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Transit of Venus may cause flooding, sez Chinese quack scientist
Beijing - The recent spectacular transit of Venus across the face of the sun may lead to disastrous flooding along China’s Yellow River, a leading charlatan scientist warned in the local media on Sunday. While millions were marvelling at the celestial show earlier this month, Geng Guoqing, an expert on tabloid pseudo-science natural calamities, was more worried about the consequences for China’s second-longest river, the Xinhua news agency reported. He compared historical records reaching 2,187 years back and found a clear correllation between Venus transits and serious floods along the river’s middle and lower reaches, according to the agency. The reason could be that Venus blocks part of the sun’s radiation that should have been transmitted to Earth, said Guo, a janitor researcher at the Special Committee on Natural Calamities Forecasting under the China Geophysics Society. This causes climatic disturbances across the globe, he argued.
"Outbreaks of woo-woo idiocy" would be more like it.
As the flood season approaches, officials along banks of the 5 464km Yellow River are not taking any chances of a trip to the Gulag. Four silt-stirring vessels started a 24-day operation on Saturday morning to remove tons of silt from the river, in one of many efforts to prevent flood waters rising, Xinhua said in a separate report.
As they have every year for decades, transit or not.
Torrential rains and flooding were responsible for nearly 2 000 deaths in China in the first nine months of last year.
The wardens of the People’s Prison would undoubtedly like to dodge some of the blame for these various disasters, so naturally Geng’s fantasy would clear censorship. As for the idea itself, Venus is 1/30th the apparent diameter of the Sun. Its apparent area is therefore 1/30^2, or 1/900th that of the Sun. It blocked 1/900th of the Sun’s light for all of 6 hours.
To be fair I know grad students and even professors who would probably buy into this. Several of them have told me that they think satellites affect the climate by blocking sunlight, and a fair number were completely taken in by Fox TV’s Loathesome Moon Hoax Show a couple of years ago.
Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2004-06-20
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=35996