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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.
Nice strawman ad hominem.
Actually, if he pulled together data and published a research paper, he'd get chucked in the kook bin. Welcome to climate science.
We chuck a lot of people in the kook bin, from vaccines-cause-autism whackjobs right up to those people who... well, invented vaccination. We've got a pretty bad track record for figuring out whose science is bullshit and whose is valid.
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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.
How is it a strawman? Particularly the latter point, that climatologists are compromised because they work by and large with government grants is brought up all the time as a counter to AGW research. For chrissakes, that claim is trotted by pseudo-skeptics in fields like geology, evolution, and cancer research.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Of course that is what a lot of us that are being called "denialist", which just FYI is an regressive term designed to shut down discussion by comparing anybody that doesn't buy magic beans to Holocaust deniers, ...
It's the climate science deniers that are trying hard to make the link between denial in general and Holocaust denial specifically so they can look like a persecuted minority.
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.
How is this insightful? We have an excellent track record for determining the correct theories. Look at all the new technologies that have been developed since the beginning of the 20th century. That is the result of engineering based on the scientific discoveries that have been made.
The public's opinion is vulnerable to greedy assholes with huge media corporations pushing their agenda to the detriment of every person on earth and especially to those not even yet born. It is sad that such large swaths of people can be turned into shills against their own interest and be totally ignorant of the fact for so long.
The oil and gas industry's tactics are the same as when they perpetrated the leaded gas abomination.