1.3 milliseconds is a LONG time, according to a "general agreement"

Based on "observational data and climate models"

The impacts of human-caused climate change are so overwhelming they’re actually messing with time, according to new research.

Polar ice melt caused by global warming is changing the speed of Earth’s rotation and increasing the length of each day, in a trend set to accelerate over this century as humans continue to pump out planet-heating pollution, according to the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The changes are small — a matter of milliseconds a day — but in our high-tech, hyperconnected world have an important impact on computing systems we have come to rely on, including GPS.

It’s yet another sign of the huge impact humans are having on the planet. “This is a testament to the gravity of ongoing climate change,” said Surendra Adhikari, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a report author.

The number of hours, minutes and seconds making up each day on Earth are dictated by the speed of the Earth’s rotation, which is influenced by a complex knot of factors. These include processes in the planet’s fluid core, the ongoing impact of the melting of huge glaciers after the last ice age, as well as melting polar ice due to climate change.

For millennia, however, the impact of the moon has dominated, increasing the length of a day by a few milliseconds per century. The moon exerts a pull on Earth causing the oceans to bulge towards it, gradually slowing Earth’s rotation.

Scientists have previously made connections between polar ice melt and longer days, but the new research suggests global warming is a bigger influence on time than recent studies have shown.

In the past, the impact of climate change on time “has not been so dramatic,” said Benedikt Soja, a study author and assistant professor of space geodesy at the Swiss university ETH Zurich.

But that could be changing. If the world continues to pump out planet-heating pollution, “climate change could become the new dominant factor,” outpacing the moon’s role, he told CNN.

It works like this: As humans warm the world, glaciers and ice sheets are melting, and that meltwater is flowing from the poles toward the equator. This changes the planet’s shape — flattening it at the poles and making it bulge more in the middle — slowing its rotation.

The process is often compared to a spinning ice skater. When the skater pulls their arms in towards their body, they spin faster. But if they move their arms outwards, away from their body, their spin slows.

The team of international scientists looked at a 200-year period, between 1900 and 2100, using observational data and climate models to understand how climate change has affected day length in the past and to project its role in future.

They found the impact of climate change on day length has increased significantly.

Climate change-fueled sea level rise caused the length of a day to vary between 0.3 and 1 milliseconds in the 20th century. Over the past two decades, however, the scientists calculated an increase in day length of 1.33 milliseconds per century, “significantly higher than at any time in the 20th century,” according to the report.

If planet-heating pollution continues to rise, warming the oceans and accelerating ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica, the rate of change is set to soar, the report found. If the world is unable to rein in emissions, climate change could increase the length of a day by 2.62 milliseconds by the end of the century — overtaking the natural impacts of the moon.

“In barely 200 years, we will have altered the Earth’s climate system so much that we are witnessing its impact on the very way Earth spins,” Adhikari told CNN.

A few milliseconds of additional time a day may be imperceptible to humans but it has an impact on technology.

Precise timekeeping is vital for GPS, which everyone with a smartphone will have, as well as other communication and navigation systems. These use highly precise atomic time, based on the frequency of certain atoms.

From the late 1960s, the world started using coordinated universal time (UTC) to set time zones. UTC relies on atomic clocks but still keeps pace with the planet’s rotation. That means at some point “leap seconds” need to be added or subtracted to keep alignment with the Earth’s rotation.

Some studies have also suggested a correlation between an increase in day length and an increase in earthquakes, said Mostafa Kiani Shahvandi, a study author and a geoscientist at ETH Zurich. But the connection remains speculative and much more research needs to be done to establish any clear link, he told CNN.

A paper on the same topic published in March concluded that while climate change was increasingly slowing the Earth’s rotation, processes in the Earth’s core could be more important and actually be speeding it up, shortening day length.

“What we have done is to go a little bit further and re-estimate these trends,” said Shahvandi. They found any influence from the molten core was outweighed by that of climate change.

Duncan Agnew, professor of geophysics at the University of California San Diego and author of the March study, said the new study still meshes with his research, “and is valuable because it extends the result further into the future and looks at more than one climate scenario.”

Jacqueline McCleary, an assistant professor in physics at Northeastern University who was not involved in the study, said the new research helps inform “a decades-long debate over what role, exactly, climate change will play in the changing length of the day.”

While there is now general agreement climate change will have a “net lengthening effect on the day,” she told CNN, there has still been uncertainty about which processes affecting time will dominate this century. This study concludes climate change is now the second-most dominant factor, she said.

It’s a sobering conclusion, said ETH Zurich’s Soja. “We have to consider that we are now influencing Earth’s orientation in space so much that we are dominating effects that have been in action for billions of years.”

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/15/climate/polar-ice-melting-day-length-time/index.html

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Biden’s Energy Policies Directly Cost U.S. Households More Than $2,548 Since 2021

Energy prices continue to surge due to President Joe Biden’s radical energy and climate agenda, according to an analysis by The Heartland Institute, a national free-market think tank. The analysis depended entirely on data from Biden’s U.S. Energy Information Administration.

In 2021, household electricity prices increased 8 percent. Electricity price increases accelerated even more in 2022, and continued to rise in 2023. Since December 2020, the last month before Biden took office, residential electricity prices have increased by 23 percent.

Key Points

Over the past three years:

Residential electricity prices have increased 23 percent

Industrial electricity prices have increased 19 percent

Home heating oil prices have increased 69 percent

Oil prices have increased 52 percent

Natural gas prices have increased 32 percent

Gasoline has increased $0.97 per gallon, or 42 percent

After three years of Biden’s energy policies, the average U.S. driver has spent at least an extra $548 per year in higher gasoline costs while the average household has expended $318 in higher electricity costs. Households that use natural gas have spent an extra $586 over the past three years, and those using home heating oil have paid a whopping $3,068 more.

Since Biden entered the Oval Office, the average American household has directly paid at least $2,548 in higher direct energy costs. This is the cost calculated by averaging price increases from January 2021 through December 2023, which means the actual added cost of energy is likely even higher.

The Heartland Institute analysis states: “Rapidly rising energy prices are not accidental. They are the predictable result of Joe Biden’s war on abundant, affordable, and reliable energy. The Biden administration has implemented dozens of policies that have caused energy prices to spike.”

https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/07/bidens-energy-policies-directly-cost-u-s-households-more-than-2548-since-2021/

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UK: Science Shock: Met Office Continues to Site New Temperature Stations in Junk Locations

Over eight in 10 of the 113 temperature measuring stations opened in the last 30 years by the U.K. Met Office have been deliberately or carelessly sited in junk Class 4 and 5 locations where unnatural heating errors of 2°C and 5°C respectively are possible. This shock revelation, obtained by a recent Freedom of Information request, must cast serious doubt on the ability of the Met Office to provide a true measurement of the U.K. air temperature, a statistic that is the bedrock of support for Net Zero. Over time, increasing urban encroachment has corrupted almost the entire network of 384 stations with 77.9% of the stations rated Class 4 and 5, but it beggars belief that new stations are being sited in such locations.

The siting situation is just as bad over the last 10 years where 81.5% are rated junk, while over the last five years, eight of the 13 newly-opened stations are Class 4 and 5. Only last year, Arthog No 2 was opened in Wales with a class rating of 4, and the year before another class 4 was sited at Neatishead. It is one thing to inherit a network, one of whose stations goes back to 1794, that has become corrupted, but serious questions must arise as to why the Met Office is planting measuring devices at sites that cannot provide a proper natural air temperature. Using these data to promote the Net Zero project by suggesting temperatures are rising faster than they are, while implausibly calculating warming down to one hundredths of a degree centigrade, risks the state-funded Met Office becoming a national joke.

Citizen journalist Ray Sanders is on the Met Office case and regularly contributes to Paul Homewood’s online blog. He noted that Neatishead was sited just 19 months ago and asked why sites are being opened of such poor quality. He observed that “someone of a suspicious mind might think that they are deliberately adding these junk sites simply to make current U.K. temperatures artificially high”.

The class rating system for temperature measuring stations is set by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). It reflects both human and natural impacts on temperature measurements caused by nearby activities, buildings and other structures. Class 1 is pristine and in a “perfect” world can be considered a “reference” site, notes WMO. Barely 6% of the Met Office stations are Class 1. Class 4 sites are heavily corrupted by artificial temperature changing sources and come with WMO “uncertainties” of 2°C. Class 5 sites have “uncertainties” of 5°C and with no siting requirements could be located by the door of a blast furnace, or, as happens at airports, the super-heated exhausts of jet engines. Under ISO/WMO standard 19289:2014 (E), a Class 5 site “is a site where nearby obstacles create an inappropriate environment for a meteorological measurement that is intended to be representative of a wide area”.

Earlier this year the Daily Sceptic exclusively revealed that nearly one in three (29.2%) of Met Office temperature stations were in junk Class 5. And astonishingly, 48.7% were in Class 4. Just 13.7% or a paltry 52 stations are in Classes 1 and 2, where no “uncertainties” are set. The scientific scandal here is that the Met Office has known about the situation for years, but far from improving the network by careful siting of new stations, it appears to be intent on making it worse. To date, the Met Office has resisted giving a public explanation and the Net Zero-obsessed mainstream media have ignored the story. Instead, the legacy press has concentrated on promoting a diet of Met Office “record” and daily high temperatures often set at the same heat-racked sites. “Speaking truth to power” in this case has been replaced with acting as a helpful and unquestioning messenger for Met Office claims. As is usual in these cases, whether it be Covid cover-ups or a spaced-out U.S. Democrat President, mainstream media are nowhere to be seen, although the subject is widely discussed on social media.

Last month, the Daily Sceptic analysed a week of these claimed highs and found the hottest day in the U.K. was set at Heathrow airport no fewer than five times. Every day, many of the same dud sites feature at the top of the local lists. In Scotland, the measuring stations at Edinburgh Botanic Gardens, Glasgow and Leuchars featured on four days out of seven. In England, Hull East Park was joined by Killowen on four days along with Usk, Durham and Pershore College on three.

Does the Met Office consider this is credible scientific information, presenting the same natural mini local heat spots as representative of the U.K. climate, or just Net Zero story telling? It is about time it provided an explanation.

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/07/18/science-shock-met-office-continues-to-site-temperature-stations-in-junk-locations/

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