Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
So I ran across this headline and subhead out on the interwebz:
“China Disrupts Earth’s Rotation”: NASA Confirms Massive Project Is Slowing the Planet With Unprecedented Global Consequences
In a groundbreaking revelation, NASA confirms that China’s monumental Three Gorges Dam project is subtly altering Earth’s rotation, raising global environmental concerns.
Intrigued, I read on … and on … and on … and finally down near the end, I find that the NASA geniuses have estimated that the Three Gorges Dam will increase the length of a day by … wait for it … 0.06 microseconds.
And how big is that?
Well, it will increase the day length by a whopping 0.00000000007% …
And bizarrely, this hot-off-the-presses news is two decades old. The source of this claim is a 2005 NASA JPL paper that’s here.
In addition, the smallest directly observed change in Earth’s day length (LOD) is 0.001 seconds (1 millisecond), measured on August 2, 2001, when Earth’s rotation briefly accelerated. This measurement was made using space geodetic techniques, including Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) and Global Positioning System (GPS) data. Changes smaller than that can’t be measured with current technology.
So this claim about the Three Gorges Dam would have to be sixteen THOUSAND times larger to be even measurable …
I don’t know which is more aggravating—the hype that the media puts on these trivial issues, the fact that this is from a 2005 paper, the fact that the claim is sixteen thousand times too small to measure, or the fact that there are highly educated NASA scientists wasting their time on this nonsense.
People are screaming about how the proposed budget cuts to NASA are going to cripple US science … but given the fact that NASA megabrains have time to jerk around making calculations and claims about things that are far too small to even measure tells me that there’s plenty of NASA fat to cut.
But that’s not all the terrifying news for today. We also have the following story about how bad things are. Here’s the headline and subhead:
Scientists may have figured out why a potent greenhouse gas is rising. The answer is scary.
Methane emissions spiked starting in 2020. Scientists say they have found the culprit.
I gotta say, the demand for scared scientists must be at an all-time high. And just what does this ultra-terrifying methane “spike” look like out here in the real world? To determine that, I got the data about the changes in atmospheric methane and CO2, and converted them to calculated changes in downwelling radiation using the IPCC formulas for the conversions. Here’s a graph showing the “scary spike”.
Pretty scary, all right.
My explanation for all of this is that the climate alarmists feel the ground shifting under their feet as taxpayer dollars dry up, and they are running as fast as they can to keep the population terrified so their grift can continue.
Sigh … at least it seems like we’re winning the battle to end this expensive, suicidal con job that’s already cost us hundreds of billions of dollars.
My best regards to all, keep up the good fight
w.
PS—As is my habit, I ask that when you comment, you quote the exact words you are referring to. Prevents endless misunderstandings.
PPS—I’m fed up with the endless insults from various folks. I’m going to start snipping them out of comments. If you think that calling names is how adults discuss contentious issues, this isn’t the place for you.
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I was hoping it would negate daylight savings time.
I thought Trump was sorting NASA out?
a whopping 0.00000000007 IQ is nowhere good enough. No matter how well meaning.
The article did say that the paper was from 20 years ago.
The change is actually measurable because the difference is cumulative. If you wait a few thousand days you’ll see that the stars are in a fractionally different place to the original prediction.
How long before the changes are actually above the error in positional accuracy of a telescope? Now that could be a better equation.
Actually, China knew that, and concluded it would be OK to burn lots of coal.., which is good, because it increases CO2 ppm, which is a vital ingredient for growing flora, which supports fauna, and increases crop yields to feed 8 billion people
What about that big hunk of concrete California built for a high-speed choo-choo? That slowing down the world too?
I am more worried about it speeding up, and all of us flying off
somewhere
NASA has way too many people. Trump should trim 80% of the head count, and we would all be better off
What about those pyramids built by Egyptians 4000 years ago?
They are way bigger than Three Gorges. They slowing down the world too?
Just for clarity, the effect is not expected from the weight of the concrete but rather the huge weight of water in the new lakes formed behind the concrete.
It’s also interesting to note that when solar activity is low during a N.H. winter, the Earth rotates faster … https://andymaypetrophysicist.com/2023/02/01/tom-nelson-interviews-javier-vinos/
“or the fact that there are highly educated NASA scientists wasting their time on this nonsense.”
highly educated -> highly paid
It’s debt money, so I guess my kids are buying.
Some people are educated beyond their capacity to think.
Your kids, their kids, their kids’ kids. Assuming, of course, that interest rates are low and the country doesn’t go bankrupt.
Just to say I love Willis’s posts. They cheer me up. I am an old grandmother, so I don’t worry about my future. I have no future anyway. Y worry when I read alarmist news, thinking about the future of my grandchildren.
Thank You Willis .
Mil gracias, mi’jita.
w.
Regarding your sigh, until we get an honest MSM mogul the general public won’t know that the Bandar-log are getting ever more shrill in their desperation. I guess we just have to keep chipping away.
Hey, Seadog, always good to hear from you. And I love the Kipling reference.
Best to you and yours,
w.
Bandar-log.
I only ever saw the movie (The Jungle Book) and did not remember this name.
This site is worth visiting just for the general education it provides (or leads one to)
I never saw the movie; early in my life I found that the movie of a book was always second best.
Read the Jungle Books.
(I)Here’s a graph showing the “scary spike”.(/i)
__________________________________
Graphs in Watts per Square Meters make my eyes glaze over. Can you tell us how that translates into global temperature? Looks like you’re showing CH4 causing about 0.1 W/M^2 of forcing whatever that means in term of global temperature.
Thanks, I’m in the same boat as the average policy maker when it comes to understanding this stuff.
IF the IPCC is correct, the 0.1 W/m2 of forcing will cause somewhere between 0.03°C to 0.16°C warming … “settled science” at its finest.
w.
Thanks I will make a note of it. If you can cite IPCC chapter & verse, that would be fantastic!
NB : I am definitely not Willis !
(Effective) Radiative Forcing and temperature to 2100 under various IPCC scenarios is shown in Figure 4.35, on page 619 of the AR6 WG-I assessment report.
Figure 4.35 | Comparison of RCPs and SSPs run by a single emulator to estimate scenario differences. Time series with 5–95% ranges and medians of (a) effective radiative forcings, calculated as described in Annex 7.A.1; and (b) global surface air temperature projections relative to 1850–1900 for the RCP and SSP scenarios from MAGICC 7.5.
.
Temperature “projections” under most SSP scenarios “only” up to 2300 are shown in panels (a) and (b) of Figure 4.40 on page 632.
Figure 4.40 | Simulated climate changes up to 2300 under the extended SSP scenarios. Displayed are (a) projected global surface air temperature (GSAT) change, relative to 1850–1900, from CMIP6 models (individual lines) and MAGICC7 (shaded plumes) (b) as (a) but zoomed in to show low-emissions scenarios;
.
Long-term “ERF” is more tricky, but can be found starting from the “Drafts and Review Materials” webpage for the IPCC AR6 WG-I report.
URL : https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/drafts-and-reviews
In the “Final Government Distribution” section the last column has a set of (barely visible) “Supplementary Material” links.
The one you want is at the end of the “Chapter 7: The Earth’s Energy Budget, Climate Feedbacks, and Climate Sensitivity” line.
A screenshot of the top of “Figure 7.SM.1: Total effective radiative forcing from SSP scenarios with respect to 1750 for 2000-2500 …”, which can be found on page “7SM-10” (or “Page 10 of 52” in my PDF file viewer application) of that file, is attached below.
PS : For ERF numbers see also “Annex III : Forcings”, especially tables AIII.3 (ERFs from 1750 to 2019) and AIII.4a to AIII.4e (ERFs for the 5 “main” IPCC SSPs from 2020 to 2500), on pages 2144 to 2147.
Surface temp 288 C is 390.1 W/m^2 at emissivity of 1.
……………….289 C is 395.5 W/m^2
IR leaving Top-of-Atmosphere is 240 W/m^2 on average. The difference is the greenhouse effect of the warmer-than-outer-space atmospheric dome over top of us surface dwellers.
So .1 watts by CH4 is technically SFA temperature wise, seriously few anxieties.
“Graphs in Watts per Square Meters make my eyes glaze over.”
We need it expressed in terms we understand …. simple stuff…
Like the number of London buses divided by an Olympic swimming pool.
or
the amount of whales in Wales
Which is why I always promote the universal unit measurement for anything not worth measuring –
a Poofteenth
I really like velocity expressed in furlongs per fortnight.
Or the ‘perfect octagonal ball ……….’
What we need to know, and climate science and the newly christened “Legacy Media” never tell us, is how much warming methane will actually cause. If. It’s any more than 0.1 degrees “C” we need to see their work and source.
I prefer Hiroshimas, though it’s a relative larger unit of energy. Maybe yactoHiroshimas would be better.
“yactoHiroshimas”
Love it !!! (:-))
That is the 64$ question, is it not?
What temperature change is effected by a given forcing change?
The Earth’s temperature appears to have varied only ±10C over past couple of billions of years under all actual forcing changes. Life has persisted, usually in great abundance.
Climate models use a PARAMETER – climate sensitivity – which allows whatever answer you wish to be reached. What is your pleasure? Tens of $Billions (that word ‘billions’ again) have been spent to answer that question, with many answers and none being given.
Climate modeling is a significant government expense. Someone quoting Puskin recently wrote (translated from Russian) – ‘where there is a trough, there will be pigs’. Climate modeling is definitely a ‘trough’.
Methane has become of greater interest to climate modelers in the past two decades, as CO2 has failed in its task. Another metric, the Global Warming Potential, GWP, has increased the warming effect of CH4 from 25 times to 85 times that of CO2, according to the IPCC summary in 2022. All that happened without changing the CH4 molecule in the least, but has made fugitive CH4 a more potent greenhouse contributor than CO2, just when the IPCC needed it.
How convenient.
Did you see this:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/03/06/the-misguided-crusade-to-reduce-anthropogenic-methane-emissions/
Well, that’s the thing, you can’t. It depends on so many things, you’ll go crazy before you’ve got the math figured out.
How ’bout this one:
Mars atmosphere has ~11.5 times more CO₂ by mass than Earth.
By volume, Mars has ~700× more CO₂ than Earth’s atmosphere.
Willis,
a couple of things. Firstly the smallest observed change in the length of the day is very different from the measured accuracy. The article states that “Gross works with a group at JPL that uses the global positioning system to measure Earth’s rotation very precisely, to about one-hundredth of a millisecond” which is 100 times smaller than the 1 millisecond change that they measured. Secondly the way to measure small frequency differences is to wait until the change becomes noticeable. So while you can’t directly measure a difference of 0.06 microsecond over the course of a day over a year it will add up to a difference of about 18 microseconds which is measurable by Gross and his colleagues.
That there is a difference in rotation rates is not surprising. Due to conservation of momentum anything that changes the mass distribution of the earth will change the rotation rate. Simply walking up a flight of stairs will do that. So why you need to drive attention to the click-bait site sustainability-times for posting out of date news is another matter entirely.
When NASA (or any other taxpayer-supported organization claiming to represent “science”) fronts obviously absurd alarmist claims, it deserves being called out for “malfeasance of office”.
Asserted accuracy does exonerate a completely bogus claim.
Thanks for noting that most “climate™” publications are just click-bait garbage science.
A small step. !
Mr. Walton: A couple more things- So they “observe” what they cannot “measure”? Don’t you notice how often CliSci is “confirmed” by things they can’t measure??
Second, if your second point is valid, then Gross and his colleagues are reporting that measured change, right? But that’s not so, is it?
Mr. E’s proven ability to expose matters like this is driving attention to click-bait, or letting the sun shine in? As you like.
When steak on the table is threatened, then the mandate is obeyed. The scientists, I certainly hope, understood the triviality of the issues, but performed their molehill search study anyway, knowing it was both trivial and correct, so what could go wrong? The media gets a true story to blow out of proportion, and the scientists get an abundance of steak. Only the public is duped and that is what is intended from the get-go.
Bread, meet butter.
Ah, that same old “rotation” song and dance. At least it wasn’t the Russians what done it.
nor the North Koreans…
The putative observation of “gravitational waves,” involving a much smaller infinitesimal signal that is likewise unmeasurable, is another fictitious result illustrating the complete solipsism of mainstream science, yet Mr. Anthony Watts heartily believes in that one and even wrote a post here lauding the so-called accomplishment:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/02/14/a-triumph-of-science-first-detection-of-the-gravitational-wave/
People here are highly selective about where they apply their skepticism. There are no gravitational waves, relativity is flatly wrong and ridiculous, and politicized science is a two-way street after all, not an exclusive possession of the Left.
@Intellligent Dasein… have you paid your dues to the Flat Earth Society. Would you be so kind as to provide evidence that relativity is wrong
“Every Day Brings All Humans 24 Hours Closer to Death ” – details at 11.
“Moscow in flames, missiles on the way, film at 11.”
To be followed by a documentary about zinc oxide.
It was such fun that movie. The first of its kind that I saw.
It was.
“Women and minorities hardest hit”
As has been noted a long time ago…. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” Use it wisely.
I’ve noticed that the days are getting longer. It started back in December.
Yes, but my days here in New Zealand started getting shorter at pretty much the same time! You have global warming but I have global cooling…Watts Up with That?
So clearly these effects are not ‘global’?
(sorry, my stage 5 pedantry cannot be cured 🙁 )
Yes, everything tends to the average…
Drive down the road blindfolded and see if you tend to the middle of the road.
Universal symmetry!
The reference below is outlines climate variation from benthic studies since 65 MYbp.
http://www.riversimulator.org/Resources/ClimateDocs/AnAstronomicallyDatedRecordEarthsClimateAndPredictabilityOverTimeLast66millionYears2020Westerhold.pdf.
Water, moving about the planet due to climate, and also tectonic, variations is a major player in altering the Earth’s rotation/spin. The coming and going of large glacial ice sheets is one obvious mechanism for moving large amounts of water in and out of the ocean basins, dwarfing the Three Gorges Project, as all human activities are routinely dwarfed by naturally occurring processes.
But, since NASA and other agencies are funded to do what those currently in power desire, trivia must be blown completely out of proportion to support a narrative.
May I humbly suggest that you save “bold” for the parts you want to emphasize?
PS I gave an “+” to what you said.
PPS I’m the only person I know that should everything I say in “bold”. 😎
PPPS Willis, if you “snip” this, at least put the snip in bold. 😎 😎
Yes, let’s not underestimate the tectonic effect. The consequence of one large subduction earthquake and plate movement would dwarf the Three Gorges effect I would think. But only until the Andes or Cascades rise a mm higher again.
Darn. It just popped that the Three Gorges Effect is much like the Barbra Streisand Effect.
Great article Willis. Thank you.
Now, now, it’s easy with hindsight to laugh about 6 microseconds, but how were those NASA scientists supposed to know that before they made the calculations?
Fair is fair.
See, we all discover things throughout life that we thought were worth worrying about at the time, only to discover upon further investigation that we were getting all in a tizz over nothing of any consequence whatsoever.
When this happens, it’s best not to publicly share your discovery about nothing worth discovering, but rather to keep it to yourself and move on with your life.
(Unless of course, you’re a NASA “scientist” who feels compelled to publish something, anything, just in case one of the DOGE team suddenly arrives and asks “what have you produced today?”)
But one of the big problems in peer reviewed science is how many studies fail and they never report the failure. One of the recommended cures is to register all studies publicly before they begin, and they don’t get paid if they don’t show their work and the result.
Spending the money and hiding a silly result is worse than spending the money and publishing the silly result.
“Methane emissions spiked starting in 2020. Scientists say they have found the culprit.”
I’m going with cow farts – that’s the usual BS reason, isn’t it?
Are humans eating more or less beans since, oh, around 100 years ago?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Are humans eatuing more beans? Yep, it’s all those vegans…
It’s the clams, I tells ya! They’re going to k1ll us all!
https://www.earth.com/news/clams-worms-high-methane/
All that popcorn eating following the latest discussions on the internet.
It has recently been documented that beavers experience flatulence. Therefore, the re-introduction of beavers to areas where they have experienced extirpation will not only increase ‘natural’ methane from the beaver-made wetlands, but their digestive track will contribute also. I suspect it is the same people who are concerned about fugitive methane from human activities that are behind the ‘re-wilding’ of areas the formerly had beavers.
Pun intended?
“it will increase the day length by a whopping 0.00000000007%”
If the working day increases, that means the wage bill will have to rise, so staff will be sacked leading to unemployment, starvation, insurrection then a full civil war that could morph into worldwide Armageddon; …
… on the plus side, we’ll get longer in bed (:-))
I would be quite interested to know how Earth’s moment-of-inertia vector (i,e., spin axis and length-of-day) has changed over the last 20+ years as a result of construction and filling of the Three Gorges Dam compared to the combined effects of continental drift and changes in ice mass over both north and south poles occurring over that same time period. I suspect the ratio would be around 1:1,000,000.
But then again, such a revelation would be contrary to NASA’s meme that humans are the cause of all things related to “climate change”.
And annual slippage along major faults such as the San Andreas is about an order of magnitude greater than sea level rise.
Just have China move all their unsold EVs up against the Great Wall of China then go full throttle and push until the Earth’s rotation goes back to normal.
Problem solved!
Which side of the Great Wall will you push on, though. If you push on the wrong side you’ll just make the ( so-called ) problem worse.
2011 Tōhoku earthquake off Japan shortened the day by about 1.8 microseconds. The 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake (remember the one that generated a tsunami that killed 200K+people), also shortened the day by about 6.8 microseconds. So I’d say lengthening the day by 0.06 microseconds helps, but we need more lengthening events to bring the Earth back into balance.
Very nice Willis. I have struggled to find an argument to show that just because the math is correct doesn’t mean it is meaningful. This is as good as any.
Yes Bob.
It’s also like that with a whole raft of new technologies & systems that are desperately searching for needed, practical applications.
Patents offices worldwide are overflowing with Rube Goldberg inventions.
Thank you so much for putting these stories in perspective. You are doing work that is so much more valuable than that of the scare mongers and is essential to keep them at bay. 👍👌
Why explicitly name China and use the evocative word “disrupt” ?
They do it because bad news sells newspapers.
w.
Agreed. It’s all about the clicks (ie money)
Well, there is of course the dramatic and life-threathening extremely fast warming of the Earth.
This IPCC graph shows the gruelling extent of the horror: