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NASA: Global Warming Is Now Changing How Earth Wobbles (go.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A new study from NASA finds global warming is shifting the way the Earth wobbles on its polar axis. Melting ice sheets are changing the distribution of weight on Earth, which has caused both the North Pole and the wobble, called polar motion, to change course. Since 1899, scientists and navigators have been accurately measuring the true pole and polar motion and for almost the entire 20th century they migrated a bit toward Canada. That migration has changed with this century -- now they're moving toward England, said study lead author Surendra Adhikari at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. "The recent shift from the 20th-century direction is very dramatic," Adhikari said. NASA scientist and the study's co-author Eirk Ivins said, Greenland has lost on average more than 600 trillion pounds of ice a year since 2003 and that affects the way the Earth wobbles in a manner similar to a figure skater lifting one leg while spinning.
Maybe it'll make all those denialist idiots sticking their heads in the sand, even more dizzy than they were.
I alway felt that oil extraction would have the same affect.
About turning the world upside down.
Because there were only roughly 400 million people on Earth in the 1500's, up to over 7 billion now. At roughly 140 pounds a piece (a lot more in western countries), well, we've added a huge amount of weight to the planet. We would have spun the Earth out of control either way.
Geomagnetic reversal has occurred a number of times in Earth history and is far wilder than just closer to Canada and England. I mean, oh no! The sky is falling!
Did they adjust for the trillions of tons of American blubber?
He wanted to crack the Earth in two halves like an apple with an explosion!
Just setup massive garbage dumps and prisons on Greenland.
Move all our garbage and prisoners there. The extra mass should rebalance things.
This has nothing to do with the magnetic poles. It is not geomagnetic reversal. This is the wobble of the mass of the earth and the distribution of the mass of earth is changing because of melting ice (mass) causing the wobble to change.
Sure it's possible that it has an effect. Effect size is still kinda important since the Japan Tsunami caused a significant and abrupt change in the Earths wobble. However, until someone can adequately explain our enhanced rainfall that started in 2010 that is clearly caused by enhanced evaporation in 2010 I'm in the Global Warming is dubious camp. Heck I suspect I can see that Japanese Tsunami in the Evaporation data, but the sample size is just too small to be sure. If it's global warming why doesn't the evaporation change significantly before 2010? If Global Warming Causes the evaporation to remain flat by increasing the humidity then why does it move after 2010 in a very disturbing way. It's easy to see it's caused by the last solar cycle, but then why didn't the other cycles have the same effect? It's easy enough to find out why by doing some searching on some disturbing differences in cycle 24, but you can't get past the Bad Astronomer comparing counter Global Warming evidence to holocaust deniers.
Is it though, is it really?
I think some pseudoskeptics think that if they type any kind of a response, somehow, that invalidates the science. Yesterday, I had a guy somehow asserting that because plate tectonic theory was developed, that this meant AGW was on uncertain footing; as in "hey, they developed this new theory, so any day now, AGW is going to be falsified!" My retort, as it ever is these days, is to ask "Where the hell is all that energy that the growing concentrations of CO2 in the lower atmosphere is trapping going?" At the end of the day, when you boil it down, AGW is about creating an energy sink. If AGW is false, it either means our understanding of the physics of carbon dioxide is wrong, or it means there's some as yet undiscovered means that the lower atmosphere eliminates heat into space. They've been clinging to the lack of cloud data, but new research is now taking that away from them, so I'm not sure what's left.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
They've been clinging to the lack of cloud data, but new research is now taking that away from them, so I'm not sure what's left.
It's the god of the gaps.
--
BMO
How, precisely, does this change in the Earth's dynamics affect things like weather, seasons, etc?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I guess they can always go back to mumbling about "chaotic systems".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
By wobbling the earth, governments can cause all the loose change from our wallets to fall into the treasuries' pockets.
This has been happening a lot over the last few decades. They call it 'freedom of movement' :-)
Funny how people still trust this organization created by and ran by Nazis as a smokescreen to the real secret nazi ran space program.
The planet is going to lose its balance and fall over. And then you'll be sorry.
the wobbles are causing climate change
(fixed it for you)
Ooooohhh.... I've never had anyone use that argument on me...That would be a fun one.
I'd fire right back at them and say that "yes, chaotic systems do exist, and the atmosphere is one of them, which means there /is/ a tipping point where things will go completely utterly haywire and bad for all of us. It's how populations crash. It's how the gypsy moth population in the Northeast US crashed. They reproduced like crazy and ate all their food, which wasn't enough, and they died of starvation before being able to reproduce (they died as caterpillars). This happens with deer, frogs, any population you can name. It happens when the environment can no longer sustain the population Every Single Time For As Long As There Has Been Life. The human species is a population. You were saying something about chaotic systems, Faggot?" [derisive sneer]
That insult at the end is entirely offensive and optional, use at own risk. I am not responsible for any bar fights.
--
BMO
Earth wobbles in a manner similar to a figure skater lifting one leg while spinning.
5.5 5.4 5.8 6 6 aand we have a winner! Cry!! Oh, that was the old scoring system, but then again the Earth has been at it for long enough.
Even chaotic systems don't make energy disappear. They will create an inherent degree of randomness and unpredictability, but even in really chaotic systems, as physicists deal with in Quantum Mechanics, you can still apply statistical methods and come up with models that resemble reality well enough. Essentially, pseudo-skeptics invoke "chaotic systems" as a gaps argument, but they never really describe what they think a chaotic system is supposed to do in the case of trapping heat. Vortexes dumping heat into space? Quantum teleportation of excited molecules? It's just a magical invocation.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Something does not stick
The article says it's nothing to worry about. Well that's what they said to Jor-El, and you know how that turned out.
The shift in mass distribution caused by melting ice will cross the boundaries of tectonic plates, changing the relative pressure on adjacent plates. This will likely lead to increased earthquake and volcanic activity. On the bright side, the ash from the volcanoes may limit global warming (maybe even trigger an ice age), and deformations of the sea floor may reduce sea level rise (or make it worse). Another possible impact is the triggering of a geomagnetic reversal.
The political debates about climate change are futile. What we should be discussing is whether we know enough about how this planet works (and have the technology) to attempt some kind of active intervention, such as carbon sequestration or actually blocking sunlight from space. But we'll probably just end up fighting over whatever habitable parts of the planet remain. Maybe the survivors will be wiser.
Which leg and how high? Straight or bent?
Your description of the pseudo-skeptic nattering on about chaotic systems is bewildering, but I guess that they don't really know what a chaotic system actually is. Are they really using it to say "you can't predict the future" or some such nonsense?
--
BMO
Seriously.
Don't
give
a
flying
fuck.
Sick of hearing about "We have this symptom!"
Okay. Treat the fucking disease already!
"But wait! We have ANOTHER symptom to tell you about!"
Okay! Treat the fucking disease!
"Pardon me sir! Do you have a moment to talk about your lord and savior, we have ANOTHER symptom?"
*Facepalm*
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I mean really... That said, it would be interesting to see how this "wobble" effects the distribution of thermal energy on the planet. I suspect that we're going to get a few people saying "look at the climate change!'... ignoring that maybe the earth has tilted one way or the other slightly which could account for changes in climate in parts of the world.
Whatever... everything is climate change and everything would be improved if we just put the Marxists in power... just ask the Marxists. *rolls eyes*.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
But CO2 is both a heat sink in the lower atmosphere AND a heat reflector in the upper atmosphere. So it's a zero-sum game.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
> tipping point You could impress a lot of easily impressed people by sounding all sciency if you started calling it a bifurcation point.
Depends on what you're measuring. If you're measuring rainfall, it's climate change. If you're measuring temperature it's global warming. And, of course, newspapers are notorious for abusing the language. Consider the term "hacker".
Actually, it could always be climate change, but calling it global warming when you're talking about rainfall is just confusing.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If you want to see it really tilt, wait until Antarctica really melts. But you'd better check your hip boots for water-tightness first.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Both, straight.
"Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Mother Nature cannot be fooled." -- R.P. Feynman
Bzzzzzzt.
The Sun dumps visible light on Earth, which is absorbed, and re-radiated at a lower wavelength. The atmosphere is mostly transparent to visible light, and CO2 does squat to it. The atmosphere is opaque to IR pretty much to the edge of space; the "top of atmosphere" is where a given photon has a higher chance of being released to space instead of being captured and re-radiated. The effect of CO2 is not to increase the opacity of the lower atmosphere, which is already saturated with H2O and CO2, but to push the CO2-rich layer further out into space.
You clearly know fuck-all about atmospheric physics. Why are you commenting?
The Bible only describes the shape of the Earth in one place, and it says that the Earth is round. This is also where the Bible contradicts the other religions of the day by stating that the Earth hangs from nothing (while other religions claimed it was perched atop giand pillars, or riding on the back of a giant tortoise, etc)
If you are going to pretend to be smarter than the supposedly ignorant "Bible thumpers" you should start by demonstrating (a) that you are actually literate, and (b) that you have actually studied the book you are criticizing.
I will further note that the Bible should be read, as any other book is read, COMPLETELY so you get it all in context and therefor the obvious expressions like "ends of the Earth" are understood as the obvious expressions they are (just as they would be in any other book) and without pretending that if you properly understand such an expression then you must imagine the entire rest of the book to be similarly not literal (a bizarre form of literary interpretation not generally applied to other books).
The Earth's wobble has long been known, it was in old dusty textbooks.
Anybody who has ever worked with or studies spinning objects knows that they wobble if the mass distribution changes while they are spinning.
Anybody with any slight exposure to history or geology (no actual degree in either field required) knows that there have been times in the past when huge parts of the planet have been under huge thick ice sheets, and other periods when those ice sheets are gone or nearly gone. It's also astoundingly obvious that the water is not destroyed during inter-glacial periods - it's redistributed as liquid water in oceans lakes and rivers and as water vapor in the atmosphere NONE of which are the same mass distribution as when in glacier form atop continents. As a result, anybody with a brain knows that the Earth's wobble has over time been affected by the climate cycles as the planet goes down into a deep cold ice age and then warms into a very warm inter-glacial period and then goes back into another deep cold ice age. All of recent human history has been in a warm inter-glacial period, with the only real question being have we hit the peak of the warming before we dive towards the next ice age, or are we going to get a bit warmer yet before the next slide down into another ice age.
The only real headline here is that there are people in NASA willing to hype ANYTHING to push AGW. Next month somebody at Goddard will spill coffee on himself, discover that it's WET and HOT and will announce that hot coffee is somehow wrapped-up in AGW. I had personally hoped that the agency would return to honesty and sanity after Jim Hansen retired, but sadly that appears not to be the case and his influence appears to have been more like an infectious disease whose primary symptoms are fanatacism and anxiety attacks.
A little late for April Fools.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Climate change denial will not yield to logic, proofs, measurements or facts. Cowardly personalities fear change and fighting global warming and rising seas mean that many things in our lives must change. But cowards reason that they will surely be dead anyway before total calamity takes place. They could care less about their children or future generations. To then it is better that their children perish than they might be forced to pay a bit more in taxes.
Wait....isn't it climate change now?
It's been climate change for a while now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I don't even bother with the topside comments anymore in these propaganda stories. The bottom comments is where it's at!
The change matches with the rise of Dubstep.
The post you are responding to was a response to a question, and addressed it in those terms. Maybe you should go back and read what Curunir was responding to.
In point of fact, CO2 has a negligible affect on the temperature of the earth. The equalibrium temperature is based almost entirely on the radiation that reaches the earth and the density of the atmosphere, regardless of the types of gasses. CO2 is such a vanishingly small proportion, and heat trapping and radiating properties so insignificant in the total equation, it makes no difference in the total equation. You would be way beyond toxic levels in the atmosphere before it make any significant difference in the equilibrium temperature, and then only if you're calculating out to 1/1000th of a degree or something.
That is, you know fuck-all about physics in general.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...
Result:
2.722×10^14 kg (kilograms)
2.722×10^11 t (metric tons)
Volume V of water from V = m/rho_(H_2O):
| 2.722×10^14 L (liters)
| 272 km^3 (cubic kilometers)
| (assuming maximum water density ~~ 1000 kg/m^3)
By highlighting the symptoms, they may spur more people into doing something to 'cure the desease'.
Otherwise the masses will do nothing and the issue will continue to escalate.
Of all denialist theories, this one is most trivially false.
Sorry, but you just can't fix stupid.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"I told you not to eat that last donut!" said one ant to the other as the tree they were climbing toppled over under the woodsman's axe.
Seriously though, we exist on a very thin layer of non-liquid minerals, which is floating atop a truly massive amount of liquid minerals. The dissimilar rotational velocities of various layers and compositions within are the explanation of our magnetosphere. If you believe you fully understand what is going on because you saw a cut-away picture showing yellow, orange, and red balls under a brown shell with buildings on it, I have a bridge for sale. Special price just for you!
Continental drift is a pretty solid idea. There is strong evidence that the magnetic poles have flipped over. These things were not caused by humans and did not require human input at all.
Given the scale of masses involved, I would say anything on the surface is insignificant if the underlying process has anything to do with the larger, lower bodies involved. And like the ants on the tree, it is simply foolish to assume the universe functions entirely within the sphere of your own understanding.
"A new study from NASA"... so why are you linking to a mass media outlet? Whenever a real scientist finds a correlation, media seems to always jump on it as if it were a confirmed causal link. Sells better I suppose. "Journalistic integrity" used to mean something. Used to be able to read clear information with no bias or influence. And they wonder why nobody trusts anything they write anymore?
The correct term for "earth wobble" is precession. It takes 26,000 years for a complete precession cycle. I doubt anyone can tell if there has been any change in the precession path in the last 50 years. It moves about 1 deg. per 72 years.
But the point is that it is an objection. It doesn't matter that it's ludicrous and essentially denies physics All that matters is that it sounds like a scientific objection. Of course is a load of shit, and maybe even the poster knows that (but I doubt it), but it's part of the "CO2 is totally harmless" counterargument which has been around for decades now. Like Creationists, psuedo-skeptics just keep repeating the same lies over and over and over again, no matter how many times they have been falsified.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
NASA is trying to distance themselves from these crackpots - https://www.rt.com/news/338810...
There you have it. Anything to do with weather and climate, etc and it's from NASA, it's an opinion at best. It's a shame that it takes a third world country with one satellite to call bullshit for us to actually admit NASA doesn't do climate.
Should be clear. Bad hurricane - MMGW. IT's too hot - MMGW. It's too cold - MMGW. Nothing happened for 15 years - Still have MMGW. Anything happens - MMGW. Nothing is natural anymore.
When a paper uses terms like "link" and "clue" it means they don't have proof for their hypothesis. So the report didn't "find global warming is shifting the way the Earth wobbles." It found some correlations between various data sets. And as every scientist knows, and most lay persons should learn, correlations are a time a dozen and prove nothing.
So this is just more AGW Chicken Little alarmism.
You really are a crackpot. Every argument you've made has been based on a faulty understanding of basic science.
You really are a crackpot. Every argument you've made has been based on a faulty understanding of basic science.
Worded poorly, perhaps, but not based on "faulty understanding". CO2 absorbs heat not just reflected off the earth, but also as it enters the atmosphere and warms the air and clouds BEFORE it reaches the earth. And it radiates that heat in all directions, including back to the upper atmosphere and eventually back into space.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
The ice expansion is miniscule, is only extent of sea ice and is despite the massive reduction of ice MASS at that pole. All in all a great big whopper of a lie from a denier of reality.
Yeah, right. Except not.
1) He never siaid in the piece where you and other idiots claim he said it would be underwater by now, that it would be underwater by now.
2) Hurricane Sandy DID flood that area. And somehow, this is proof he's wrong??!?!?!?!?
Fucking moron.
the fact that we don't know means that you know it's unimportant. Because you believe ignorance is proof of something about reality.
This will help the US reach out to muslim nations.
Which is exactly what NASA was tasked with doing in 2008.
A zero sum game implies that all effects bottom line cancel each other out.
In your example we only have one effect: CO2 trapping IR light.
It does not matter in what layer. On what physical basis should it "reflect" IR in the upper atmosphere but trap it in the lower? And even if it would: by what magic should it be in both cases the exyctly same amount?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.