Posted on 02/13/2002 7:08:17 AM PST by johniegrad
WASHINGTON -- Feeling like the day is dragging? Blame global warming.
Increased man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a global warming gas, is slowing the Earth's rotation, according to a new study by Belgian scientists published Tuesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
It's not much of a slowdown -- about 1.7 microsecond or 1.7 millionth of one second a year, according to co-author Michel Crucifix, a climate researcher at Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.
The slowdown occurs because extra carbon dioxide expands the mass of the Earth's atmosphere from the Earth's surface. The change slows the Earth's rotation for the same reason that the spins of ice skaters slow when they extend their arms.
Crucifix's findings were based on runs of 14 different computer models.
Even without global warming, Earth has been slowing, mostly because the gravitational pull of the moon has been acting as a brake. Keepers of the master clock at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington generally add a leap second to official time every 12 to 18 months to compensate, said observatory spokesman Geoff Chester.
The effects of lunar braking plus global warming add up to this: A day in 2002 is about .002 seconds longer than it was in 1900, Chester said.
Not that you'd notice.
If you're banking on getting an extra minute of sleep, it'll be an extra 3 million years before you see that,'' Chester said.
Well, yes and no. Click here for a description of leap seconds.
The last leap second, BTW, was added in January, 1999 -- three years ago. By historical standards that's pretty long.
No, but you do see that the "global warming" is laying down increasingly thicker ice and snow in the Antarctic. Satellite measurements are showing the build up, (which should not be happening in a warming climate anyway), but the extra mass is probably the real cause of the earth slowing down. (Note, that last comment was sarcasm, I think everything the Global Warming crowd comes up with is junk science and I refer them to "The Skeptical Enviornmentalist".
HAHA........very good.
How about Congress facing west during one session....same effect.
Let's keep it clean? :)
I try to.
No, leap seconds are indeed added to civil clocks to account for the lengthening of the mean solar day caused by deceleration of the Earth's rotation due to tidal braking.
The last leap second adjustment was made on Jan 1 1999.
See USNO Leap Seconds for the excruciating details.
FWIW, there is currently a proposal to forego leap second corrections altogether, and let civil clocks drift with respect to the mean solar day.
The article said "the weight of the atmosphere was growing". Yet the number of atoms of carbon and oxygen on the planet is fixed, with none being created or destroyed, only redistributed. If the atmosphere is "getting heavier", the solid part of the planet is getting lighter.
Actually, earth gains weight with all the meteorites and space dust it sweeps up. Maybe the extra weight is what's causing that component of the slowing rotation. Most probably, there are enough observational and computational errors in the models that make this figure invisible among the statistical "noise".
if anyone care, this is about 30 minutes every billion years.
NASA Extinguishes Global Warming Fire
NASA's James Hansen now predicts precisely the same, small amount of warming in the next 50 years that the much-derided "climate skeptics" predicted all along. According to both the skeptics and Mr. Hansen, the planet is destined for a mere 0.7 degree Centigrade (1.25 degree Fahrenheit) warming between now and 2050. It's a good thing "W" listened to those skeptics before he decided on Kyoto. If he had waited for NASA, he might have committed the United States down the road to an unwarranted economic disaster for no good reason.
When will they add in the even bigger effect of the gradual accumulation of micrometeoroids to earth's mass?
tooth decay
cold weather
recession
rust
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