I don't mean to say it's as specific as people blaming their morning traffic jam on Mars in retrograde.

FTFY

Allow me to clarify further. There's ample evidence that all sorts of animal and human behavior is affected by the amount of night illumination provided by a full or new moon. Corals spawn according to the amount of moonlight - if you keep a reef tank and want your corals to propagate, you need a moon light that waxes and wanes.

- HOWEVER -

None of that is accounted for even a tiny little bit by astrology of any kind. It's just not in the model. And that's the important aspect: you can believe that droughts are caused by an angry god or you can believe that droughts are caused by perturbation of the jet stream. If you study perturbations of the jet stream, you're likely to learn a little bit about predicting and mitigating drought. On the other hand, if you study angry gods you're never going to get to the "jet stream" portion of the program.

And that's the issue with astrology, with ayurveda, with acupuncture, with homeopathy, with iridology. There is an affect you can see, but you can conclusively prove through trial and error that your model for predicting it is wrong. So your choices are either to throw out your model or to fight skirmishes in the corners so that you can preserve the overarching philosophy that attracted you to the practice in the first place.

To quote David Ogilvy:

I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination.

Data is just numbers on a table. It's what you make of it. My point is that when you use that data and say "89% of this illustrates that I have no idea what's going on" you're a lot closer to learning something than when you say "11% of this agrees with my pre-existing hypothesis therefore the orbit of Mars predicts traffic jams."