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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