The Moon will be at First Quarter on August 25.
See the end note about enlarging illustrations.
You can see that close to it is the “antapex of Earth’s way,” the point away from which Earth is traveling at this moment. The Moon, as it reaches First Quarter, is crossing outward over our orbit behind us.
The antapex keeps traveling leftward (eastward), keeping 90° away from the Sun. It’s an imaginary point, but if the Earth had “Trojan” satellites like Jupiter’s, they would cluster somewhere near the antapex. Or maybe there’s a genie there, following the most favored planet in the solar system and keeping watch on it – a benevolent and sometimes worried watch.
June 29, now nearly two months in the past, was to have been Earth Overshoot Day: the date when, according to an international network of researchers, the rate of human consumption of Earth’s resources will surpass the rate at which nature can renew them. That was the prediction, back in early 2019.
But no! Suddenly, the rate slowed, by 9.3%. Hopeful! Had the number of frugal people taken a sharp rise?
No. The coronavirus had struck, putting people out of work, and forcing then to stay at home and not go out buying things. So the researchers modified their prediction of Overshoot Day. To August 22. Which was yesterday.
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ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format. You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor. One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge. Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it. On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers). Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.
Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after positing it. If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.
This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
I suppose that eventually we will run out of exploitable natural resources on this planet.you can see that with fracking they’ve got the easy to get stuff and now are going after the harder to get stuff but eventually that’ll run out too.hard to know what the answer is as our economy is tied up with the cycle of endless consumption but the resources to consume are not being replenished.as Han Solo said when he saw the Death Star”I have a bad feeling about this!”
Than goodness some 23 million people have been credited with having the China Virus so that, like the antapex of Earth’s way, the imaginary EOD point can also slip. Great news, isn’t it?
If I ever get to see the Moon such is the huge increase in rainfall over England.not 1 single dry day in about 6 weeks.its a bit like living on Venus without being crushed,melted and being burnt by sulphuric acid all at the same time! virtually constant low pressure systems from the Azores.
Earth Overshoot Day causes me to recollect Rachel Carson’s SILENT SPRING and Paul Erhlich’s THE POPULATION BOMB. The population estimate for the world was 3.5 billion in 1968. The current estimate is 7.8 billion as of March 2020. Reproduction is extremely popular. Overshot is more like it!
Reading this blog post I got the impression that Earth Overshoot Day is the edge of a once-and-for-all cliff.
The Guardian article linked here clarifies that Earth Overshoot Day is an annual statistic published by the Global Footprint Network, a way to represent how much humanity’s consumption of natural resources during a given year exceeds the Earth’s capacity to regenerate them. The initial projections that yielded the June 29 date were that during 2020 we would use a bit more than twice as much stuff as the Earth could regenerate. The revised estimate is that we’re “only” exceeding our planet’s carrying capacity by 1.55 times.
For 50 years we’ve been using more stuff than the Earth produces, and our excess consumption has steadily increased decade by decade.