If you weren’t already gibbering in your boots at the prospect of devastating climate change, it’s time to think again. Apparently, the movement of water from the melting icecaps is slowing the rotation of the Earth.
The effect is so drastic that – wait for it – the next ‘leap second’ required to reconcile atomic time with the position of the Earth may need to be added a whole three years later than expected. Scientific American is one of the outlets with the story:
Drastic polar ice melt is slowing Earth’s rotation, counteracting a speed-up from the planet’s liquid outer core. The upshot is that we might need to subtract a leap second for the first time ever within the decade.
“This is another one of those ‘this has never happened before’ things that we’re seeing from global warming: the idea that this effect is large enough to change the rotation of the entire Earth,” says study co-author Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The BBC’s World At One (March 28th 2024) wheeled in Professor Andrew Shepherd, Head of the Geography and Environment Department at Northumbria University to spell out the impending horological catastrophe.
He explained, deploying a colourful metaphor:
The mass [of water] moves towards the equator and spreads evenly around the planet. And that causes the planet to slow down in the same way that a ballerina spinner spinning would slow down if they moved their arms outwards.
Presenter Jonny Dymond was keen to make sure listeners understood this is no joke with a proposition masquerading as a question: “This is another message from the Earth that things are changing.”
Prof. Shepherd took the bait:
Yeah. It’s another bad news story unfortunately but it’s a good example of how climate change affects all kinds of different parts of our lives. You might not think it’s important that the Earth is slowing down but that changes all of the satellite telecommunications that we rely on and people have to take account of to make sure that the GPS system is as precise as we want it to be and all of that has to go on in the background because we don’t, we don’t programme those satellites but someone else has to.
“Are you surprised by this finding?” Dymond asked. Shepherd replied:
So it’s quite interesting. I was surprised that the fingerprint of climate change crops up in all kinds of different records. I was quite surprised to see that geodesists, people who look at the Earth and time, spotted it and, I guess, they were saying that what’s going on here something must be happening and they’re not climate scientists so they had to hunt around for the source of this and realised, stumbled upon the fact that our polar ice sheets are melting at a colossal rate and so they have to join the dots. And that’s science really.
“Join the dots”, “that’s science really”. So that’s how science works. Just come up with an all-purpose climate change hypothesis and stick to it.
As ever, climate change apocalypse news is predicated on the concept that at some nebulous point in the relatively recent past the Earth was in a perfect unchanging state of equilibrium. The Moon of course is slowing the Earth’s rotation down anyway.
As for GPS, that’s a 21st century problem. Just a few years ago Australia’s annual 7cm move north was realised to be why GPS systems and maps were out of synch with where the country’s maps were located.
How could that be happening? Presumably the melting ice in Antarctica is pushing the island continent which is now surfing north towards the equator. Obvious, isn’t it? All you have to do is join the dots.
You can listen to World At One here. Spin forward to 27:14 in. Or you can listen to Radio 4’s PM and learn how a nuclear war would result in a drop in world temperatures of 40 degrees Fahrenheit thanks to the soot from nuclear fires, resulting in “large bodies of water becoming sheets of ice” (spin through to 57:35). Hobson’s Choice.
Better not tell the Child Saint that or she’ll be clamouring for nuclear war. At least the world would stop slowing down though, eh?
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They jumped the gun – it was meant to be announced on Easter Monday.
My own joined dots is all those wind turbines and their enormous blades causing drag on the atmosphere and thereby slowing Earth’s rotation.
This fits in with the vortex round the bath plug hole much slower than pre-wind turbine days. It’s science.
Then there is the weight of all the dead Red Kites, Buzzards, Falcons, Sparrow Hawks, Eagles and Bats killed by the turbine blades pressing down on the earths surface, causing the core to heat up which then sends more lava out of volcano’s, increasing natural emissions of CO2 which causes even more global warming which then requires even more turbines and even more dead birds. ——–Oh I get it now. Is this the Carbon Cycle alarmists keep harping on about?
If we could align all the wind turbines and drive them using solar power we could speed up the Earth or make it spin in the direction of our choosing?
Nah. An ice-age caused by global thermonuclear war would (eventually) raise large masses of H2O in the form of ice relative to current sea levels. Just as with the ballerina analogy this mass, spinning further out from the centre would slow the planet down.
Now there‘s a good reason not to have a nuclear war.
Updated to add: Especially as the resulting disruption to GPS might make the next lot of nukes miss their targets by as much as several metres.
It’s the windmills wot did it. Ha ha ha
Why would an ice cap which is not melting, affect a spin when it barely impacts the surface ?
The Ancients (Greeks, Persians, Hindus, Egyptians, Amerindians etc) all claimed that the Earth at one time rotated East to West, not West to East as it does today. Velikovsky that hated heretic, provides a masterful summary of these claims. Rotation is a definite problem for ‘The Science’.
What started the rotation? Is it always constant? How would a spinning top spin at the same rate in the same direction for 4 billion (trillion, brazilian, darwinian) years without incident? What about the Coriolis and Euler force effects, not to mention universal mass attraction?
Or worse why are there 300.000 experiments from 1810 to the fakir Einstein’s time, which picked up no rotation whatsoever (interferometers)? Why doesn’t SOHO show a rotating globe? Why did the famed Michelson Morley experiments fail to pick up a dirunal rotation?
Does the Earth really rotate? Can you prove it? Was Tycho Brahe not right?
And why would the moon also spin at the same speed meaning we only ever see the one side of the moon? ——Perhaps climate change will slow the moon down so that eventually Pinks Floyds most famous album becomes obsolete and we no longer have a Dark Side of the Moon. ———-Ok that is two silly comments I have made on this article. But what else can you really expect when we get confronted with nonsense like this?
Fishy – for it is he, “put me through to Billy. Urgently. ”
Yes Sir.
“Mr Gates? Fishy here. We have a problem. ”
How can I help?
“Mr Gates, the planet is slowing down. Something to do with this Climate Change scam you dreamt up. Ice melting all over the place. We need some boosters to get the planet back up to full speed. It’s playing havoc with my mobi and my WhatsApp messages are taking ages to arrive.”
Calm down Fishy. I will get my script writers on the job pronto. We’ll soon have the planet at full speed. I need some collateral.
Fishy, for it is he, “you can have Scotland.”
Deal.
(Fishy relaxes into his chair and thinks ‘I played a blinder. Got rid of Scotland AND saved the planet. Wait ’til Kneel hears about this.)
Thanks
“This is another one of those ‘this has never happened before’ things that we’re seeing from global warming: the idea that this effect is large enough to change the rotation of the entire Earth,”
Just one question, how many millions of years have we been actually looking for this never before seen event? Is the speed of rotation an absolute constant since time (relating to Earth) began? Do these people have any credibility, at all?
Earth has an elliptical orbit, does its speed of rotation vary based on its distance from the sun, and possible variability in the gravitational pull? Can any of this actually be measured in any meaningful way? If it supports the idiocy of climate activists it seems so!
“Do these people have any credibility, at all”? ——No None. It is a pseudo scientific fraud. —-We should all have realised that in 2009 when the Climategate emails were hacked, and before that when Mann would not provide data, code, and methodology for his silly Hockey Stick Graph. ——–Imagine if yesterday afternoon I claim to have made a new life changing scientific discovery but when asked for my data and my evidence I point blank refuse to provide it. —–This is what science has become. Just another government department.
I realised about 2004 that Global Warming was a total scam – they said the science was set and there was a CONsensus, and right there I knew, the words they used gave it away.
My early career (80’s) was as an industrial chemist, so I was trained in the Scientific Method.
Didn’t challenge 9/11 at the time, but Global Warming due to a trace gas was the epiphany.
Climate change causes the colour blue and transgenderism too.
Because science.
I’m reminded of an article on the Biased Broadcasting Cult website several years ago about the plight of the Orange Tip Butterfly due to the Climate Claptrap.
The article suggested that the butterflies had appeared 0.25 days earlier than “normal” due to Global warming (as it was then).
A full 6 hours earlier, and this prompted an article, sort of sums up the utter absurdity.
So during the ice ages that the Earth has seen in the past, did the opposite effect occur? Probably, but I bet the woolly mammoths didn’t care.
Their tusks were more curled due to the extra spin caused by all that ice – Coriolis affect.
Drastic polar ice melt is slowing Earth’s rotation, counteracting a speed-up from the planet’s liquid outer core. The upshot is that we might need to subtract a leap second for the first time ever within the decade.
All the frozen water at the poles was liquid before the current ice age¹ began. Hence, all of it melting cannot slow down the rotation of the Earth more than it had already been slowed down in the past. Ergo: Nothing to be seen here.
¹ Defined as period where permanently frozen regions exist on Earth.
Related thought: Coal is fossilized plant matter. Carbon contained in coal originally came from the atmosphere, hence, burning all coal on Earth cannot increase the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere beyond what it already was at some point in time in the past. It’s actually going to be less because not all coal deposits can be mined and because some amount of coal will always remained unburnt even when planning to burn all coal.
The Arctic ice is melting?
Of course it is. It’s getting warmer in the northern hemisphere because we’re moving towards summer. Hence, some ice is melting in the arctic.
You make a valid point, except the summer melt hasn’t started yet. There has been melting off Hokkaido and the Sea of Okhostk, but that is not really the Arctic considering Hokkaido is at the same latitude as Northern Spain.
I was just trying to reverse-engineer drastic polar ice melt, based on the assumption that it must have been constructed according a formula much overused by the apostles of St. COVID IXX: Take an everyday occurence, attach some wildly inappropriate adjectives to it and use the combination to claim that doom will certainly occur within $timeframe. For COVID $timeframe was always next month (in two to three weeks), for climate, it’s usually some number of decades.
I am afraid the cause is a lot more worrying. There is a large black hole moving closer to our solar system and the intense gravitational effect is causing the resonant frequency of the caesium atoms to change fractionally.
There is an international conspiracy of silence from the powers that be to prevent world wide panic as we are imminently to be consumed by the black hole.
Making jokes about this Stark Trek quality sciencebabble is tempting. But the problem with that is the climatists are getting away with it because they control the media (and have always talked nonsense, anyway). We don’t and hence, we won’t.
“The mass [of water] moves towards the equator and spreads evenly around the planet.”
Contemplates, ponders, scratches head, tries to envisage, then brain explodes….
Your bullsh1t detector ought to cut in before your brain explodes. Get it checked out!
Climate Change is making the wind stronger and blow from the other direction so slowing the rotation. The Science(tm).
The wind turbines are moving today and making it a windy day. We could turn them in a direction so they blow the wind to help the earth’s rotation. I know, I’m a genius/expert.
But if we eat more vegetables and beans there will be more wind. We could give tax breaks to those that use their wind to spin the world faster. We could also get all the cows to face East to help with the Earth’s rotation. And if we use burners at the back of the cows that would give extra whoomph
When they say unprecedented, its important to remember that on this very spot on the Earth has been 15c warmer, its been covered in 100m of ice and snow, Its been at the bottom of a sea, and had beasts up to 100 feet long and three stories high walk across it. Now, what did you say was ‘unprecedented’..?
So many questions spring to mind….
A. Do I need to get a new watch?
B. Will we get an extra hour in bed?
C. Should we all be running around like headless chickens?
D. Should we ban cars and private travel, outlaw wood burners and end farming etc to speed up the Earth again?