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Gil-
The Saros cycles are fascinating. Of course I always "assumed" there was such periodicity and wondered if anyone had tried to correlate these conjunctions with earthly phenomena. I don't see this undermining the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis, only perhaps a few of the attributable "evidence" for it. I don't think of scientists as "questioning everything" or at least not "everything all of the time" or at least not on an individual by individual basis. Science is perhaps the earliest form of "crowd sourcing". The early scientific organizations like the Royal Society founded in 1660 and the complex web of correspondence (mostly) throughout Europe during the age of enlightenment. Their motto is "Nullius in verba" (take nobody's word for it). The cycle of hypothesis generation and testing has several phases of "question everything". To get to a new and interesting hypothesis, one must ignore/forget/confront much of current established knowledge... then once a fairly firm hypothesis is formed, one must deliberately look for counter-examples to undermine one's own hypothesis to avoid confirmation bias and to seek the easiest form of (dis)proof which is "by counter-example". Once a hypothesis has been wrung out well and advanced to a "tentative" theory, it is time for the larger community to take the same crack at it... do their best to poke holes in it. Once it has been through "enough" of that kind of scrutiny, we tend to accept the theory as a tentative, conditional, temporary "truth". Unfortunately non-scientists tend to glom onto that kind of "vetting" process as if it leads to a final, irrefutable and irreversible conclusion. Scientists know that all knowledge is provisional, that it will get overturned, elaborated, or eclipsed somewhere down the line. Those who realized the earth was spherical, not flat got trumped when someone else eventually pointed out that it was more of an oblate spheroid! And now, with Gil's Saros cycles we have to remember that complex tidal forces are even wracking it out of shape on a 14 year cycle! In a century (if there is anyone there to reflect on it) we will laugh at some of our strongest beliefs for (or against) climate change. By then we will know a lot more, this is not a phenomena that is easy to "test", mostly we can only watch it play out like a slow motion 50 car pileup on the freeway! - Steve
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