The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Science Focus article “Something ‘unprecedented’ is now happening to Earth’s rotation, scientists say” claims that climate change is causing an “unprecedented” slowing of Earth’s rotation by 1.33 milliseconds per century, something not seen in 3.6 million years. This is false. The data show that millisecond-scale variations in Earth’s length of day are routine, naturally occurring, and both technologically and biologically insignificant.
The BBC sensationalizes the issue as something extraordinary, stating that today’s rate of change is “unequivocally” unlike anything in millions of years. But Earth’s rotation has never been constant. As explained in the Climate Realism rebuttal to Euronews on the same topic, seasonal atmospheric mass redistribution alone produces annual variations of 0.5 to 1 millisecond. Interannual ENSO shifts add another ±0.3 to 0.5 milliseconds. Decadal core-mantle coupling produces swings of 3 to 4 milliseconds. These are measured, observed phenomena, not model projections.
In that context, 1.33 milliseconds per century is not planetary destabilization. It is background noise, certainly nothing that would be noticed by even the most sensitive ecosystem or living being.
The BBC emphasizes that melting ice shifts mass toward the equator, comparing it to a spinning skater extending their arms. That physics analogy is correct in principle. What is incorrect is the implication that this is some new geophysical regime. Earth’s length of day has fluctuated throughout recorded history due to tidal friction from the Moon, atmospheric angular momentum exchange, ocean circulation, and core dynamics. The long-term tidal braking trend alone is about +1.7 to +1.8 milliseconds per century based on 2,500 years of eclipse records, a rate comparable to or larger than the BBC’s headline number.
Even more inconvenient for the narrative is the recent acceleration of Earth’s rotation. As noted in the Climate Realism piece, June 29, 2022 was the shortest day ever recorded in the atomic timekeeping era, about 1.59 milliseconds shorter than 86,400 seconds. If climate change were producing a simple, monotonic slowdown, we would not be seeing record-setting shorter days in the same decade.
The BBC also attempts to inflate the significance of the change by invoking dramatic metaphors. One researcher is quoted comparing the energy involved to a catastrophic earthquake, saying: “The change in the Earth’s rotational energy is equivalent to a magnitude 9.0 earthquake.” This is nothing but irresponsible doom mongering. The comparison is not about destructive force, as the article admits, but about abstract energy equivalence. It is an analogy designed to impress, not to inform. No cities are shaking. No ecosystems are collapsing. No lifeform on Earth can feel a thousandth of a second difference.
Let’s put the number in perspective. One millisecond is 0.001 seconds. A 1.33 millisecond change represents approximately 0.000015 percent of a 24-hour day. Human circadian rhythms are tuned to roughly 24 hours, not to thousandths of a second. There is no plausible biological mechanism by which such a tiny change could affect human health, animal behavior, or plant life. It is physiologically undetectable. Even if the rate of change were accurate, consistent, and sustained, it would take approximately 75,188 years for the day to lengthen by exactly one full second.
Technologically, the “crisis” BBC claims is even more absurd. Modern systems already handle irregular rotation through leap seconds. Since 1972, 27 leap seconds have been added to Coordinated Universal Time to synchronize atomic clocks with Earth’s spin. Discussions are underway about possibly implementing a negative leap second because of recent acceleration. GPS, spacecraft navigation, financial trading platforms, and astronomical observatories continuously ingest Earth orientation parameters from the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service and adjust automatically. They already deal with corrections far larger than 1 millisecond.
Society adjusts clocks by one hour every year for daylight saving time in many regions. That is 3.6 million times larger than the 1.33 millisecond change being described. Leap years add a full day. Compared to those routine adjustments, this isn’t even a rounding error.
The BBC article goes further, suggesting that by 2100 climate change could outpace even the Moon’s gravitational influence on day length. That projection is model-dependent and scenario-driven. It assumes the now discredited and removed RCP8.5 high-emissions pathways and continued ice loss at rates embedded in climate models. It is not an observed reality. It is a modeled extrapolation.
And even if that projection were accurate, we are still talking about millisecond-scale shifts. The practical consequences remain limited to timekeeping adjustments that modern civilization already manages with ease. There is no crisis as the infinitesimal change in the Earth’s rotation has and can have no plausible impact on ecosystems or living beings.
Can you spot the millisecond shift in Earth’s rotation seen below?
Figure: DSCOVR EPIC – Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera 20 images taken by the NASA probe showing the Earth spin at 23.4 degrees of tilt.
The most telling line in the BBC piece is the assertion that “human influence on the Earth system has become so profound that we are now changing the very way our Earth spins.” That statement is designed to provoke awe and alarm. It is also technically trivial. Humans also change Earth’s mass distribution through groundwater extraction, reservoir construction, mining, and urbanization. These processes are measurable, they are not existential.
In the end, the BBC’s hyped 1.33 millisecond per century change to the Earth’s length of rotation, even if true, represents trivial geophysical adjustment. One that is not biologically meaningful, technologically disruptive, and not outside the envelope of natural variability observed over decades and centuries.
Earth is not a precision quartz watch. It is a rotating, fluid planet with a molten core, dynamic oceans, shifting winds, and a gravitational partner in the Moon. Its spin rate fluctuates; it always has.
Framing a millisecond-scale variation as “unprecedented” planetary destabilization represents a a textbook example of taking a measurable but trivial geophysical adjustment and inflating it into a symbolic crisis. It is a giant nothingburger. An attempt to scare people with a story that is not scary in the least.
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
I’m waiting for the alarmist article announcing the imminent rise of the city of R’lyeh and the awakening of Great Cthulhu, whose slumber will have been disturbed by the “unprecedented” warming of the oceans caused by catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. There must be something about it in the Sixth Assessment Repo… Uh, I mean in the Necronomicon.
In the words of Joe Biden, “Don’t jump.”
The BBC?
The Blatant Bolleaux Corporation. As if that needs proving. The demise of all things RCP8.5 hasn’t happened, it’s… business as usual.
As this nonsense clearly demonstrates.
More blowing things out of proportion by Climate Alarmists.
It’s not funny. Kids read these exaggerations and fear for their future. Most of them don’t have WUWT to fall back on. At best, they are confused, at worst, they are convinced.
these exaggerations
Are beaten into them
No wonder so many are in need of psychiatric help.
Explains all the projection…gotta release the issues somehow.
Any of the resident alarmists going to defend this BBC nonsense?
I think MUR has gone to look up “Tufton Street” conspiracy theory.
I think he/she doesn’t do any research at all
Research means reading the latest talking points memo from party central.
Modern definition of unprecedented for “journalists” = hasn’t happened in my lifetime.
4.5 billion Years
and we don’t have any data for 99.999999% of the time.
Major shifts in rotation during the cooldown,after meteor mpacts, especially while moon was created,positioning of continents may also have an impact just as ice ages.
We can only imagine how unprecedented this millisecond is.
But even the lifetime thing may not work as the H-bomb test or some XL hurricane may have had a tiny effect
and especially Honga Tonga eruption.
Young journalists .
If anything Man has done is affecting the Earth’s rotation, it’s more likely the tons of stuff we’ve launched into space. Let’s get the UN to ban space exploration! 😎
It’s more likely that the billions of tons we dug and pumped out of the earth had more of an impact
and the 5%+ increase in greening as result of man made co2 by “lifting ” billions of tons of water up a few inches.
We have been drawing water from various acquifers.
So we should ban “Man-drawn” DHMO? 😎
PS In case the ” 😎 ” didn’t make it clear, I wasn’t serious about the space program effecting the Earth’s rotation. But there are so many people that blame any natural change on something Man has done, why don’t they ever blame the space program?
Maybe it is not climate change, but the energy taken from the earth’s rotation by wind turbines … Unlikely, but more likely than being caused by climate change
All things being equal, eventually Oklahoma is east of North Carolina.
The model-derived results reported by that paper say that climate change is causing days to lengthen; i.e., the Earth’s rotation must be slowing.
But NASA reports that measurements show that days have been getting shorter, and the Earth is speeding up. This is their video (posted 10 months ago):
Once again in this video, climate change is blamed as a cause for the changing of earth’s rotational period.
Except in this video, climate change is causing a speeding up of rotation.
Once again, climate change is causing both opposite phenomena to occur simultaneously. Add the earths rotation to the list of more rain, less rain, more wind, less wind, more disease, less disease, etc etc. The list of dualities goes on and on.
Actually, the NASA Space News video scriptwriter was more sly than that. The narrator didn’t exactly say that climate change is causing the speedup, but he certainly allowed his listeners to infer that.
What he actually said is that climate change “also play[s] a role.”
What he conveniently forgot to mention is that that it was expected to have the opposite effect than what is observed, so the “role” is presumably to reduce the speedup that he’s reporting.
Likewise, what that modeling paper conveniently forgot to mention is that measurements show that the opposite of what their paper claims is happening.
If “climate change” were really causing the Earth’s rotation to speed up, it would suggest that Antarctica and/or Greenland are gaining ice mass instead of losing it. That would be… inconvenient.
It’s sort of like the modeling-based studies which report that climate change from CO2 is reducing crop yields… after adjusting for all the beneficial effects, like CO2 fertilization and drought damage mitigation, and if we assume that farmers are too stupid to figure out the best planting dates for their crops. 🤔
If the BBC still prints papers, its time for the public at large to protest by using their newsprint as a$$wipe and placing the brown streaked results at the Beebs front door.
Reminds me of my childhood durig the war. News print was always softer after wrinkling it 25 times.
World War Eleven?
In any case, best wishes to you. Your resilience is inspiring.
The pattern: Drop the propaganda bomb, the compliant MSM hypes it, and the fear mongering continues. Facts/history mean nothing to them in this scenario. But AGW has jumped the shark and they are just adding fuel to their own lack of credibility.
Didn’t the Fukushima earthquake slow the earth’s rotation by a millisecond or two?
The there is the Moon, interaction with the tides is pushing the Moon further away from the Earth and stealing rotational energy at the same time.
In the vast majority of human history there has been no means of measuring time down to half a second never mind milliseconds. The current definition of a second has its 60th anniversary next year.
Speed up the World, I want to fly off!
Talk about people with too much time on their hands. Scientists consumed their time, and our tax dollars, to worry us about a 1.33 milliseconds per century change in earth’s rotation? There isn’t something more pressing out there to study, like how to influence the dating habits of shrimp? Goodness.
Gender neutral shrimp too?
Can’t be discriminatory now.
So nothing to do with the fact that the moon is moving away from the earth at 38mm (1.5″) per annum then, or is the moons movement also caused by CO2?
so when will we no longer have a full eclipse of the sun?
Unfortunately, we won’t.
Also the sun is slowly getting larger, though it won’t be a problem for the earth for a couple of billion years.
My guess is the movements of the moon in relation to the distance from the earth is cyclical. Unless the moon is hit by something very large, it will continue to move back and forth until our sun no longer shines.
A useful axiom that I use to read stuff like this: “Not everything that is important can be measured, not everything that can be measured is important.”
Working with large super conducting magnets at a national lab at the time….
I’m not mathematically inclined, so am I going to have to set my watch back a minute on Dec 31 of the year 367,489,125 or put it ahead by a minute? And all because I drive a gasoline-powered car!
Isostatic adjustment offset.
Here we have another example of the BBC giving The Guardian a break and taking its turn at feeding the public some environmental crisis story. Except it should have learned by now that its exaggerations of trivia generally are ignored.
Every time climate change activists discover a natural phenomenon they didn’t know before, they immediately claim it’s evidence of climate change. It’s part of their belief the world is static, doesn’t change, and man is responsible for all changes. I’m just waiting for them to claim climate change is pushing the Moon away from us at a little over an inch per year.
This is exactly why our side needs to saturate the media with correct information in plain easy to understand language. That is what the other side is doing the difference between us and them is they lie and cheat and we don’t. All the technical/academic/scientific language should be saved for other purposes.
No. Its why its hopeless to argue about these recondite points of science with these people. You are never going to change their minds, they will anyway just invent another one if you do, and the public is never going to understand what the debate is about.
The only, only viable strategy is to focus on the energy policies, and there are two possible approaches. The first is to point out how little impact the energy policies will have on the climate. But that is liable to be unproductive because it gets back into the same recondite science. and a lot of debate about what will or will not happen in 2080.
The second way, which has a chance of working, is to point out, by pieces such as Turver’s on another thread, that the move to electricity generated by wind and solar is hugely expensive, getting more so.
Its also a route to shortages and rationing. You can for example cite the fact, recently reported, that applicants for grid connection at Heathrow are being quoted a nine-year lead time. The grid operators are too busy getting lots of capacity to the north coast of Scotland to be able to give reasonable service to places where there is demand that are trying to grow.
And it will not work anyway. You can point out to people on the doorstep that intermittent technology cannot be made to deliver the power we need. There is no sun on a winter evening, there is no power when the wind stops.
There is some chance of making progress with these arguments because they happen in terms people are used to in everyday life – its basic commonsense budgeting that they do every day and their employers and councils do also. Arguing about some milisecond astronomical alteration is a hiding to nowhere. Even arguing about what reasonable estimates are for the CO2 sensitivity parameter are? Global temps in 2080? Hopeless!
But point out that the time is coming when one of these Januaries you are going to drive your electric car home to an dark house, wondering as you do so why the street lights have gone out and the other houses are all dark, and discover you have 3 hungry children to feed by candlelight, no way to even boil a kettle. And after you serve them cold baked beans it suddenly occurs to you that your old mother in the next village is going to be sitting there freezing, and you have no way to charge your car now. And that for this your electricity bills have doubled.
Now that you have some chance of getting across.
The 2011 Japan earthquake altered the rotation by ~ 1.5 microseconds and altered the tilt by some 6.5 inches.
China’s massive Three Gorges Dam slows the Earth’s rotation by 0.06 microseconds and altered the tilt by 0.8 inch.
Due to the moon moving away from the earth, the rotation is slowing 1.8 msec/century.
This is much, much more serious that a 1.33 msec/century.
Plate tectonics also alter the rotation.
We should all get our wills in order. The doom is NOW. /sarc