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Is Global Warming Behind Earth's Gravity Shifting?
MichaelH writes "The good folks at JPL along with the Royal Observatory of Belgium have an explanation for the recent changes in Earth's magnetic field: the melting of sub-polar glaciers causing a mass shift towards the equator. Starting in 1997, a noticeable change in Earth's gravitational field was observed; Earth was beginning to develop a 'bulging waistline.' Sounds like it's time for a diet with fewer greenhouse gases...."
Earlier, I had read a cnn blurb about global warming which contained no useful information. Finally, the whole global warming thing is explained:
Natural variability may be behind the changes, but human activity might also be to blame, scientists said.
That's what I call "pinning it down"!
It just hit me when I looked at that picture. If the earth keeps getting wider, it will eventually become flat! Thats just not right.
I *love* it when people postulate that humans are the cause for 'global warming'. It's been shown that
But it has never been proven that human activity of any form did cause, (or could stop) the climate change everyone seems so keen to label global warming.
News flash: Global warming itself is still theory. It has some amount of scientific evidence behind it, but some against as well. This is to say nothing about the theory of human dynamics on climate.
What is happening, however, is there are groups out there who believe that until we know for certian that we are the problem, we should assume we are and stop what we can. These people are called extremists or fanatics.
I do not deny that the planet is changing, and likely it is due in part to human life. But it would be just as irresponsible for us to run in and fix something we don't understand (and may well not be 'broken') as it would to wontonly destroy our atmosphere (which is what some are claiming we do).
Yes, yes, let's reduce our pollution. I, as well as many others reading this, have mild but chronic asthma. Sure, I'd like to breathe cleaner air and know that I won't get as ill as frequently as I currently do.
Let's just not become couriers of FUD in the process.
-Adam
If it ain't broke, fix it 'till it is.
Earth First! (we'll strip mine the other planets later)
So that's what happens when we come out of an Ice Age...
It's amazing how often this point is convieniently ignored.
-- MarkusQ
> the melting of sub-polar glaciers causing a mass shift towards the equator.
Wouldn't this cause the earth's rotation to slow down? (spinning in the chair experiment). With super-accurate GPS and atomic clocks, I would think this would be measureable.
-metric
Nice article overall, but what the hell is up with that picture? If the Earth bulged that much, we'd all have noticed the incredible changes in gravity between 45 degree N and 0 and 90 degree north. I mean, yikes, that's gotta be at least a 10% difference between the two Earth-like planets in that picture.
Realistically, the shift much be vanishing fractions of a percent, and you wouldn't be able to find a difference between the two Earths ("pre-bulge" and "post-bulge"), even in principle, on a low-resolution picture like that; the effects they are talking about would be sub-pixel, to say the least.
I'd do the math, but there aren't any numbers in the linked text and it's too late to go out and try to find them. (Perhaps someone else will... I'll lay my money down on, ohhh, within an order of magnitude of "one ten-millionth of a pixel difference" between pre- and post-bulge Earth.)
So, where is the trending data over a few thousand years saying that man and his theorized greenhouse gases are heating things up?
Reconstructed climate data from the last 1000 years can be found here.
So... If somebody ever proves with real evidence, and trending, that these greenhouse gases are the culperate for ALL our problems...
Nobody has ever claimed that greenhouse gases are resonible for all of our problems.
what are we going to do about those pesky things called volcanos? Tell them that they can't spew millions of tons of greenhouse gases?
Nothing, we evolved with volcanos, and their effect on the earth's climate. It's when we started pumping in extra greenhouses gaes, over and above what volcanos contribute, that problems occur.
Warning: Some ideologies on the Net are smaller than they appear.
The article is about Earth's gravity shifting -- like it says in the title of the post. Why does the body of the post mention "recent changes in Earth's magnetic field"? Does /. know something about a unified theory that physicists don't?
There have always been people entrenched in their fields who will defend nearly to the death the reputations they built for themselves. In face of any findings to the contrary.
Read Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' or any number of other books on the philosphy of science.
No, 'thousands of PhDs' doesn't automatically impress us. They have their grant funding to think of, and if there isn't an emergency how will they fund the new lab benches?
Okay, let's assume that burning fossil fuels isn't what's causing global warming, and we reduce or eliminate our use of fossil fuels anyway.
So now we've just managed to clean up our air to the point where Los Angeles and Toronto no longer have pollution advisories on the Weather Channel, but Rio de Janerio and Amersterdam are flooded.
Well, we've just done one very good thing, and the other thing was expected anyway and didn't happen overnight, so it's not like we had to rush a huge evacuation or anything. Maybe we've just built better dikes instead.
If we *don't* do these things, then Los Angeles and Toronto will have even lower air quality *and* Rio and Amsterdam will be flooded too.
But what of the costs! They'll be enormous! Well, that's what they said about replacing CFC's, eliminating particulate waste from coal power plants, and not using PCB's to cool big electrical transformers. Oddly enough, coal power plants are now selling that particulate waste as a replacement for gypsum in fire-resistant wallboard, the extra cost of not using CFC's in your car's air conditioner is about $20, not $1500, and your electric utility is now spouting on about how good and wonderful they are for not using PCB's in your friendly neighbourhood power transformer (despite the fact that the government had to force them to do so).
Even better is the fact that we can reduce our current CO2 production just by not wasting our fuel! Are we so wealthy that we don't have to worry about how much we spend on fuel, but not wealthy enough to not use it so much? There was one company here in Canada that went to parliament saying that "hey, this Kyoto thing isn't so hard. We met those goals already and look at the millions of dollars we saved!"
By forcing people to look at the problem, we can start to find solutions. A large part of the problem here is waste. Waste is bad because its a sign of inefficiency. Why can't some people realize that when it's so blazingly obvious?
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Even if that were true, it would be irrelevant. CO2 emissions do cause increases in average global temperature; that is elementary physics. The only question is the degree and when those increases will lead to catastrophes. But increases and catastrophes will inevitably result sooner or later if emissions continue at current levels or grow.
But it would be just as irresponsible for us to run in and fix something we don't understand (and may well not be 'broken') as it would to wontonly destroy our atmosphere (which is what some are claiming we do).
Quite to the contrary: the only responsible thing to do is to greatly reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Not only does that address issues of global warming as best we can, in developed nations like ours, it is also good for the economy, for defense, and for quality of life. The only groups who don't benefit are entrenched interests afraid of change.
In fact, it was completely irresponsible to start such massive changes on a global scale in the first place, initiated by what amounts to a very small group of people, with no oversight and no democratic input from most of the affected populations.
Let's just not become couriers of FUD in the process.
Given the global and irreversible nature of these changes, fear, uncertainty, and doubt are completely justified.
What I find particularly ironic about the bogus arguments you are repeating is that they often come from the same people that formulate our drug policy on tenuous or disreputable scientific evidence. Apparently, it's not OK for me to voluntary inhale or ingest substances that only affect me and have never been demonstrated to be harmful. But it's perfectly OK for big companies to emit substances that I can't escape from and that the scientific mainstream pretty much agrees are going to have deleterious effects on people and the world.
It is debatable to what degree the current, measurable increases in global temperatures are due to human emissions of greenhouse gasses.
It is absolutely not debatable that human emissions of greenhouse gasses will lead to serious and costly problems sooner or later--that is just basic physics.
Yo, Slashdot editors, please loose the P.C. Crap.
When you don't like or understand the scientific realities, you just accuse people of political bias. Sadly, that's how a lot of political decision making happens in the US today.
Ok, nice of you to admit this. Let's add one more thing science can give you: some numbers.
CO2 records go back thousands of years from Greenland ice core data; since the industrial revolution began the era of massive human use of carbon-based fuels, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have already risen 30%, methane concentrations doubled, and nitrogen oxides up 15%. All these chemicals are known to trap heat.
People have been modeling this year after year for decades with relatively consistent results - a warming on the order of a few degrees C by 2050, much greater warming at the poles than at the equator, increased intensity of storms and other severe weather.
None of the models see global cooling as a result any more, although regional cooling of one sort or another is possible with changing ocean circulation patterns. If the effect is always warming, whether 1 degree or 10, no matter what the model, you can safely conclude that the added human chemicals do force a general warming of the planet with a value somewhere in that range.
The scale of what we have been seeing, from around the world, over the past decade, is alarmingly very much in line with the model predictions. Global temperatures are already up 0.5 degrees C, and even this small temperature rise seems to have had dramatic effects.
Does this prove that human activity has caused global climate change? Science never conclusively proves anything - results are always open to further question. But for policymakers not blinded by the continuing obfuscation from the oil companies and their toadies, the conclusion is rather inescapable. Humans have clearly increased gases that are clearly known to trap heat, and the climate has already seen warming over the past century.
Why aren't we doing more about it? Look at what the Europeans are doing to meet Kyoto targets: massive investment in wind farms, for example. Why isn't that happening in the US? Why has average US automotive fuel economy gown down in recent years, not up? Would reduction of oil use really be such a bad thing??? Only for the oil companies who are currently running the US government...
We are so utterly dependent on oil that we have to kow-tow to the arrogant Saudi's and similar despots around the world who control so much of the world's oil resources - or, in current circumstances, go to war. Improved automotive fuel economy by just a few percent would return far more oil than the disputed ANWR drilling area. But the US Congress the last two years has rejected all attempts to re-instate the fuel economy standards and apply them across the board.
There are alternatives, but the current US government refuses to invest in them - Energy department programs in renewables and fusion energy have been cut year after year. The research dollars required are considerably less than, for example, the billions California lost in last year's energy debacle, but we refuse to make that investment.
What about the possibility that the world will warm and climate will change whether or not we do anything about our CO2 production? First, admitting that humans can have an impact on global climate should give us the confidence to know we can also impact it for the good, as well as for bad. Contrary to your impression that we don't understand climate, we do understand it well enough to know the effect of some changes we could make. Large-scale geo-engineering to mitigate natural climate change is certainly a possibility.
But in the long run, Earth has managed pretty well on its own and our policy probably should be one of neutrality rather than hands-on management: movement of industrial activity into space (as your tag line indirectly suggests) may well be the best long-term option for the planet. But we're not quite ready for that yet (although that's another area where I believe US R&D investment has been much less than it could have been).
Energy: time to change the picture.