PLEASE NOTE:
*
AN ESSAY ON CALENDARS, CHRONOLOGY & EXCEPTIONAL EVENTS
From Duncan Steel <dis@a011.aone.net.au>
Dear Benny,
Having read some of the comments of others, I now have some
further
comments with regard to Timo Niroma's ideas regarding events
around
1867. In some ways my calendrical comments may appear off-topic,
but I
note that they relate not only to some statements of others, but
also pertain to the general notion of identifying exceptional
events.
There were two main subjects which Timo addressed: (A) The
climate in
Helsinki around that time; (B) A flood of the Nepean river, near
Sydney, ditto. I will deal with those in turn although my
comments
are related.
(A) In retorspect some of my initial statements about the effect
of the
calendar followed in Finland could have been better-expressed,
but the
gist of my intended meaning still applies. That is, in making any
comparison like this one has to be *very careful* about the
calendar
and time-keeping systems followed. If Finland took records
internally
and maintained them that way on a calendar which is consistent
with
respect that widely used now then that provides some advantages,
although
there are still many problems which I come to below. On the other
hand,
one must be careful that the records have not been passed through
some
filter, such as a conversion to another calendar (like that used
in
Russia or elsewhere). One example of the problems which can crop
up
in that way is that if weekly-averaged maximum temperatures were
kept,
then in converting (at any stage before 1st March 2100) from the
Julian
calendar to the Western calendar a hiccup will occur because the
number of
days in the correction is not divisible by seven. Let me
refer the
reader, for example, to the paper by D.J. Thompson in Science, 7
April
1995. I will come back to that paper later.
Having written that, in terms of increasing complexity I would
mention
the following problems with the comparison between monthly
temperatures
which Niroma describes:
(i) What temperatures do you use? Do you employ a maximum
and minimum
scheme? That will lose the temperature averaged over the
day. Do you
use a temperature at a certain time of day? If so, do you use
local
solar time, local mean solar time, or standard time? (Prior
to the
International Meridian Conference in 1884, the records of that
meeting
indicate that only four nations followed standard time systems:
the UK,
the USA and Canada - but only just for those two, from the year
before -
and Sweden; was Finland on standard time? The Netherlands
did not become
part of the international standard time system until 1954, for
example).
Just how does one compare temperatures from 1867 with those
measured
now, then?
(ii) The idea of "the coldest/hottest month on record"
is fraught with
drawbacks and inadequacies. Although it is the sort of
phrase trotted
out by TV weather presenters all the time, it has little
scientific
validity. This is for a number of reasons, the first of
which is
simply that calendar months are not the same length.
January has
more chances to get the 'coldest day' than February.
(iii) The second problem is that even if you compare same-length
months
(compare all months labelled 'January') there is still a problem,
because
those labels do not refer to a constant time of seasonal year
(but see
below too). With the leap year scheme used in the Western
calendar the
time of the vernal equinox ranges over 53 hours within 19-21
March,
producing a corresponding variation in the solar longitudes at
which
'January' occurs.
(iv) It has been assumed for a long time that the seasonal year
follows
the spacing between the equinoxes and solstices, the *average*
such time
being the familiar *tropical year* of 365.2422 days when again
averaged over
some dozens of orbits. This assumption seems to be
wrong. The
publication by Thompson referenced above shows that the cycle
time of
the seasons over the past several centuries (since temperature
records
began) is actually the anomalistic year, the time between
perihelion
passages, which is near 365.2596 days again when suitably
averaged.
Because perihelion passage shifts later by about one day every 58
years
on the Western calendar, this would imply that not only does
'January'
oscillate by 53 hours in the leap year cycle, but also the
current
'January' is shifted, seasonally-speaking, by more than two days
compared to 'January' back in 1867.
There are other more-detailed comments I could make, but the
above should
be sufficient to show some of the specific reasons why I have
doubts
about the idea of using the concept of "the hottest/coldest
January on
record" or somesuch as being a sure-fire indicator of some
drastic
effect. On the other hand, if there is a clear anomalous
drop of
the max and min temperatures by many degrees persisting for some
time
then one might suspect that *something* was going on, but the
analysis
of past records must be done judiciously and with much
double-checking
and consideration of the meaning of all the parameters, like the
dates.
(B) Superlatives make the news, which is why TV weather people
make
statements like that above. But that does necessarily not
make the
phenomena truly exceptional. If you look at one of the year
books
beloved of American High School classes, every student is given a
positive superlative in some respect (the dumbest kid in the
class is
"The student most likely to improve"). Would one
count a particular
class as being the 'tallest in the state' because it produces two
champion basketball players? If you take several hundred
separated towns, spread around the globe, it is near certain that
two
or more of them will have on any set day the
hottest/coldest/windiest/
wettest day of the year (similarly week/month/season/year).
That does
not mean that the climate has gone haywire and an asteroid has
hit us.
Exceptional weather is very common, then. Various Australian
correspondents have already commented upon the apparent Nepean
River
flood in 1867, and their statements are wise and
knowledgeable. Even
back then this was a densely-populated region, a fertile
well-watered
region with a navigable river and an excellent sea-harbour
nearby.
Quite likely there have been Tunguska-type events in recent
centuries in
unpopulated regions which have escaped notice in the 'civilized
world',
but this was not one.
People living in one part of the world will have experiences of
the
phenomena all called 'floods' which are quite different. As
a boy in
England, persistent heavy rain for some hours would occasionally
flood
the small river passing through my home town, leaving the shops
full
of smelly mud. In southern Arizona, the dry desert is prone
to flash
floods which thunder down through chasms cut through the parched
land
and drown people, with not even a few minutes' warning. If
you drive
through Nyngan, in dead-flat outback NSW, you will notice in the
arid
surrounds of the town large noticeboards thanking others for
their help
in the aftermath of the great flood of 1990. Outback NSW is
almost
always dry, but it is one big flood plain. Last year the
town of
Katherine in the Northern Territory was submerged.
Exceptional events,
but they happen somewhere in Australia every year. Note
that, if you
are habituated to floods being sudden, this is not necessarily
the
case in a large flat continent. Heavy rain up in Queensland
a couple
of years back produced a low wall of water hundreds of km wide
which
eventually flooded the dry salt lakes of South Australia, for
only the
fourth or fifth time since European colonization began, bringing
in birds
from far away and making the desert burst into flower.
People flocked
from all over to see it: but they had six or eight weeks'
warning, because
that's how long the wall of water took to reach the lakes.
You could
have walked ahead of it. Not all floods are like one
imagines based
on one's own peculiar experience.
It is easy to see that correlations between exceptional events
occur from
time to time simply by chance. I write this on January 31st,
Australian
time. It is not yet the 31st in the USA. On this date
the Superbowl
will be contested in Miami. If Atlanta beat Denver, it will be an
exceptional event. Is there a climate connection?
Well, the weather
in Atlanta at this time of year is MUCH more like Miami than is
the
case of Denver, giving the former an advantage (although I tend
to think
that if the Falcons triumph it will be for other reasons).
Somewhere in
North America this will quite possibly be the
coldest/warmest/wettest...
January 31st on record.
But so what? Apart from anything else, if one kept a
calendar held steady
against the perihelion position (and hence the seasonal cycle *at
present* - I would anticipate that this cyclicity is only
temporary for
some centuries until perihelion moves far enough away from the
winter
solstice to lose the resonance) then the 24-hour period labelled
'January
31st (Eastern Standard Time)' would in the past have been in
February.
This all comes back to the calendar one uses. Above I have
employed the
term 'Western calendar', as indeed has Arthur C. Clarke in an
item cited
earlier in a CC Digest. May I recommend its usage to
everyone. It is
a fallacy that the calendar used as the world-wide standard (with
local
or religious calendars also employed) is the 'Gregorian
calendar.' That
is an ecclesiastical calendar adopted by-and-large only in
various
Catholic states around 1582-1610, persisting since in e.g. Italy
and
Spain. Elsewhere solar calendars have been legally adopted
(by other
countries) in which the same (inaccurate) leap year rule as the
Gregorian
happens to be used. The Western calendar derives basically
through the
major powers: Britain's calendar reform of 1751, which was
inherited by
the American colonies and thence by the initial founding states
of the
USA (note that the USA does not have any legal calendar code of
its own,
the familiar system is just used by common assent there and hence
elsewhere). It is this which may be termed the 'Western
calendar'.
But that does not make the Western calendar the same as the
Gregorian.
There are several very significant differences. The
Gregorian is a
luni-solar calendar in that it provides for a lunar cycle as well
as
a solar sycle. Everyone knows about the leap-year
corrections (three
in 400 are dropped: 1700, 1800, 1900, 2100...) but few know also
of
the lunar jumps: the lunar phase (the phase of the ecclesiastical
moon,
not the real moon) is assumed to follow the Metonic cycle of 19
years
which is close to 235 lunations, except that over a period of
2500 years
there are eight single-day jumps interposed. This is done
to 'regularize'
the date of Easter, the main aim of the Gregorian reform.
The
Gregorian is a luni-solar religious calendar, whereas the Western
is a solar
civil calendar. They are not the same thing.
That is not to say that Lord Chesterfield's Act of 1751 did not
address
religious matters. It had to, because Great Britain (as it
was then)
is a religion-based nation. The monarch is the 'Defender of
the Faith.'
In this connection the Act contains several mistakes. For
anti-Catholic
and anti-Semitic reasons the phraseology employed (oft-quoted by
people in
some form : "Easter is the first Sunday after the first full
moon after the
equinox") is nonsensical in itself, and does not lead to the
Easter dates
actually printed in the Book of Common Prayer, the tables there
following
the Catholic rules. The statement cited there would imply
that Easter
cannot coincide with either an astronomical full moon or the
Passover,
whereas such coincidences do occur. I might note that the
first person
to have spelled out this nonsense, in about 1850, seems to have
been
Augustus De Morgan, one-time Secretary of the Royal Astronomical
Society.
On top of that - and this is significant - the Act mentions the
desire to
keep the solstices and equinox at the same seasonal dates.
Leaving aside
the recently-recognized fact that the seasons follow the
anomalistic year,
the implied necessary year-length for the calendar (the Western)
as defined
by that Act is the *tropical year* of 365.2422 days (on average,
etc.).
The 'Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac' (an
official
publication of the US & UK governments) actually mis-defines
the tropical
year as the time between vernal equinoxes, and it is NOT.
Because of the
eccentricity of our orbit four different-length years result from
the
times between vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and winter and
summer
solstices. The Gregorian reform was based upon regularizing
Easter and
thus keeping the date of the vernal equinox near-constant (which
it fails to
do; note the 53-hour range mentioned earlier), meaning that the
year
counted between those equinoxes is what is needed. This is
365.2424 days
at present.
This provides another reason why the Gregorian and Western
calendars
are not the same thing: their target year lengths are
different. That
difference in the fourth decimal place is significant. The
mean
Gregorian year of 365.2425 days is much closer to the Vernal
Equinox
year of 365.2424 days than the tropical year of 365.2422 days, as
used
in the Western calendar. Arguments over whether we need a
'correction'
every 3200 or 4000 years, begun by astronomer John Herschel in
1828,
are thus specious (and apart from anything else, tidal drag is
lengthening the day as defined astronomically as opposed to
atomically). The Catholic Church in the later sixteenth century
would
have produced a 'better' calendar if it had instead used a
33-year
cycle containing eight leap years, as does the Persian
calendar. This
(i) Makes a year 365.242424... days long on average; (ii) Makes a
cycle
short enough to keep the equinox within a 24-hour range; (iii)
Leads to
a better solution of the lunar phase problem connected with
Easter.
There is more. The Eastern Orthodox Churches have suffered
splits
since in 1923 it was suggested that they alter from the Julian
calendar
to what has been called the 'Revised Julian'. This would
have seven
leap year days dropped from nine centuries, such that the year
would
average to 365.242222... days. This was to provide
one-upmanship over
the Gregorian scheme, but it is based on the mistaken belief that
the
*tropical year* rather than the *vernal equinox year* is the
target.
There are still arguments within those Churches on this topic,
mostly
based on a totally incorrect understanding of the astronomy.
But this brings me full circle. So far as I am aware the
only one of
the Orthodox Churches to have adopted the Gregorian calendar is
that of
Finland. Thus it is true that the Gregorian calendar is used in
Finland: within the Orthodox Church, and the Catholic
Church. As for
the rest of the country, that is a different matter. One
would need to
look at the Swedish legislation to see whether they adopted the
Gregorian calendar, in a legal act dated (I would imagine) 1752,
the
year before the actual reform took place, although I am not sure
whether Sweden was using the March 25th New Year as was Britain
until
31st December 1751. I would imagine that the Lutherans of
Sweden, like
the Anglicans of Britain, would have written an Act which did not
mention the Catholic Church/Pope etc., but rather defined a
parallel
solar calendar with some definition for when Easter is to be
celebrated. Perhaps they made the same silly (and
religiously-motivated) mistakes as did the British.
It is very easy to make glib statements like "We use the
Gregorian
calendar" without realizing what is actually involved.
For example,
making January 1st the New Year's Day is often ascribed to the
Gregorian
reform, but that is a false belief. It was already in use
before that.
Off and on it has been used since at least 153 BC.
Similarly we use
calendar months which have been unaltered since 45 BC,
notwithstanding
claims that Augustus Caesar fiddled with them. Thus the
months, as such,
are not defined as part of the Gregorian calendar.
This links to some rather unwise statements made on this list
regarding
the year numbering system which we use. So many comments
are made, in
newsmedia articles and so on, along the lines of 'people in the
past
did not know of the number zero' that perhaps I should not be
surprised
by the idea being repeated by educated people. But it
really is a
misguided notion.
Our year numbers are ordinals, not cardinals. Notwithstanding the
fact
that we count a 'zeroth law of thermodynamics', and a 'zeroth'
Pharaonic dynasty in Egypt, it makes little sense to have a
'zeroth
year'. AD 1 is 'the first year of the Lord'. (1 BC is the
'first year
Before Christ', a seventeenth-century invention by an astronomer,
by
the way.) One may wonder how AD 1 can be 'the first year of the
Lord'
if he was born on December 25th (I am talking here about
*traditional*
dates rather than historically-veracious dates). When
Dionysius
Exiguus was setting up his framework for Easter dates in 525-253
(he
was not trying to define an era) he correctly recognized that a
Jewish
boy's life is reckoned from his circumcision, not from
birth. Thus
Dionysius equated 1st January (in the year which two centuries
later
became labelled AD 1) as the date of the circumcision, it being
the
start of the year. (Look into a Church Missal and you will find
January
1st named as the Feast of the Circumcision, and our method of
counting
years from that date is technically referred to as the *Stylo
Circumcisionis*.) Circumcision occurs on the eighth day counting
exclusively (see your Bible), putting the traditional Nativity on
25th
December 1 BC, which was the traditional (but not actual, even
then)
date of the winter solstice festivities. (The early Church had
actually
used January 6th, Epiphany, to avoid the pagan solstice
celebrations.)
Dionysius then counted back the nine month gestation period to
the
traditional (but not actual) vernal equinox of March 25th in 1
BC, and
he counted years from there as the *Anni ab Incarnatione*. This
is the
year which astronomers call 0 (using cardinals) but is more
generally
termed 1 BC (using ordinals). The fact that March 25th was
the
Incarnation/Annunciation/Lady Day was what led to the British and
eventually American colonies using that date for New Year,
although
counted FROM THE WRONG YEAR! (AD 1 instead of 1 BC).
I hope that the above is both of interest and illuminating.
A final
note for readers in the USA. Although you now use the Western
calendar,
and previous to 1752 the Julian was used in the Atlantic
colonies, do
not imagine that no use has ever been made of other
systems. When the
first Catholic missionaries arrived, they imposed the Gregorian
calendar. Thus when (say) Texas and California joined the USA,
although
their dating systems may have been continuous they did move from
the
Gregorian to the Western calendar. Those parts in the Louisiana
Purchase were on the Gregorian until they were administered for
three
weeks under the French Revolutionary Calendar in late 1803,
before
Napoleon sold the region to the USA. That's something to
note next
time you eat Lobster Thermidor in New Orleans.
And a final link to the 1860s and the problem of dates.
Until Alaska
was sold in 1868 to the USA it was part of the Russian Empire,
and thus
on the Julian calendar. But it is more confusing than
that. The day
of the week there was different to that throughout the rest of
North
America. Although a change from Julian to Western (or Gregorian)
calendar did not involve a change in the day of week sequence
elsewhere, in Alaska it did because that region, in the absence
of any
International Date Line, used both the date and the day of the
week
appropriate for Moscow.
Perhaps all of the above makes clear why I have cautioned about
why
making use of old temperature (or whatever) records has numerous
pitfalls.
Duncan Steel
Dear Benny,
Duncan Steel has commented lengthy my comments on the Finnish
calendar or
calendar in general versus Finnish measurements on temperatures
or the
measurements in general. He makes some interesting points,
although the
main idea of the anomalies of the middle 1860's is not
considered.
(A) First of all Finland took the records "internally"
based on the
autonomy of Helsinki University which based on the autonomy of
Finland.
There was no conversion between calendars (unless someone in
Russia used
the records for his own purposes). I have not used any
weekly-averaged
temperatures, I have used monthly averages based on daily
averages.
(i) The daily averages is the mean of the temperatures at 03:00,
09:00,
15:00 and 21:00. Standard time was used in all official places,
such as
Helsinki University.
(ii) Of course the different lengths of various months cause some
inaccuracy. So causes also the dividing of the year artificially
into
months. But I still think that if there are such anomalies as the
May 1867,
several degrees Celsius below the second coldest May in 170 years
or even
in Mays of 1866 and 1868 (1.8 degrees C compared to 5.7 degrees
on previous
and 8.4 degrees on the next May), this is so great a deviation
that it is
not explainable by any artificial errors. The ensuing famine, the
hardest
in Finland for 300 years, was also a mark of something very
unusual.
(Besides France lost its vine harvest in 1867, so this was not
wholly a
Finnish event.)
(iii) What comes to the leap years, the above-said concerns them
also. One
day's oscillation drowns in the noise. I really am not supposing
that the
1.8 degrees C is absolute, by using artificially months of the
same
lengths, or by any other method, the value could have been 1.7 or
1.9
degrees, what matters is that it still is nearly 3 degrees colder
than the
next colder May during the last 170 years. And the grave
consequences.
(iv) Although April and June 1867 were not record-cold, they
still were
well below the normal, April -1.1 degrees C and June 12.2 degrees
C, well
below the normal values (the before and after-values of 1866 and
1868 were
pretty normal: April 2.2 and 1.5 degrees and June 15.2 and 13.1
degrees).
So we get for the whole season from April to June for 3 month
average:
1866 7.7 degrees C
1867 4.3 degrees C
1868 7.7 degrees C
1. No measurement inaccuracy can't explain this anomaly.
2. The anomaly is so great that an explanation is badly needed.
3. The French events hint that this was a European, not only a
Scandinavian
event, and leaves open the question of its global character.
4. The famine was so severe that we could cry for an explanation
without
even any accurate temperature measurements.
(B) I don't claim that the Nepean event had anything to do with
this. I
only ask could it have had some relation? A tsunami caused by an
impacting
body is just a guess. It could have happened far from Nepean, but
Nepean
being a lowland it could have suffered even from an impact 1000
km away. Of
course a blanket from a volcano could be as good an explanation
for the
anomalious cold in Finland/Europe, but was there any great
volcano eruption
in late 1866 or early 1867. I know of no one. Or did something
anomalous
happen to Sun in April-May 1867? Or did Earth dive in a cosmic
dust,
whatever its source.
I insist that we have here an event that cries for an
explanation.
Regards,
Timo Niroma
http://personal.inet.fi/tiede/tilmari/sunspots.html
http://www.tilmari.pp.fi
Not to drift too far from the subject of Duncan's essay, it is
sometimes possible to correlate different time reckoning systems
by looking for references to exceptional events LIKE THE 1866
LEONIDS.
A good source for ferreting unusual events by date is the work of
William R. Corliss. The more recent volumes of his SOURCE
BOOK PROJECT include a Time-of-Event index that can be quite
helpful in finding possible causes of curious anomalies.
In THE SUN AND SOLAR SYSTEM DEBRIS (Corliss 1986) the TOE-index
for 1866/67 points to:
AYO8X1. November 13, 1866. England. "During the
great display of Leonids, 1866, Nov. 13, many observers noted
nebulous meteor clouds in and around the radiant area.
These appearances were described as greenish ill-defined spots of
nebulosity, which brightened and faded." (R3) Since
motion of the nebulous spots is not mentioned, they may be only
meteor trails seen head on. (WRC)
(R3)= Packer, David E.; "Nebulous Meteors," ENGLISH
MECHANIC, 74:133, 1901.
(WRC)= A comment by Corliss.
AEXIX50. 1867. A noncircular object, as black as the
center of a sunspot crossed the sun west-to-east.
(R17)= "Astronomical," ENGLISH MECHANIC, 6:129,
1867.
ASO2X3. East-west coronas. During the total eclipse
of 1867, a period of minimum sunspot numbers, Grosch saw long
extensions of faint illumination emanating from the sun's
equator, but only very short ones in the polar regions.
(R4) Some of the observers of the 1878 eclipse saw an
east-west corona; others did not. […] 1878 was also a time
of sunspot minimum. (R4)
(R4)= Young, C.A.; "The Corona," THE SUN, New
York, 1896, p. 238.
Now whether any of these happenings affected the weather is
obviously not known--such observations do supply good food for
thought though. Let's hope the 1866 roar of those
Little-Leonids didn't add up to a lingering solar shade--we don't
need more anticipated Y2K problems, particularly real ones!
8^/
Source for SOURCE BOOKS:
http://www.knowledge.co.uk/frontiers/sourcebk.htm
Later.
bobk
Bob Kobres
bkobres@uga.edu
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk
706-542-0583
Main Library
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602