticed a drastic change in the time of the sunsets in general.. Summer sunsets at our 44 degree north were usually around 8:30 on June 21, creating dark soon after 9. In the ensuing summers after 2011, the sunset at the solstice was after 9 pm. On a clear night, there was light to work by until well after 10 pm.
I still ponder the law that a body in motion tends to stay in motion.
I was on farm bank board at the time this whole change was taking place. We had made a sizable loan to the largest catcher of herring. Once the Fisherman took possession of the boat, he was unable to fine A FISH of Herring. I so wanted him to go north by 9 degrees and see if he would have found fish?
The Honey Bee colony collapse also happened during this time. Butterflies that eat the iron laden milk from Milk weed used that iron to navigate during their migration to Mexico. Their migration was in my estimation, Weak. Things were not right in the world or at the very least had changed. We have snow geese flying inland on the North American continent when they used to hug the shores near the ocean.
I had to figure a way to check my findings.
In March of 2012, I took a trip to the Galapagos Islands and planned on being in Ecuador on the equinox in March. I needed to be at the equator and see how things lined up in March. The sun should be right over the equator on March 21. I visited the Museum of the Equator in Quito, Ecuador. At Noon, the shadow was not right.
There should not have been a shadow!
I had a 9 degree shadow to the south. This meant that the equator had moved. I needed to figure how far north the equator was and I needed to get a taxi driver to drive me there. I did both. The taxi driver picked me up at 8 am and we traveled to a village on the Pan American Highway called Isaharah. I had figured that 9 degrees should be about 54 miles. Isaharah was at that spot. When we got there, we stopped at the top of a hill where there was a Pepsi stand with two benches perpendicular to each other. I was ecstatic when I realized that the shadow of the bench was directly below the benches, at both benches: one pointing north and one pointing east. I climbed on the bench and took pictures of this “nothing”. I had difficulty climbing down from the bench as there was no shadow to tell me depth of how high this bench was. It was surreal.
So here it is November 2018. There have been earth quakes since then but none seem to have caused the earth to “Wobble” as is necessary to change the declination angle of mother Earth.
I return to my observations to date. Weather is still extreme worldwide. Europe has had “weird weather”. In the USA we have had drought on one side and floods on the other. It is very hard to predict weather. In general, the sun is stronger.
You don’t know when the “killing frost” will come. It used to be the end of September. Now it can be anywhere from the first week in September to not until after Christmas. Meanwhile the northern Ice cap is decreasing in size and the polar bears are at a loss for food.