For those who say there’s never enough time in a day, your wish for more time is getting granted, if ever so slightly. Scientists have now found a new source of our days getting longer — climate change.
You may have already been aware that the length of the day on Earth has been getting longer over time due to the drag exerted on our planet by our friendly neighborhood Moon. Many other factors come into play though, including the Earth’s own mass distribution. As the Earth warms and polar caps melt, the water redistributes to the Earth’s equator causing it to slow more rapidly.
In the worst-case scenario, RCP8.5, it would result in climate-related effects to planetary rotational velocity even larger than those caused by lunar tides. Under that scenario, the earth would probably be a less pleasant place to live in many other ways, but at least you’d have a little more time in your day.
While we’re talking about time, we wonder what ever happened to getting rid of Daylight Savings in the US? If you long for a simpler time, perhaps you should take up repairing mechanical watches and clocks?
I cared about climate change and environmentalism before it was mainstream. I eventually stopped caring.
I cared about social moral decay before it was mainstream. I eventually stopped caring.
I cared about competency crisis before it was mainstream. I eventually stopped caring.
I cared about sociological problems of social media when only a handful of people knew what Facebook was. I eventually stopped caring.
Now I care about myself, my family and my hobbies. I am happier than ever!
if you’re so enlightened why bother commenting
> If the biosphere didn’t collapse, certain people would fundraise to collapse it so they could fundraise some more and keep their NGO sinecures
I think we have enough oil/coal and whatnot CEOs doing enough “fundraising” (=financing) climate denial idiots (idiots in regards to humanities(!) survival, not idiots to their own bottom line).
If such companies hadn’t been fighting against science and funding denial for the last >50 years “bourgeois shitlib eschatology” probably wouldn’t even exist (or at least be less “annoying”).
Stop scarmongering, humanity will survive the single digit increase in temperature over the next hundred years
Regarding the popular use of phrases like “…climate denial idiots… “:
I submit that the “global warming” movement has become a religion… complete with priests, saints, zealots, dogma, churches, and excommunication/shaming for those who dare to challenge GW church canon. A charge of “climate denier” basically boils down to an accusation of heresy.
Data suggests that our climate is changing… which should come as no surprise as it has been in a state of flux since… forever. Michigan was once under mile-thick ice sheets… those didn’t recede because of SUVs and coal-fired power plants.
Conversely, a single eruption of Mt Tambora in 1816 pushed global temperatures down by nearly a degree, resulting in the coldest summer in Europe in 150 years. People across the Northern hemisphere starved to death because of crop failures.
Then there is the matter of “climate change” being observed on other planets, like Mars. I’m willing to bet that banning beef and mandating the purchase of electric cars by 2035 will do as much to fix Mars’ “global warming” as it will Earth’s.
How can you tell the difference between REAL science and the global-warming cult? Real science embraces and respects dissent.
A stunningly clear and simple few sentences of wisdom.
Thanks.
Well I can’t be happy doing nothing. I choose to fight.
So please everyone start fighting against the destruction we cause instead of each other about the motivation why we should do this. Let’s be competitive about who uses the ressources most efficient.
Right there with ya, buddy! Watched the internet grow from simple news services to the monster that it is today and lost most of my friends and a lot of relatives to it. Don’t get me wrong, I still know them, but I live in real life, and they live on the screen, consuming and repeating everything it presents to them (if you can even call that living)… We no longer have anything in common worth talking about.
As another commenter mentioned, “global warming” or “climate change” or whatever it is called this week has become a religion. It is very similar to the dark ages; Hordes of mental peasants cling to this religion, repeat its mantras, and if you commit heresy by speaking against it, they will come at you with the modern equivalent of pitchforks and torches, hoping to see if you float (or maybe burn you at the corporate stake!).
I turned the TV off 20 years ago and packed it away and that was one of the best decisions of my life. I ignore the news, and if I want weather predictions I ask the farmer next door or look at the sky in the morning and evening. Chickens are great.
According to the same scientists, the day was 21.9 hours long 500 million years ago and the earth was warmer with no polar caps.
That’s somewhat believable. Most spinning things tend to slow down a bit over half a billion years
If there’s friction. Space is pretty slippery.
Yes, let’s get back to abolishing this Daylight Saving Time nonsense, please.
5000 years then ice age..
A geological timescale eh?
A difference of 1/3 of a millisecond PER CENTURY. That’s 0.00033 seconds per year.
Let me know when it makes it to a full millisecond, I might care to yawn.
1/3 of a ms = 0.0003 seconds.
0.0003/100 = 0.000003 seconds / year.
Or…
0.000000008219 seconds / day = 8.2ns / day.
I might be able to get 31 more CPU cycles complete, every day.
But there’s also evidence to suggest the speed of light in a vacuum is changing with the expansion of the universe. Maybe we should work on stopping the expansion.
..when baking, should I consult my almanac first – i.e will Earth’s rotation fluctuate or will I end up with consistently smaller portions, meaning less cake for me?
You will have your cake and eat it too!
B^)
C’mon now we all know there are only two choices, “cake or death”.
A n atmospheric physicist told me it is also slowing because previously buried carbon is now circulating in the atmosphere. More ‘ice-skater’ effect.
So, you’re saying the slowing of the day will return to the value it had been 6,000 years ago?
Irrelevant and low-effort article.
How is it “irrelevant”? The science is certainly valid because if the poles melt the water is certainly going to migrate to the equator. I’ve seen a TON of other articles here with no more effort behind them than this one and I didn’t see you complain about them.
It’s humorous to see the climate change deniers here (“fluff piece” … really?) who denigrate the whole idea simply because they don’t want to believe that humans cause it. Or maybe just because they’ve become bored with the topic. Or maybe because they ignorantly think the consequences either won’t apply to them or won’t be consequential enough to worry about. Whichever the case, and no matter whether anyone thinks humans are causing climate change or not, the undeniable fact is that climate change is happening and that the effects will be significant. The data for that is already there.
But maybe the author of this article should have recognized that this discussion was going to turn political simply because the topic itself has already become ridiculously political.
It is a fluff piece, you don’t need to drag out the “deniers” thought-terminating cliche here. Even some believers in anthropogenic climate change (like me) also see this stuff as a strange and trivial moral obsession paraded around by a certain class of useless people.
And of course the discussion is going to turn political, it is an inherently political topic whether you like it or not. This demand that the total transformation of every human society on the globe (even if it is warranted and absolutely necessary) should be non-political is OUTRAGEOUSLY naive.
Cool, so how do you talk about this stuff without inducing white-hot rage ?
By “political”, I mean that it has become an issue of POLITICS, as in liberal versus conservative … and that is most definitely ridiculous. People can take sides on the issue, and that is fine since everyone will interpret things they way they want to, but making it an issue of of right versus left is just plain stupid.
Maybe they just recognize the 5,000 climate change articles being posted every day as the unscientific, close-minded, clickbait cash grab that they truly are.
Imagine if every site on earth was posting about how you need to spend your life savings on canned food, because the rapture is coming and only God’s chosen people will survive.
The reaction would be the same, because the content would be the same.
Personally, I feel that that people screaming that the world is ending because it’s hot outside in summer, are using the exact same amount of scientific rigor and logic as people saying global warming isn’t real because it’s cold outside in winter.
Neither group knows what the climate is. Neither group knows how science works. And both groups are getting robbed blind by the people they choose to follow.
Dave, we all know that North America was a glacier less than 10,000 years ago. Every time they find a new sample or learn a little more about radio carbon dating, everything they’ve dated gets younger. At the current rate that 10,000 years will probably be 5,000 years before 2040. What made the glaciers melt? We all know it wasn’t dinosaur farts. No one who denies the Church of Climate Change (previously branded the Church of Global Warming) is trying to deny the drastic changes that the earth has gone through over the past few thousand years – They simply dismiss and deny this religious cult that claims that we can “fix” the “problem” by injecting countless trillions of taxpayer dollars into corporations. There is no problem to fix, the earth is just the earth doing its earth thing and we are along for the ride.
Maybe you should call them “Corporation Deniers” or “Insurrectionists” – That would surely make for more entertaining conversation.
Anyone who had done DSP 101 knows that unless you obay the Nyquist theory, your data it will be full of artifacts.
Taking a Min and a max every day does not an average make.
I’m not saying global warming is not real, I’m saying what is being pushed as science, is far from it. Perhaps global warming is worse than we thought, perhaps not. Get data at an appropriate sample rate and we can talk.