I as thinking alog the lines of Brian. This new person's logic makes more sense than Amit's: change to retrograde motion should have zero influence, while alignment would have miniscule/insignificant gravitation effect. But a couple of months ago there were posts here comparing magnitude of effects to sun-moon caused earth tides, and for Jupiter is orders of magnitude smaller, and add another order or 2 of magnitude smaller for Saturn. Plus, the very significant sun and moon tides have only tiny effect, and this has only been demonstrated in special locations like near the Juan de Fuca-Pacific spreading center(s) (Tolstoy et al).

So, yes, Malarky.
Chris