Bro, I kid you not these two stories were published on the same exact day — one from NBC News and the other from CBS News.
So Earth is spinning faster and we might have to adjust our clocks, but then Earth is spinning slower due to global warming which could also mess with our clocks.
Are you two corporate news outlets trying to tell us something?
Is global warming…
Good?!
Just asking questions here.
Let's look at the main points in each story.
First, let's see CBS News' take concerning the Earth spinning faster than it used to.
For the first time in history, world timekeepers may have to consider subtracting a second from our clocks in a few years because the planet is rotating a tad faster than it used to. Clocks may have to skip a second — called a "negative leap second" — around 2029, a study in the journal Nature said Wednesday.
"This is an unprecedented situation and a big deal," said study lead author Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. "It's not a huge change in the Earth's rotation that's going to lead to some catastrophe or anything, but it is something notable. It's yet another indication that we're in a very unusual time."
…
Earth's speeding up because its hot liquid core — "a large ball of molten fluid" — acts in unpredictable ways, with eddies and flows that vary, Agnew said.
Agnew said the core has been triggering a speedup for about 50 years.
Okay, very complicated stuff: The Earth's core is extremely hot and acts unpredictably so now we're spinning faster when, historically, we have been slowing down as a result of "the effect of tides, which are caused by the pull of the moon."
Next up we have NBC News, who tells us Earth is spinning slower because of the "climate catastrophe," as we're all supposed to call it now.
Global warming has slightly slowed the Earth's rotation — and it could affect how we measure time.
A study published Wednesday found that the melting of polar ice — an accelerating trend driven primarily by human-caused climate change — has caused the Earth to spin less quickly than it would otherwise.
The author of the study, Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, said that as ice at the poles melts, it changes where the Earth's mass is concentrated. The change, in turn, affects the planet's angular velocity …
"What you're doing with the ice melt is you're taking water that's frozen solid in places like Antarctica and Greenland, and that frozen water is melting, and you move the fluids to other places on the planet," said Thomas Herring, a professor of geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the new study. "The water flows off towards the equator."
The study suggests, in other words, that human influence has monkeyed with a force that scholars, stargazers and scientists have puzzled over for millennia — something long considered a constant that was out of humanity's control.
The story even mentions the fact that we're counteracting what is already happening as reported by CBS News.
His study, which was published in the journal Nature, suggests that climate change is playing a significant enough role in the Earth's rotation to counteract an opposing trend. Because of a combination of factors, the Earth has begun to spin faster in recent decades, a temporary trend that has prompted scientists for the first time to consider subtracting a single "negative leap second" from clocks worldwide as soon as 2026. But the melting of polar ice has delayed that possibility by about three years, according to Agnew.
I mean, we could just keep doing all of our global warming stuff like flying private jets, bombing every country in the world, and, of course, farting, and then everything would be offset.
Why not just continue on the route we're going instead of having to change our clocks?
In fact, both articles mention the global warming effect on Earth's spin, noting that the melted ice makes its way to the equator where the new mass tends to slow down that beautiful, beautiful Earth spin.
But I remain in my position: It looks like global warming is helping this situation! 😂
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