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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.
Water extraction would be much worse. It's shifting a resource from 30% of the surface to the other 70% of the surface. And it's done at a much higher rate than oil extraction. For example, in the year 2000 a total of 26 cubic kilometers of water was pumped from just the Ogallala aquifer alone. That amounts to around 450 million barrels a day - compared to around 90 million barrels a day of oil worldwide. And given the fact that water is 10-15% denser than oil - we have a mass shift of around 6:1 in favor of just the Ogallala aquifer water versus worldwide oil. Total water shift worldwide is probably closer to 60:1.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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?