Climate change is making days longer, scientists ‘discover’ – but only since 2020?

Greenland ice sheet (east coast) [image credit: Hannes Grobe @ Wikipedia]

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We’re told this hinges on the combined effects of rising sea levels and reducing polar ice. But such effects don’t come with ’caused by’ labels attached. Also the *shortest* day in the last half century occurred in June 2022, according to this article: ‘Over the past few decades, Earth’s rotation around its axis – which determines how long a day is – has been speeding up. This trend has been making our days shorter; in fact, in June 2022 we set a record for the shortest day over the past half a century or so. But despite this record, since 2020 that steady speedup has curiously switched to a slowdown – days are getting longer again, and the reason is so far a mystery.’ Why is the claimed switch from faster to slower around 2020 being assigned to climate effects that have been going on for the best part of 200 years, according to greenhouse gas theorists? (Footnote: link to the study not available yet).
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Rising sea levels caused by climate change are making the Earth “fatter” at the equator – slowing down its rotation and making the days longer, reports Sky News.

As polar ice caps have melted, water has shifted from the poles to the equator, “significantly” increasing how oblate – or fat – the Earth is since 1900, and lengthening its days.

Adding a few milliseconds to a 24-hour day may not sound much, but it has “implications for precise timekeeping and space navigation”, the authors of the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said.

The pace of change is higher than at any point in the 20th century, they found.

If greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate, the length of the day will continue to increase [Talkshop comment – assertion of a theory] and could reach a rate of an extra 2.62 milliseconds per century by the end of the 21st century, the study said.

That would make climate change a bigger contributor to long-term variations in day length than lunar tides.

“These findings signify the unprecedented effect of climate change on planet Earth,” the study said.

The study follows research published in Nature in March that looked at the effect of climate change on global timekeeping.

Full report here.
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Image: Greenland ice sheet (east coast) [credit: Hannes Grobe @ Wikipedia]
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CNN version here.