Stand on a seaside shore, watch the tide roll in and out, and I can see, and feel, the Moon’s force, cyclical, ever present and yet not easy to unravel.
There are now tide times, that accurately forecast the height of sea level for any location on Earth. Not the same, ever changing, yet able to be predicted.
A century ago, Arthur Thomas Doodson, a mathematician at the Liverpool Tidal Institute, worked out which cycles were most important and their order, decoding the ocean’s rhythms with astonishing precision. His work, pivotal to the D-Day landings of 1944, holds a key to understanding a hypothesis central to my new Theory of Climate Resilience: the ‘Moon’s Tidal Push’.
By connecting Doodson’s legacy to modern science, we see how the Moon’s influence, as obvious as the tides, could reshape climate science and revolutionise our capacity to forecast droughts and floods on land.
Doodson’s genius lay in decoding. He identified 388 tidal constituents—distinct gravitational rhythms from the Moon, Sun, and Earth’s motions, including the 18.6-year lunar declination cycle where the Moon’s angle to Earth’s equator shifts.
Each constituent, like a note in a symphony, contributes to the tide’s rise and fall. Using mechanical tide-predicting machines, Doodson integrated these factors to forecast tides for Normandy’s beaches, ensuring Allied troops landed safely at low tide on June 6, 1944. His calculations, correctly incorporated lunar cycles as short as hours and as long as decades, without a single computer.
If Doodson could work this out in the 1920s, imagine what we can do today. Modern computers can crunch numbers far beyond his analog machines, yet the Moon’s role in climate remains under-explored, overshadowed by CO2-focused models that don’t work. They have limited predictive capacity, but much political utility that is not serving us well.
The future is in rejecting the current paradigm and beginning to work from a new theory of climate resilience.
I have begun to detail the technical aspects of this at https://jennifermarohasy.substack.com/p/the-moons-tidal-push
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Sea level is also affected by local conditions such as weather. I know from experience in specific locations that the impact of residuals can be quite high.
This phenomenon is often used by climate change deniers to cherry pick photographs of sea levels to support their erroneous belief system.
“Residuals are the difference between sea level and the tide predictions. They are due to non-tidal effects (weather) and they are a combination of short and long-term effects.
Short term water level changes can vary on a timescale from minutes to months. The main influence is weather or meteorological effects. For example, high atmospheric pressure reduces water level heights. Low atmospheric pressure raises water level heights. Onshore winds raise water levels while offshore winds depress water levels. Other short-term effects include seiches, tsunamis, Proudman resonance (meteo-tsunamis) and shelf waves.
Long term effects are of the order of years, decades, or even millennia. They comprise of long-term meteorological effects such as El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), eustatic changes due glaciation and tectonic movements and sea level rise due to global warming. Depending on timescales under consideration, some of the components can be ignored.
Although tides are influenced by astronomical and non-astronomical factors, local tides can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy from the analysis of long-term tide records. The tide predictions provide the time and height of high and low water for a particular day at a particular place.”
The Moon’s Great Influence
In the 1930’s I was taught in a one-teacher school. As well as drumming the ‘three R’s’ into six different classes simultaneously, (modern teachers are not aware that they are born!) and refereeing the odd fight during the day’s break periods, the teacher found time to teach a bit of gardening on the side, and one day each week, would take us all on an excursion into the nearby thick bush-land, for a long lesson in first-hand Nature Study.
He also offered us the rudiments of music and the arts, as well as some astronomy. I remember well learning about the Sun, stars and planets, and the Moon.
In those days the word ‘satellite’ was a rarity, and the way our teacher described the Moon’s relationship to the earth, was in the context of servant and mistress; that the Moon appeared to represent the Earth’s handmaiden, and that ‘she,’ in some mysterious way, exerted a powerful influence on farmer’s crops.
Accepted as Gospel
Whether the latter was true or not, it certainly was accepted as gospel by many farmers of my acquaintance who, religiously, planted their crops by the Moon’s phases.
Those ‘old-timers’ knew whether it would be wet or fine, by observing whether or not the New Moon was ‘holding water’ by ‘ lying on her back,’ or ‘spilling water’ by ‘standing upright.’
Whether or not the above Moon signs were bona fide criteria, I am not aware but according to the data so far encountered in this study, there seems little doubt that the Earth’s handmaiden has a say, in whether or not man’s crops get watered.
The Moon I now accept as being a satellite of the Earth, responsible for exerting great influence on all life thereon.
Though the Moon is bound to Earth by gravitation and so must, as part of a binary system, not only orbit Earth, but also (with Earth,) orbit the Sun once a year, the lunar year differs in length slightly, to Earth’s tropical year.
The lunar year is defined as having a duration encompassing 12 new moons. Its length is approximately 11 days shorter than Earth’s tropical year of 365.25 days.
No doubt the fact that Earth’s rotation rate has slowed down (and continues to do so) over geological time, and conversely, the moon has speeded up in its orbit, would account for the 11 day discrepancy, by virtue of the transfer of angular momentum over the same period of time.
The Law of the Conservation of Angular Momentum states that two separate bodies, spinning in the same plane around a common axis, are subject to the above law, so that any loss of angular momentum by the one, must, by law be transferred to the other.
Thus the Moon is gaining angular momentum at the expense of the Earth’s, while at the same time moving farther away from the Earth.
Once Much Closer?
If this process is reversed, the conclusion is reached that the Earth and moon were once much closer neighbours. George Darwin (son of Charles Darwin) postulated that the Moon came into existence as a result of a great rupture in the Earth’s crust, caused, in turn, by centrifugal force, set up by a much faster spinning Earth at some earlier stage in its evolution, and the great scar it left became the Pacific Ocean basin.
It follows, that if the Moon came really close to the Earth, gigantic tides would be raised in the oceans, evidence of which ought to be plainly displayed. This has not, so far, been discovered.
Sister Planet?
Later studies, and the analyses of Moon-rocks brought back by the astronauts, have demonstrated the probability that the Moon is more likely to be a sister planet than the daughter that George Darwin suggested.
The study of the annular growth rings of Devonian corals (400 mill. Yrs. BP (before the present) indicates that Earth had a 375 day year at that time.
Thus, the Moon would have been somewhat closer to Earth, and orbiting more slowly, while Earth’ rotation would have been correspondingly speeded up, if not precisely conforming to the ideal 12 orbits of Earth each tropical year, the coming close to 12 lunar months of a similar duration to the Earth month of the times.
Solar System Running Down
This indicates that the Solar System’s ‘clock-works’ is slowly running down, along with that of the rest of the Universe. According to scientists, the rate at which the Earth’s day is lengthening, is one second in every 1000 years.
Newton’s Law of Gravitation states that two (or more) bodies will attract each other in proportion to their respective masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
It is the gravitational effect of the Moon and, to a lesser degree, the Sun and planets, that produces the reaction in the Earth which we call tides.
Not only does the ocean react by the well known ebb and flow of the tides, but at the same time there are tides raised in the solid Earth and the atmosphere too. These tides are in fact a never-ending train of cycles, wrought mainly by the influence of the Moon on land, sea and air.
By virtue of the Moon’s decree that on Earth there will always be two high tides and two low tides daily, it becomes evident that the Moon, by directly controlling these cycles, simultaneously exerts complete control over countless cycles of life on Earth.
Patterns of Cycles
Nature’s great and fundamental law of conservation, acting through its agent, gravity, has set the patterns of the cycles, which are repeated over and again.
The simplest and most widely accepted is the Earth’s year(or period) cycle, which itself is made up of varied and manifold cycles, such as days, weeks, months etc, as well as the seasons (not to mention the countless cycles of life.)
I have listed but a few of the cyclic patterns in Nature which, while the Solar System continues to exist, will go on being repeated.
Why then, should our climate/weather patterns be exempted from a cyclic system, when all else appears locked into it?
We have seen that amongst the numerous cyclic phenomena directly affecting the earth and all life on it, is the Moon. Apart from the Moon’s cyclic effects on Earth’s tides and marine life, it also controls Mean Sea Level.
While to find Mean Sea Level might appear to be merely a matter of ascertaining the median between high and low water, it turns out that such is not so. The method employed by scientists requires the recording of water levels every hour, over the full 18.61 Yr metonic cycle of the Moon’s nodes, then striking the average.
The metonic cycle of the Moon turns out to be an all-important factor in the overall pattern of our climate/weather; the more so when it happens to coincide with one or more of the unknown (to me) number of cycles which control the Solar System.
Alex S. Gaddes,’Tomorrow’s Weather’ (1990) pp 27-30
Trains of Cycles
“So, there are at least three independent trains of cycles,(that I’m aware of) coinciding at this point of time.
“Note that the 502.47 year tree-ring cycle is made up of 27 x 18.61 year metonic cycles of the Moon, or 3 x 167.49 year tree-ring sub-cycles, or 74.44 x 6.75 year regional drought cycles.
“I’ve found that the solar rotation rate of 27 days, seems to fit the formulae better than the 26.75 day value; this I’ve endeavored to demonstrate in the accompanying exposition….” (Fig. 3.)
Alex S. Gaddes ‘Tomorrow’s Weather’ (1990) p18
Its worth noting that during strong El Nino sea level rises in the east Pacific and falls in the west, causing mass coral bleaching.
Karen’s argument has merit, but our moon is undoubtedly the main driver.
‘Tidal residuals in New South Wales are primarily driven by La Niña events, but Southern Annular Mode is also significant.
‘Joint impact of El Niño Southern Oscillation and Southern Annular Mode on tidal residuals is larger than the individual ones.
‘Tidal residuals covary with El Niño Southern Oscillation and Southern Annular Mode at frequencies between 4 and 8 years.’ (Christina et al 2024)
Fascinating. You do good work.
I often ponder the waves always rolling in on incoming and outgoing tides.
The same applies to the opposite side of the ocean at the same time.
Interesting learning about the two bulge effect – your link.
The ancients lived by the moon and moved their flocks at night. Old Testament.
The moon was named Sin and the people were termed sinners.
The gardening guides plant to moon cycles. Yates Gardening Guide.
The moon is there for a reason.
I look forward to learning more.
Cheers.
“Stay in your lane, or face the ‘pivot penalty’
When a scientist moves away from their original area of expertise, their publications receive fewer citations than their previous work. An analysis of millions of papers revealed that the larger the shift away from a scientist’s field, the greater the effect — a phenomenon coined the ‘pivot penalty’. A pivot can also make getting a paper published, and securing initial funding, more difficult. “When you move out of the area in which you’re trusted, you lose that recognition,” says science-policy specialist Kieron Flanagan.”
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_tides/tides03_gravity.html