Guest “I couldn’t make this sort of schist up, even if I was trying” by David Middleton
‘Unprecedented’ Sea Level Rise Is Making Earth’s Days Longer
Published Jul 15, 2024 at 3:00 PM EDT
By Jess Thomson
Science Reporter
Our changing climate is impacting our planet in a huge number of ways—ranging from powerful hurricanes and intense droughts to invasive species and ocean acidification—but there might be another bizarre effect that you’ve never heard of.
Climate change might actually be slowly changing the length of a day on Earth, according to a new paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This is a result of sea levels rising—because of increased temperatures and the melting of the polar ice caps—thereby causing a redistribution of mass from the poles of our planet toward the equator.
[…]
Newsweek
Newsweek? They’re still in business?
The PNAS article is pay-walled. However, the abstract says it all…
Abstract
The melting of ice sheets and global glaciers results in sea-level rise, a pole-to-equator mass transport increasing Earth’s oblateness and resulting in an increase in the length of day (LOD). Here, we use observations and reconstructions of mass variations at the Earth’s surface since 1900 to show that the climate-induced LOD trend hovered between 0.3 and 1.0 ms/cy in the 20th century, but has accelerated to 1.33 ± 0.03 ms/cy since 2000. We further show that surface mass transport fully explains the accelerating trend in the Earth oblateness observed in the past three decades. We derive an independent measure of the decreasing LOD trend induced by Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA) of −0.80 ± 0.10 ms/cy, which provides a constraint for the mantle viscosity. The sum of this GIA rate and lunar tidal friction fully explains the secular LOD trend that is inferred from the eclipse record in the past three millennia prior to the onset of contemporary climate change. Projections of future climate warming under high emission scenarios suggest that the climate-induced LOD rate may reach 2.62 ± 0.79 ms/cy by 2100, overtaking lunar tidal friction as the single most important contributor to the long-term LOD variations.
PNAS
It’s models all the way down. There’s no way to measure fractions of milliseconds per century (ms/cy) changes in the length of day (LOD) over any time period, much less at a centennial to decadal scale. Might as well try to determine “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”
The LOD has been generally increasing over geologic time (Mitchell & Kirscher, 2023). As the Earth has pushed the Moon farther away, the Earth’s rotation has slowed down.
1.33 ms/cy = 0.0000133 s/yr
At a rate of 0.0000133 seconds per year, in 80 million years, the sidereal day will be 18 minutes longer than it currently is.
Back in the Cretaceous Period (~80 mya), when sea level was much higher than it is today and there was little to no polar ice, the days were about 23.5 hours long (de Winter et al., 2020). The rate of LOD change from 80 mya to present (1950 AD) was about 2.25 ms/cy.
Allow this to sink in: The rate of LOD change from 80 mya to 1950 AD was about +2.25 ms/cy. The rate of LOD change since 2000 AD, allegedly driven by “‘unprecedented’ sea level rise is only +1.33 ms/cy.
Of course, there are no Cretaceous measurements of LOD. This is based on reconstructions from rudist shells and models… And the error bars are in days and hours… not milliseconds.
Measuring LOD
Current LOD can be directly measured very precisely. Schreiber et al., 2023 employed “a laser ring gyroscope” to measure changes in the sidereal day. They found that the LOD fluctuated by as much as 6 ms over the 120-day measurement period.
If LOD fluctuates by 6 ms over a two month period a 1.33 ± 0.03 ms/century increase in the LOD is about as relevant as a 1-3 mm/yr rate of sea level rise is to a 1 meter daily tidal range.
References
de Winter, N.J., Goderis, S., Van Malderen, S.J.M., Sinnesael, M., Vansteenberge, S., Snoeck, C., Belza, J., Vanhaecke, F. and Claeys, P. (2020), Subdaily-Scale Chemical Variability in a Torreites Sanchezi Rudist Shell: Implications for Rudist Paleobiology and the Cretaceous Day-Night Cycle. Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, 35: e2019PA003723. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019PA003723
Mitchell, R.N., Kirscher, U. Mid-Proterozoic day length stalled by tidal resonance. Nat. Geosci. 16, 567–569 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01202-6
Schreiber, K.U., Kodet, J., Hugentobler, U. et al. Variations in the Earth’s rotation rate measured with a ring laser interferometer. Nat. Photon. 17, 1054–1058 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-023-01286-x
Shahvandi MK, Adhikari S, Dumberry M, Mishra S, Soja B. The increasingly dominant role of climate change on length of day variations. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Jul 23;121(30):e2406930121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2406930121. Epub 2024 Jul 15. PMID: 39008671.
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The day is slowly getting longer and has been for the past 4 billion years. Venus’ day has gotten longer over the same period such that its year is shorter than its day. The other factor is the large satellite orbiting the Earth.
Because of the earths slower rotation … I FEEL heavier. Nope. It isn’t all those sugar laden Frappuccinos … it’s the global warming induced slow earth rotation that has made me into a fat tub of goo
I don’t know that the days are getting longer … I feel the days flying by way too quickly lately, each day passing quicker than the last, weeks have flown by, months, it’ll be Christmas soon at this rate!
I found the perfect way to stop time.
I removed the batteries from my watch.
“I feel the days flying by way too quickly lately”
and the older you get- the faster time goes
When you get older you are not stuck at work for 10 hours each day hoping each minute that the clock will speed up so you can get on with your life. Once you are relieved of that nonsense, the days seems to go faster.
It’s either that, or those afternoon naps.
Would someone please inform Newsweek “Science Writer” Jess Thomson that according to actual observations and measurements, storms are not getting stronger and are not increasing in number nor are droughts changing. It is truly amazing the large number of media “experts” who write such false and anti-science fluff. Have they no conscience? Have they no duty to their profession?
“Would someone please inform Newsweek “Science Writer” Jess Thomson. . .”
_______________________________________________________________
From the link in the above article:
You can get in touch with Jess by emailing j.thomson@newsweek.com
Go ahead, give her a jingle. If you’re cordial and respectful you might even get a reply (-:
Now with all the cellphones and the Internet we can see and pass on all the bad weather events that previously only made it to the local news, if that.
Nowt, sells papers, like bad news.
Heard this on my running radio, working out at the Y yesterday. Don’t know why NPR and you even brought it up.
It’s true, but who cares? Our “adaptation” will be a couple more lines of code in GPS software.
NPR needs to improve their story running. You need to work during working hours, instead of looking for irrelevant silliness. Then, maybe you can provide your employer with workover opportunities that don’t water out soon after they get funded and executed…
What a load of incoherent gibberish !
Incoherent word salads are blob’s especiality.
Oxygen deprivation.
Keep it up, Mr Middleton – present facts that show just how ridiculous these stories are.
I, for one, am tired of adjusting my watch every couple of million years.
Please, would y’all stop sending all that “Carbon” into the atmosphere. 😇
Aye—However a couple of milliseconds of extra sleep is always welcome.
It’s really challenging reprogramming all of our appliances with clocks.
Look on the bright side… as days get longer we’ll have more actual daylight and will finally be able to get rid of Daylight Savings Time!
Each year the days get longer and then they get shorter 🙂
Get a watch linked to NBS and get timely time updates over wireless.
I have a modest proposal. Blaming everything on global warming is getting a bit old and stale. The ignorant masses need a new cause, a new something to blame everything on and to hate. Why don’t we bring back blaming everything on the devil? Not a cute huggable Disney type devil. But a blood curdling monstrous Satan figure. Heck, we could scare the public silly with that.
Think about it. The earth’s rotation is slowing down? Just blame it on the devil. Sea levels are rising? Must be Satan. Don’t like today’s weather? Old Scratch is at it again. I mean it really is no more absurd than saying earth’s rotation is affected by global warming, and it’s a lot more entertaining.
The universities could produce hundreds of learned tracts proving that the devil causes Republicans to eat orphan children. Instead of virtue signaling with flammable electric car we could burn a few witches publically on PBS and BBC. Wouldn’t that be fun!
I propose that it is time we find a new villain to blame everything on. Come on guys, let’s scare the s out of the little kids!!!
Climate Change IS the Devil. Aren’t there passages in the bible about many false prophets and emissaries of the devil? False Profits like Michael Mann and John Cook and Stephen Lewandowski
It is instructive to read what the Law of Moses has to say about false prophets.
Well … the Warmists have fashioned one hell of a Golden Calf at which hooves they worship
Indeed.
Blame everything on politics, politicians, WMO, WHO, WEF, UN, etc., etc., etc.
Cast a large enough net and you will catch a fish, or at least something fishy.
“A disinterested love of facts, without any regard to the bearing which those facts may have on one’s hopes or fears or destiny, is a rare quality in all ages.” It means the scientific spirit.
J B Bury – A History of Freedom of Thought.
====
What shame that so many who post here – e.g. Nick Stokes seem to be pushing an agenda instead of seeking facts and truth.
I’m fed up with being fibbed to by “experts” especially government ones.
Stokes is a professional gaslighter, his job is to keep the rise alive.
1ms/C
1 Microsecond per century?
At that rate it will take a 100,000,000 years for the earth to add 1 Second to the global chronometer
ms = millisecond… 1/1,000 of a second.
μs = microsecond… 1/1,000,000 of a second.
Ok so only a hundred thousand years per second then…got it
I’d better get to work on the new clocks and calendar then
But that’s so much more frightening when you put it that way!
But if the day gets longer, but it takes the same time to go around the Sun, won”t there eventually be fewer days in the year?
Yes… Days get longer, years get longer… Lyrics from a Thin Lizzie song?
Big picture tho
… the sun is the same, in a relative way, but you are (simply) older ….
Yes… Days get longer, years get shorter…
Sigma Xi who sends out a not very Smart Brief had that along with a positive and negative mix which is not very well edited also and just started off with this–Top Story Radar confirms lunar cave that could shelter astronauts
https://www.sciencealert.com/earths-days-to-grow-at-an-unprecedented-rate-as-polar-ice-melts
“Between the year 1900 and today, climate has caused days to become around 0.8 milliseconds longer – and under the worst-case scenario of high emissions, climate alone would be responsible for making days 2.2 milliseconds longer by the year 2100, compared to the same baseline.”
And they have solved Tachyons–https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Tachyons_Redefine_Theoretical_Boundaries_in_Modern_Physics_999.html” “Tachyons are hypothetical particles that exceed the speed of light.”To calculate the probability of a quantum process involving tachyons, it is necessary to know not only its past initial state but also its future final state,” the researchers explain. Incorporating this into the theory eliminates the previous difficulties and renders the tachyon theory coherent.”
And they are teaching politics.
https://www.sigmaxi.org/meetings-events/science-policy-bootcamp
“Hack-a-thon: Final day where participants form teams and put their new tools and knowledge into action by developing and presenting a real world science policy solution.”
And wiping out carbon and finally found a climate model that works, etc. When a Science Research Honor Society and National Academies show signs of Affirmative Action, ugh.
I forgot to mention that Louisiana is getting its first wind turbine, where the wind is apparently not important. https://louisianaradionetwork.com/2024/07/16/38116/
Nice how it’s providing jobs to the Irish. What happened to “made in the USA”?
As you may know, today was the state opening of Parliament here in the UK. The King gives his speech about the policies his incoming government will progress. The speech is written for him, by the new government. In this case the Labour Party.
Now as most people realise, the Labour Party have some pretty unique talent in their Party. Individuals, who are quite capable of interrogating something as complex as mass distribution spin correlation right down to milliseconds. In fact our new Energy Secretary/Net Zero champion is even called Miliband just to show how detailed the Party is at getting close to (net) zero..
Now other great thinkers in the Party include the Mastermind expert David Lammy the Foreign Secretary, what he doesn’t know is not worth printing. (the cost would be prohibitive). Then we have the polymath Diane Abbott. Her understanding of maths is on a par with a parrot (hence the polymath description/moniker) She, Ed Miliband and Mastermind Lammy’s would be perfect to investigate the merit in this profound relationship of Earth’s mass distribution and spin rate their collective understanding of quantum physics, is exemplifies and reflected in the Part’s named key policies i.e. Net Zero.
To be fair, that is about the actual merit of the subject matter.
Chuck’s delivery was atrocious. A routine filled with one-liners, and nobody laughed even once. It’s all in the way you tell ’em.
You left out an L in Polly.
Wouldn’t someone feel stupid to bring up a millisecond per century lengthening day, in the context of all the scare porn surrounding climate change? Doesn’t it sound sarcastic to the true believers? E.g. one scientist conjures up islands and coastlines disappearing, another presents the image of drowning polar bears, and this guy mentioned in the article can only manage to talk about a lengthening day… sounds very anticlimactic.
Probably the best way to confront the fanatics is to accept a priori their guesses, and point out to them that would still be an improvement compared to now, in the middle of an ice age.
“ reconstructions of mass variations at the Earth’s surface”
This sounds like voodoo to me, where do these variations come from, or where do they go?
…where do they go? Behind the curtain, where you’re not supposed to look!
In fact, how dare you! question our climate scientist overlords!
Greta, is this you?
Story tip- Wind turbine debris causes closure of Nantucket beaches
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1OreyX0-fw
Watch this for big picture of spin rate of earth from beginning. Skip the paper…
Isn’t possible to do a web search and block all results with climate change or global warming in results???!!!
Excuse me for a moment I need to check the date.
I thought we had moved beyond April a while back…..
We’ll be adding another Leap Day on Feb 30 every 86.4BY
‘Competing interests The authors declare no competing interest.’
I assume all of this crap is funded by our delightful Federal government, meaning that any ‘competing interest’ not fully on board with empowering same was meticulously excluded.
Frankly, I don’t see the problem.
Mass redistribution to and from the poles has a relatively easily calculated effect on the Earth’s rotation. Demonstration of the conservation of angular momentum is a great learning experiment for children if you have a large enough room and a chair that can freely rotate.
But so what? I’m not going to get het up about somebody discussing it.
For additional information beyond the abstract, see the following:
https://scitechdaily.com/climate-change-is-slowing-earths-rotation/
One of the rationalizations for their concern is not being able to land in a target zone on Mars. Apparently, the author has not heard of “mid-course corrections.”
David remarked, “They found that the LOD fluctuated by as much as 6 ms over the 120-day measurement period.” By the ‘logic’ displayed by the authors of the article, to make accurate Mars landings, the LOD should be determined for the launch day.
I find it pitiful that many researchers bend over backwards to rationalize the importance and relevance of their research. Climate has become the catch-all for public relevance.
Climate has become the catch all for government funding…that’s the problem.
“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” I know: As many as want to…
How is the LOD in anyway materially important? The a day – the time required to make exactly one full rotation – is arbitrarily assigned a time of exactly 24 hours. A second is thus 1/(24×3600) = 0.000011574074 of a day. A change in the LOD of ms/cy is so vanishingly small it is of no significance. In fact, we have to adjust the reference standard time clock by much more than the LOD change every year and a half by adding “leap seconds” (~0.4s).
Rick C,
There are scientific conventions about the use of units.
Authors are NOT free to make up units like ms/cy which I translate as milliseconds per century.
As a Chemist, I was taught to use IUPAC, the International Convention on Pure and Applied Chemistry, whose purpose includes use of standard terms to avoid home-made stuff that needs translation before it is useful. I do not recall cy for century, if that is indeed what has been made up.
(Still waiting for USA to drop Fahrenheit).
Sadly, it is a signal of inexperienced authors, then caveat emptor.
Geoff S
Fahrenheit? How about feet and miles?
Authors are perfectly free to use whatever units they want as long as they do so consistently. ms/cy is a useful unit since it is understandable. In contrast the SI unit for rate of change of day would be seconds/seconds or in other words a unitless number. If you like the conversion factor is that 1 ms/cy =3.169 x10^-13. Now I don’t know about you but ms/cy gives me a lot more information than a pure number.
Rick,
a second is defined in terms of the number of vibrations of a caesium atom. Have a look at
“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second”. It has not had anything to do with the length of a day since 196.
Also changes in the length of the day need to be accounted for in order for GPS to work. Given that light travels at 3×10^8 m/s even a small change in the LOD would have a large effect on the precision of GPS unless it is accounted for.
The accuracy of a recreational GPS is +- 5m, I doubt a difference of a millisecond would make much difference. On the other hand the precision has no bearing on the accuracy.
A millisecond is a large amount of time when dealing with GPS signals. Light travels at 3×10^8 m/s so in a millisecond it will have gone 300 kms. So if your GPS timing signal is out by 1ms then your distance will be out by 300kms. To get the required accuracy the GPS satellites keep time to within 3ns.
Will you stop giving us misinformation.
The speed of light is exactly equal to 299,792,458 metres per second.
Also which year are we talking about? The year with the millisecond missing or one where it is longer?
This is very complicated stuff for very little gain.
Actually a split second and an eternity can be defined as the same time span
A split second is the time between when the traffic signal turns green and the a$$hole behind you lays on his horn
An eternity is the time between when the light turns green and the idiot in front of you realizes it bit you still needed to honk
No, the cesium vibration is just the atomic clock’s ‘pendulum’. The number of oscillations that define a second are based to the duration of one complete rotation of the earth (24 hours exactly). If the length of day changes the cesium clock will need to be adjusted by increasing the number of cycles that define a second.
The adjustments of the calendar year by adding leap days and seconds are based on one complete orbit of the Earth around the Sun which is very close to, but not exactly, 365.2422 days.
Something that I think is worth drawing attention to is the following statement in the abstract:
“Projections of future climate warming under high emission scenarios suggest that the climate-induced LOD rate may reach 2.62 ± 0.79 ms/cy by 2100, ...”
The probability of high emission scenarios continuing until 2100 CE has been called into question by more than one researcher.
They don’t specify whether the cited uncertainty in their calculations is 1-sigma or 2-sigma. I would be surprised if it were the 2-sigma bounds usually used by sciences other than climatology. Inasmuch as they are qualifying their estimate with the caveat “may reach,” I question their implied precision. If they want to convey what the potential upper-bound is, then they should use 2.62 + 0.79 ms.
It seems that any endeavor tainted by climatology results in poor quality research.
Clyde,
Thank you for noting that there are continuing problems with the expression of uncertainty, which is a concept so fundamental to good science that it has to be proper.
When I write about uncertainty (which is often) I vener know how to express in real data the term arising from theoretical data involving the Normal Distribution, or the bell-shaped curve so fundamental in statistics. When data are truly bell-shaped, it is appropriate to calculate standard deviationms and to express as one sigma or 2 or 3 etc. From the Net –
One standard deviation, or one sigma, plotted above or below the average value on that normal distribution curve, would define a region that includes 68 percent of all the data points. Two sigmas above or below would include about 95 percent of the data, and three sigmas would include 99.7 percent.
However, the temperature data we so often use seldom fall into the Normal Distribution. Skew and Kurtosis can be severe and thus make it wrong to use the sigma concept.
We badly need another way to express uncertainty. Any ideas?
Geoff S
Geoff, there is an international standard for the expression of uncertainty, the JCGM Guide to the expression of uncertainty in measurement.
The problem climate pseudoscience has to face is that if the GUM was used correctly, their claimed tiny mK “uncertainty” numbers for all this air temperature data would be exposed for the fraud they are.
karlomonte,
Quite so, the JCGM guidelines are there, but what expression should be used when one or two sigma should not be used because of different distributions, not standard?
I have been saying similar to “The uncertainty estimate is +/- 1.5 deg C which would be 2 sigma if the standard distribution applied.”
Seeking a better way. Geoff S
“The uncertainty estimate is +/- 1.5 deg C which would be 2 sigma if the standard distribution applied.”
Geoff, I think perhaps you misunderstand. If the uncertainty estimate, however derived, represents ~68% of the samples for both sides of the mean, then the uncertainty is +/- 1 sigma. If the 1-sigma value is “+/- 1.5 deg C,” then the 2-sigma value is “+/- 3.0 deg C.”
Geoff, for starters the statistical parameters that define a distribution should be made specific and not require the reader to guess or assume. That is, if the uncertainty is stated, (as it was in this article) it should be made clear whether it is a standard deviation, standard error, or derived from a propagation-of-error analysis of several terms, and whether it represents 1 or 2 units. If the distribution is significantly skewed, then the kurtosis should be calculated and reported, allowing the reader to decide how much weight should be given to the nominal value, because the mode and median will differ from the mean. One might also calculate the apparent ‘SD’ for the mode and long tail as well as the apparent ‘SD’ for the mode and short tail, and report both as in “mode +x -y.” For skewed data, there are other approaches that can be used such as Tchebysheff’s Theorem for bounding the percentages. There are also mathematical methods for normalizing data. The point is, the reader should be given enough information to evaluate the conclusions of the paper and never be left to have to assume.
One of the disadvantages of “pal review” is that a reviewer may be so enamored with what appears to be supporting his/her/its biases, that a less than rigorous paper is allowed to be published. That is, the author doesn’t make all the assumptions and calculations explicit.
While I think there is little significance to the Arctic to equator mass distribution, would there not be a similar counter-effect from the redistribution of the mountaintop snow and glacier melt moving closer to the center of gravity and thus speeding the rotation of the earth?
Time dilation is a wonderful thing. Get more done in less time or have more time to get less done. Gravitational waves are causing cogniive distortion and intellectual decline in science reporters. It’s fun making spectulative hypothesis and jumping to causation… it’s just silly. The solution is for science reports to go surfing in the Baltic sea.
We hear that water abstraction from boreholes serving round farms out west is making the earth spin faster. What next?
You’d think they’d be happy with longer days.
The total output of all the worlds solar panels might increase by 1 picowatt!
Hmmm …
We’ve sent tons of material from Earth into orbit. Even to the Moon, other planets and beyond.
What effect did that have on “Daylight Savings Time”?
Perhaps about the same as all the tons of meteorite dust that lands on the surface every day, which is probably slowing down the rate of rotation. Apparently this author didn’t consider that.
Just how daft can some people be? Of course over millions of years orbits etc slow down – but we are simply NOT affected.
Since the length of my work day is fixed, I’m grateful for the extra 10 microseconds of leisure time every year.