As if we didn’t already have enough to worry about….
Excerpts from the New Scientist
Warming oceans could cause Earth’s axis to tilt in the coming century, a new study suggests. The effect was previously thought to be negligible, but researchers now say the shift will be large enough that it should be taken into account when interpreting how the Earth wobbles.
The Earth spins on an axis that is tilted some 23.5° from the vertical. But this position is far from constant – the planet’s axis is constantly shifting in response to changes in the distribution of mass around the Earth. “The Earth is like a spinning top, and if you put more mass on one side or other, the axis of rotation is going to shift slightly,” says Felix Landerer of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The influx of fresh water from shrinking ice sheets also causes the planet to pitch over. Landerer and colleagues estimate that the melting of Greenland’s ice is already causing Earth’s axis to tilt at an annual rate of about 2.6 centimetres – and that rate may increase significantly in the coming years.
Now, they calculate that oceans warmed by the rise in greenhouse gases can also cause the Earth to tilt – a conclusion that runs counter to older models, which suggested that ocean expansion would not create a large shift in the distribution of the Earth’s mass.
…
The team found that as the oceans warm and expand, more water will be pushed up and onto the Earth’s shallower ocean shelves. Over the next century, the subtle effect is expected to cause the northern pole of Earth’s spin axis to shift by roughly 1.5 centimetres per year in the direction of Alaska and Hawaii.
The effect is relatively small. “The pole’s not going to drift away in a crazy manner,” Landerer notes, adding that it shouldn’t induce any unfortunate feedback in Earth’s climate.
…
And climate change can also affect the Earth’s spin. Previously, Landerer and colleagues showed that global warming would cause Earth’s mass to be redistributed towards higher latitudes.
Journal reference: Geophysical Research Letters (in press)
full story here
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errors of scale
and yes the Earth is smoother that a pool ball (but not as round)
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/09/08/ten-things-you-dont-know-about-the-earth/
Next up, Aliens who visited Earth at Area 51 warned us about C02 and all the Global Warming dangers. They even brought the religion with them passed down from planet to planet. The Ancient civilizations of Earth had it all wrong, and fire is the evil force and the forbidden fruit. We will now return to the age of Apes, and the Warmists will provide the indoctrination.
Addendum: It is the eccentricities and changes in orbit, velocity and axis which cause changes in the distribution of earth’s mass
Shame on the New Science article author, Rachel Courtland. And even more shame on Felix Landerer at JPL. This is more ficticious global warming-tie-in tripe. EVERYTHING these days is tied to global warming theories: the frog population dwindling, honey bees dying off, reefs getting bleached, million starving. GEEZ! Enough is enough! Plate tectonics, gravity of the moon interplay with Earth and the natural cycles of the universe are what change the planet and it has since the beginning of the solar system. If I hear one more so-called scientist or writer tie some natural occurance of Earth aging and its cycles to man-made fear-mongered fake global warming, I am gonna just spew on their shoes with a half-digested burrito. Get a life. I wish I could yank JPL’s tax dollars right from under them for junk like this, and I worked there for a time.
Pamela Gray (09:02:33) :
The trouble is that poem refers to the past, but now we have the Uranus-Saturn opposition 🙂
RE:
” Alan the Brit (02:26:13) :
I await the next scary disaster story with eager anticipation. Anybody any guesses as to what that might be?”
Just as soon as the enviro-conscious world puts up enough windmills to (ha! ha!) provide all our electricity needs, some enterprising young scientist will present, in a peer-reviewed paper, that wind is not renewable after all and the mills are creating a drag on the earth’s rotation.
BEDEMIR: Quiet, quiet. Quiet! There are ways of telling whether
she is a witch.
CROWD: Are there? What are they?
BEDEMIR: Tell me, what do you do with witches?
VILLAGER #2: Burn!
CROWD: Burn, burn them up!
BEDEMIR: And what do you burn apart from witches?
VILLAGER #1: More witches!
VILLAGER #2: Wood!
BEDEMIR: So, why do witches burn?
[pause]
VILLAGER #3: B–… ’cause they’re made of wood…?
BEDEMIR: Good!
CROWD: Oh yeah, yeah…
BEDEMIR: So, how do we tell whether she is made of wood?
VILLAGER #1: Build a bridge out of her.
BEDEMIR: Aah, but can you not also build bridges out of stone?
VILLAGER #2: Oh, yeah.
BEDEMIR: Does wood sink in water?
VILLAGER #1: No, no.
VILLAGER #2: It floats! It floats!
VILLAGER #1: Throw her into the pond!
CROWD: The pond!
BEDEMIR: What also floats in water?
VILLAGER #1: Bread!
VILLAGER #2: Apples!
VILLAGER #3: Very small rocks!
VILLAGER #1: Cider!
VILLAGER #2: Great gravy!
VILLAGER #1: Cherries!
VILLAGER #2: Mud!
VILLAGER #3: Churches — churches!
VILLAGER #2: Lead — lead!
ARTHUR: A duck.
CROWD: Oooh.
BEDEMIR: Exactly! So, logically…,
VILLAGER #1: If… she.. weighs the same as a duck, she’s made of wood.
BEDEMIR: And therefore–?
VILLAGER #1: A witch!
CROWD: A witch!
BEDEMIR: We shall use my larger scales!
[yelling]
BEDEMIR: Right, remove the supports!
[whop]
[creak]
CROWD: A witch! A witch!
WITCH: It’s a fair cop.
CROWD: Burn her! Burn! [yelling]
BEDEMIR: Who are you who are so wise in the ways of science?
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/08/24/pluto.dwarf.planet/index.html
Love the last words: “I think the IAU did a terrible disservice to science, because it gives the public the impression that science is done by votes,” Sykes said. “And that’s not the way science is done at all.”
Oh really? I wonder if he follows AGW.
Now here’s a prediction that has actually come true: African nations want $67 billion in “reparations” for damage to them caused by gumball warming, which of course is the fault of “developed” nations (read USA ) and will be presenting that argument at Copenhagen (this is all over the news, so won’t bother to post url ).
Now here’s the problem I have with that: Current theory posits that homo sapiens (us’ns ) originated in Africa and spread around the world over the past few hundred thousand years. Since gumball warming has also been “proven” to be the fault of people. Since the folks in other parts of the planet came from Africa, it would seem to me that the African Nations are the root cause of gumball warming and therefore should pay the folks who were smart enough to get the hell out that armpit.
And as the ice melts & flows to the equator conservation of angular momentum will mean the day lengthens!!!
By a small fraction of a second. So much of this hysteria depends on journalists not knowing the difference between thousandths & thousands.
I recommend New Scientist date all future issues April 1. That way, their publishers can argue: “We were only kidding”.
Coriousgeorge : (10:19:19) – Of all the crackpot ideas floating around these days , that is one of the better ones .
It’s The Hab Theory all over again!
New Scientist is “tilting” at windmills…
ralph ellis (09:31:02) :
“Anyone like to estimate the weight of the Arctic icecap some 20,000 years ago?”
That is very simple since it is exactly equal to the weight of the meltwater plus the weight of the remaining icecaps:
Area of Oceans: c. 350 000 000 km¨2
Sea Level Rise: c. 120 m
Density of water: c. 1
Thus 350 x 10^6 x 10^3 x 10^3 x 120 x 1 = approx 4 x 10^16 tons
The remaining icecaps are probably about equal to 70 meters of sea-level rise, say 2.5 x 10^16 tons
So the total weight of the icecaps at the Last Glacial Maximum c. 20,000 years ago was something like 0,6 x 10^17 ( 65,000,000,000,000,000) tons.
Anthony;
I think you should see if you can get in contact with Mr Landerer and ask him to doa guest post. He obviously has developed predictive capabilities for the precise future disposition of oceanic mass that are orders of magnitude beyond those of other more mundane scientists. We could not help but benefit from exposure to the thoughts of such a towering intellect. I couldn’t locate this current paper at GRL, but they do have a couple of previous papers which seem to be his, although indication is that he was was working at the Max Planck Institute in Germany the last few years. Given that the New Scientist article says he’s now at JPL, that would indicate that our own scientific establishment may actually have recruited this deep thinker, which is a real scary thought. I didn’t invest in access for his previous papers , but judging from the abstracts, this new work will not be a large departure from his former level of “excellence”.
I’m worried that the Moon is moving away from the Earth at the rate of 4cm a year!
What is this going to do to the tides? No tides will cause an ecological disaster in the intertidal zone which is a nursery for many key sea creatures. The sea’s delicate and intricate food web will collapse and it’s all our fault!
It is clearly a result of Global Warming- as the Earth’s atmosphere warms it expands and so pushes the Moon further away.
[snip. I get the joke and the facetiousness, but I am really starting to crack down on that word ~ ctm]
Stopped read New Scientist long time ago. By the way some more bad news for warmistas
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg
Mike Strong (09:51:28) : Actually the more ridiculous these stories become the less the people believe in AGW apparently… maybe its a good thing long term (these types of stories etc..)
After they will agree to not let the temperature rise for more than 2 Celsius, the question is now… how many Earth Axis Degrees will we agree for?
I forgot to include links to the abstracts for Mr. Landerer’s previous papers, obviously his penchant for comedy is not a recent development
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006GL029106.shtml
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008JC004767.shtml
BTW, If your ribs aren’t hurting to bad after reading the New scientist piece, you should venture into the comments section, some of the contributions from the congregation of AGW devotees make Bill Murray look like Herbert Hoover.
A better (more honest) title would be something like “Global warming will NOT cause tilt of Earths axis.”
If you look at small enough numbers, the conclusion is that almost anything can cause tilt of the earths axis. This is non research of the highest order, because even before the first parameters were fed into the computer it would have been obvious that the results would be infintessimal. Two centimeters per year is absolutely swarmped by perturbations caused by the other planets, by nutation and Chandler wobble. It is swamped by isostatic rebound and compared to the Milankovich change in obliquity it is not even a pimple on a mountain.
Two centimeters works out to 64 * 10^-5 arc seconds or 0.00064 arc seconds. Consider that the anomoly of Mercury’s perihelion was a whopping 0.1 arc seconds by comparison. At that time observational astronomers claimed measurement uncertainties were only 0.01 arc seconds – still gargantuan compared to 0.00064 arc seconds.
At best it is a scientific curio – like the idea that if you fly in an aeroplane you will age 10^-5 seconds less than if you had remained on the ground. At worst it is a clumsy attempt to alarm.
Tony B @ur momisugly 09:01:01
Steve M @ur momisugly 09:16:54
Funding approved!
Bank draft for block one funding remitted via USPS.
Block two funds will be forthcoming contingent upon inclusion of catastrophic scenario.
this theory that climate change will cause the earth’s axis to tilt is pure HOT AIR.
@ur momisugly H.R.
“My hypothesis is that all of the earthworms on the panet get woozy from the wobble and they all burrow over a few feet at the same time and in the sam direction to put the earth back in balance.
“Since the earth has never shaken itself apart from a severe imbalance, I believe my hypothesis of earthworm wobble correction is the one and only truth. The science is settled. (Also note that since the appearance of earthworms on this planet, vulcanism has subsided. Their little tunnels can relieve a lot of pressure.)”
On the basis of this hypothesis, I submit the following:
Vulcanism is ameliorated by DRILLING FOR OIL.
Therefore, we’d better get back to work drilling everywhere we can–otherwise mankind is doomed!