Orbits and Ellipses for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMLXXX

Elliptical orbit

Let's get this straight: there are few habits of highly greedy freelancers that piss off our staffers more than a scientific illiterate mangling simple science in the name of picking up a few bucks. Sadly, we see it all the time. The Sciencing.com niche that Leaf Group built to house old eHow posts is, sadly, a gold mine of utter bull written about science, and one of the main reasons is the site owner's minimum word count (MWC). We long ago lost count of the number of times an eHow contributor got the answer to a simple question right and then pounded out 250 more words of utter bullshit to meet the MWC. Meet today's nominee, returning DotD Henri Bauholz, and the butcher job he performed on the question, "What Is the Shape of Earth's Orbit?"

Ol' Henri (apparently the nom de plume of ski bum Hank Nielsen) got the answer right in his first sentence, albeit somewhat awkwardly:

"The path of the earth around the sun is an elliptical shaped orbit."

Ding, ding, ding: Earth's orbit is indeed elliptical. It's what Henri said in the other 246 words of his 259-word post that caught a staffer's eye; bushwa such as,

• "But it should be noted that the exact path of the planet changes slightly over time. These changes in orbit can affect certain natural events on the planet, like weather and climate." – Besides the poor grammar of starting a sentence with a conjunction (mea culpa), changes in Earth's orbit take place over geological time. Henri wants us to think it's common...
• "The average distance from Earth to the sun is 93 million miles. The greatest distance is 94.5 million miles, which occurs every year around July 4. The shortest distance is 91.5 million miles, which occurs around Jan. 3 of each year." – Here, Hank blew a chance to explain that the variation in distance isn't due to the shape of the orbit, but because the sun is not at the exact center of the ellipse. He also blew his chance to use the words perihelion and aphelion.

Worst of all, however, Bauholz/Neilsen heard about a scientific theory that might explain climate variations, and decided to "explain" the theory:

"The Milankovitch Theory proposes that there are three types of variations within Earth's orbit that could possibly affect the climate in some sort of way."

While a knowledgeable person might have pointed out that only one of the three variations is orbital; the other two pertain to the planet's axial tilt; Henri decided "In for a penny, in for a pound." Let's see what else he screwed up:

• "Change in the shape of Earth's orbit is called eccentricity. This change could also affect the climate in different parts of the world over a long period of time." – While eccentricity is one of the phenomena addressed in Milankovich's theory, Henri totally screwed the pooch. Eccentricity is not "Change in the shape of Earth's orbit," it is a measure of how elliptical the orbit is. The ellipticity of Earth's orbit varies on a cycle of about 100,000 years. Oh, and climate change? It's worldwide, not "in different parts of the world"!
• "Bulges in the spherical shape of Earth causes [sic] the planet to wobble on its axial plane as it spins and rotates around the sun." – Botched subject-verb disagreement notwithstanding, no three-dimensional object rotates about an "axial plane" – it rotates about a line. What Henri calls "precession of the equinoxes" is real, but has absolutely nothing to do with the planet's orbit.
• "Milankovitch also proposed that a change in the tilt of the earth's axis could act to affect climate. This concept is called obliquity. " – Again, a real phenomenon. Again, nothing to do with the planet's orbit: it's related to changes in the angle between the rotational axis and the orbital plane.

Why Bauholz / Neilsen found in necessary to botch discussion of Milankovich cycles to "explain" Earth's orbit is puzzling, but we're pretty certain it's the intersection of scientific illiteracy and greed. When we see rubbish like this published, we pull the trigger on another Dumbass of the Day nomination. In Henri's / Hank's case, it's his fifth trip to the podium.

SI - ASTRONOMY