The last time Jupiter and Saturn aligned this closely, Genghis Khan was implementing his Great Reset across much of Eurasia. There will soon be another grand conjunction of the two giant planets, best seen after sunset on 21 December; which portends more for current politics than we realise.

This conjunction has been called the Christmas Star since the astronomer Kepler observed a less precise alignment on Christmas Day 1603 and calculated that a similar event in 7 BC might have been the Magi’s star of Bethlehem.

For modern Magi, the fascination with the Jupiter-Saturn alignment is its influence on Earth’s climate via its influence on the Sun.

I find the multiple lines of evidence compelling, and if a fraction of the funding given to politicised research on perishing reefs and vanishing polar bears was given to research on the Sun’s role in our changing climate, we might learn that our puny emissions are marginal in the great scheme of things. Which is why that funding will never be given.

Professor Nicola Scafetta concludes that ‘solar, lunar and planetary oscillations drive the natural oscillations observed in the climate’ and describes the Jupiter-Saturn sixty-year alignment with the Sun as ‘among the main stable resonances of the solar system’. He correlates the tidal influence of these planets on the Sun with the sixty-year warming-cooling tide observed on Earth.

Ivanka Charvátová, from the Czech Geophysical Institute, studied the Sun’s intricate cycle of movement around the centre of gravity of the solar system. She showed that, when the combined gravity of Jupiter and Saturn dominate at the start of each cycle, we observe an orderly pattern of solar motion along with warm periods on earth; when that dominance is lost we observe chaotic solar motion corresponding to the ‘climate minima’ on earth (see, most recently, Wolff, Spörer, Maunder and Dalton).

These are correlations in search of causation, and one link in the causative chain has been proposed by Professor Valentina Zharkova. Writing in Nature in 2015, she identified the mechanism underlying the Sun’s variable magnetic output, with all its implications for terrestrial climate: two magnetic waves travelling from the opposite hemispheres which are slightly out of synch and therefore create a beat pattern of reinforcement and cancellation. When Zharkova graphed this beat pattern of magnetic output backwards over millennia it closely fitted the known warm and cool periods on Earth, and graphing it forward she predicted the next Grand Solar Minimum starting this year and lasting three solar cycles. And you guessed it, the suspect for putting the Sun’s magnetic waves out of synch is gravitational ‘perturbation’ by the giant planets.

Meddling with the Sun’s magnetic field in this way is a serious offence, linked by a plausible causal chain to climate change on Earth. Astrophysicist Dr Henrik Svensmark explains the connection in the IPA’s excellent publication, Climate Change: the facts 2020.

Put simply, a weakened solar magnetic field with weaker penetration into the solar system means less protection for the planets against cosmic rays. More cosmic radiation reaching our atmosphere means increased formation of ions around which cloud droplets can form. That means increased cloud cover, which is our planet’s sunshade to keep us cool. And that is where we are heading, it appears, for the next thirty years of this Grand Minimum of solar magnetic output with its chilly nadir in 2031. That, incidentally, is the year that climate cultists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez say the world will end from global warming! Place your bets.

This entrancing chain of cause and effect from Jupiter and Saturn’s perturbing gravity to the Sun’s fluctuating magnetic field to the change in cosmic ray penetration affecting cloud cover and temperature – all this remains magnificently out of reach of the globalists at the United Nations.

What they do control is political censorship of climate science, and they have no tolerance of theories that prove Shakespeare wrong: that this time, dear Brutus, the fault is indeed in our stars and not ourselves. Solar scientist Willie Soon wrote politely of ‘socio-political factors which currently obscure a better understanding of the Sun-climate connection’. Charvátová more bluntly described the IPCC as ‘allergic’ to the field of solar-terrestrial climate science.

It is truly depressing to see the noble ideals of science corrupted at every turn by the ideology of global warming, itself subject to the politics of global governance.

But it was not always thus: there was a time when scientists, and Wise Men generally, simply followed the evidence where it led. And where it led was often the more fundamental question as to why there should be ‘truth’ in the first place. This is a broader question, not of science but of philosophy or faith.

On this great question, consider the insights of three more Magi, agnostics all but with far-seeing eyes.

Einstein, the lapsed Jew who saw further into the cosmos than any of us, wrote, ‘A conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order… This firm belief, a belief bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God.’

An agnostic Aussie, Professor Paul Davies, wrote a book called The Mind of God: ‘Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact. There must, it seems to me, be a deeper level of explanation.’

And the late great philosopher Antony Flew, described as ‘the world’s most notorious atheist’, was smitten by the same scientific beauty: ‘I now believe that the universe was brought into being by an infinite Intelligence. I believe that this universe’s intricate laws manifest what scientists have called the Mind of God.’

With insights like that, even our dismal materialist culture could be re-enchanted and our commitment to truth, including scientific integrity, rekindled.

That’s a star worth following.