ORLY?

OK, I'll feed the troll. What's your "clear and unambiguous experimental and observational falsification" of Big Bang cosmology?

Whoa, time out! NYCL is the local Slashdot guru on all things RIAA and IIRC, been personally involved in the good fight for quite some time. I don't recall him ever advocating Scientology in the past. Several thousand knowledgable and well-researched posts to Slashdot on RIAA matters over a period of many years just to trick people into clicking on a Scientology ad today would have to constitute the most over-engineered setup of all time.

Remember... never attribute to bad Thetans that which can be adequately explained by the vagaries of third party ad servers. (with apologies to Hanlon's razor)

Hmmm. By and large, *thinking* before *you* post helps you to make your point more clearly. That way the grumpy folk don't have to pick their way through your careless and imprecise language in order to understand your meaning.

Indeed, if you took more notice of the trees once in a while, you might actually read what other people write before over-emoting in response.
Notice, for instance, the emphasis deliberately placed on the phrase "Earth's winter" in my post? See there it is, hidden in full sight in the first line.

My point (in case the reference to Sydney passed you by) was that *Earth doesn't have a winter*. Hemispheres of the Earth do. As we define them in this reality, 'winter' and 'summer' are effects of the axial tilt therefore there can be no such thing as *Earth's winter*

Your initial post referred to "Earth's winter taking it out past Mars", did it not? But "Earth's winter" could not carry it out past Mars because: (i) "Earth's winter" doesn't exist (see above); and, more fundamentally (ii) any season is a consequence of solar radiation incident upon the planet *not* a driver of orbital dynamics - winter (of any kind) can't *take* Earth anywhere.

See how a posting without thinking lead to poor phrasing which hindered the point you were trying to make?

Now after all that sighing and harumphing you finally rephrased yourself and properly enunciated your original point. And, guess what? It's actually a reasonably sensible point. Yes, if the Earth's orbital eccentricity were substantially greater, it might indeed have a comparable or greater effect upon the climate than axial tilt (though, as others have pointed out, climate is not merely a linear function of instantaneous distance from the Sun). Indeed, our definitions of 'seasons', 'winter' and 'summer' might well be different in such an alternate reality. Fortunately for our health (but unfortunately for the clarity of your post), we don't live in that reality.

So please, enough of the name calling. Just THINK before you post and the grumpy people will go away. Hell they might even agree with you and mod you informative.