Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

THE DISASTER THAT WASN’T 131
wrote a book about the alignment, 5/5/2000 Ice: The Ultimate
Disaster, where he claims that the Earth’s axis would tilt due to the
combined pull of the planets, plunging the Earth into an ice age.
Noone was sincere, and felt he had done the research to back up
his claims. The problem is, his research involved almost no astronomy
at all. He related Bible prophesies, Nostradamus, and even
the shape of the Great Pyramid in Egypt to a disaster in the year
2000, and figured the planets must have something to do with it.
Yet, in his meandering book precious little space is devoted to the
planets, and nowhere—nowhere!—does he talk about the actual
measurable effects of the planets.
I am almost willing to give Noone the benefit of the doubt and
assume he really was concerned about global catastrophe. But I
wonder: if he really felt that the Earth would be destroyed on May
5, 2000, why not give away his book for free so that people could
be warned? I can’t imagine he thought the royalties he got on the
book would be worth much on May 6.
Noone wasn’t even the first. In the 1980s astronomer John Gribbin
and his coauthor Stephen Plagemann wrote an infamous book
entitled The Jupiter Effect, which claimed—again, without the benefit
of any math—that the gravity of the planets would affect the
Sun, causing more solar activity, causing a change in the Earth’s
rotation, causing massive earthquakes. This tissue-thin string of suppositions
led them to predict very matter-of-factly that Los Angeles
would be destroyed in 1982. The book was a runaway best seller.
When, in fact, L.A. was not destroyed as predicted, Gribbin and
Plagemann wrote another book called Beyond the Jupiter Effect,
making excuses about why things didn’t work out quite as they
had predicted, and of course they never simply admitted they were
wrong. You may not be surprised to find out that this second book
was another best seller. It’s possible, barely, that the first book was
a simple mistake and they honestly believed what they preached.
The motivation for the second book perhaps isn’t as clear.
If Noone and Gribbin were simply misguided, during the May
2000 alignment the “Survival Center” company was far more deliberate.
Peddling disaster nonsense, this company had a web site
promoting Noone’s book as well as equipment to help you survive