Re: [Phys-l] Fwd: decay constant variation and solar flares?!

[Moses Fayngold <moshfarlan@yahoo.com>]

On Sep 3, 2010, at 12:45 PM, Bob LaMontagne wrote:


> The elliptical nature of the Earth's orbit would by far overpower the proximity 
> to the sun due to the tilt of the earth's axis. The entire earth is closer to 
> the sun in >january than in august.


 
 It depends on what characteristic we consider. Local daily temperature on the 
Earth's surface is determined mostly by its orientation to the incident sunlight 
and its exposure time. And these are influenced by the tilt of the earth's axis 
much more than is our distance to the sun, which depends primarily on the 
Earth's position on its orbit. But in view of the small eccentricity (e = 0.017) 
of this orbit, the distance variation causes much smaller weather effects than 
the axis tilt. 
 OTOH, solar constant and solar wind intensity are indeed, determined by the 
current distance to the sun. If the decay rate is influenced by the solar wind, 
then the Earth's position on the orbit would be the culprit, not the tilt of its 
axis. In this case, the used terminology ("rate increase in winter") would be 
totally confusing, since January is the full-fledge summer time in Argentina or 
Australia. 
  This gives another illustration of my point about the tricky nature of the 
discussed effect, and before going into scientific discussion of this nature, we 
need first to clarify its description.

Moses Fayngold,
NJIT      

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