Happy perihelion everybody.
Thats right, according to the United States Naval Observatory Website Earth attained perihelion at roughly midnight Universal Time, or about 8 hours ago. For those of you who don’t know, perihelion is the point in the Earth’s orbit where it is closest to the sun; around 91 million miles. See? I thought it was getting a little warmer lately.
In actuality, the fact that the earth is 2 million miles closer to the sun does not mean that we are going to burn up. Despite the fact that there is probably some nut-job out there wearing a tin-foil thong to protect his personal posession from near-total incineration under the blazing heat of the ever approaching death-ball in the sky, the truth is that this distance is still far enough away that the heating of the atmosphere is basically negligible. This heating is easily balanced by aphelion, wherein the earth is roughly 95 million miles form the sun (thus creating an average orbital distance of 93 million miles).
What does this mean? Well, to quell the despair of you aluminum-clad fear-mongers, the oceans are not going to boil off leaving whales and fish and squid and barrels of toxic sludge and submarines basking in the noonday sun, the atmosphere is not going to ignite turning everything aboveground to charcoal (which is unfortunate for anyone who has ever been to detroit), and the weather is not going to get all crazy on us. Well… no crazier than it has been lately anyway.
Truth be told, the flux in atmospheric heating created by the Earth’s irregular orbital path is only partially responsible for weather changes which happen throughout the year. The orbit is not linked to the seasons, however, so the hot-cold cycle seen by us is not a product of the distance to the sun (as is evidenced by the fact that while it is hot on top, it is cold down there in penguin land). Nor does it put us at risk for increased radiation or solar particle exposure, since when the sun decides to blast a billion metric tons of solar plasma in our direction it doesn’t matter if we are 91 million miles away, or 190 million miles away, its still going to hurt. Basically the fact that we vary how far away we are from an 870,000 mile wide thermonuclear fireball has very little effect on us due to the fact that we are orbiting an 870,000 mile wide thermonuclear fireball.
That being said, we are halfway trough our orbital cycle, so those of you who are nerdy like me take note that we are for the next 6 months on the way out, gliding rapidly away from the sun even as we in the northern hemisphere see Bermuda shorts in our future.
Sorry, southern hemisphere.
::Edit:: I can’t type.
