All Things Environment

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/10/climate/ ... index.html

[JoeMauer89]

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/10/climate/ ... index.html

Interesting, Climate is quite a variably thing that is influenced by many factors, human behavior just a piece of the puzzle.

If Florida doesn't wake up, this series is going to a Game 7 on Monday. Not what they want at all!

1942 Maple Leafs were the only team to come back from 0-3 and win the Stanley Cup!

Joe

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/10/climate/ ... index.html

Interesting, Climate is quite a variably thing that is influenced by many factors, human behavior just a piece of the puzzle.

If Florida doesn't wake up, this series is going to a Game 7 on Monday. Not what they want at all!

1942 Maple Leafs were the only team to come back from 0-3 and win the Stanley Cup!

Joe

Yep. Human behavior is a piece of the puzzle for sure. Too bad Al Gore was the messenger. Probably would have gotten a different response. Oh well. We won’t be around if and when it gets really bad so who cares. My kids will have the resources to deal with it as best they can. They good.

[PizzaSnake]

Welp, big ag is about to take it.

No more water. Time for that ethanol stupidity to stop.

[Typical Lax Dad]

[PizzaSnake]

[youthathletics]

Shhhhhhh!.....Don't tell anyone how wrong they often are: https://x.com/ExpertsPostLs/status/1805571139550290272

[OuttaNowhereWregget]

And let's not forget the charming Miss Sweetness and Light herself...

https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1805666096009072989

And a couple of well placed comments under the tweet:

"If only Greta had gone to class instead of using fossil fuels to travel the earth complaining about climate change."

"Since I saw her leading an aggressive demonstration against the lone Israeli singer at Eurovision - a woman even younger than herself - I've lost all respect for her. But then the European public showed it certainly didn't agree - which was very satisfying...."

[Seacoaster(1)]

Yeah, let's keep pretending nothing is going on:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/26/opin ... -life.html

"The world’s longest-living vertebrate is not the friendly giant tortoise, the breathtaking blue whale or the saltwater crocodile, which can terrorize the imagination of toddlers and centenarians alike. It’s the shuddersome, floppy Greenland shark, which can live to 300, perhaps even longer, its life span slowed and distended by the deep cold of the northern oceans. Greenland sharks do not even reach sexual maturity until about age 150, which means that today there are, swimming slowly through the waters of the far North Atlantic, the equivalent of preteenagers born not long after the 19th-century heyday of New England whaling, as the Industrial Revolution was just metastasizing beyond the Anglosphere. Since then, measured by weight, 90 percent of the largest creatures sharing the oceans with them have disappeared.

This is not just a parable about the warming of the seas. By the global peak of whaling, in the 1960s, roughly 80,000 whales were still being harvested for their meat each year, more than a half-century after the bowhead, right and gray whales were brought close to extinction for their blubber and oil. Ninety percent of global marine fish stocks have now been fully exploited or overfished; 81 percent of monitored migratory freshwater populations have declined since 1970. And although the total mass of humans on earth is only about 0.4 metric gigatons, the physicist and oceanographer Helen Czerski writes in her hypnotic tribute “The Blue Machine,” we are collectively responsible for about 2.7 metric gigatons of life going missing from the seas — which are, after all, the only known oceans of water anywhere in the universe and the primal source of all known biology.

But the story of that warming is nevertheless astonishing, even for those of us anesthetized by exposure to the world’s rapid ecological transformation. More than 90 percent of all the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by the greenhouse effect goes into the oceans, and while climate-conscious humans may regard this as a lucky break for life on land, the math implies a different and less narcissistic emphasis: that the planet’s water, home also to a majority of its life, has absorbed nine times as much global warming as the world above the surface we know so well — and worry over so much.

This is a problem for the blue machine — “an engine the size of a planet,” Czerski writes, driving and distributing unimaginable scales of heat and energy, life and nutrients, around the globe, while also keeping the whole climate system (and the human civilization built on it) relatively stable. Most of the time, that is: Many of modern history’s greatest ecological disasters were produced by the flickering of ocean temperatures in the tropical Pacific as it shifted between El Niño and La Niña years, most significantly toward the end of the 19th century. A string of fallow El Niño harvests were so poorly managed by out-of-touch governments that they may have killed 50 million people (a share of the global population comparable to 320 million deaths today) and were later called, by the radical environmentalist Mike Davis, “late Victorian Holocausts.” This, mind you, is the “preindustrial” period we now use as a climate base line, against which are marked the perturbations of warming.

Famously, the oceans occupy 70 percent of the earth’s surface, with the Pacific alone so vast that if you consider a classroom globe from the right angle, you can see only the thinnest slivers of land. “The Pacific alone could swallow every landmass, every continent and island, and still have room for another South America,” Susan Casey writes in “Underworld,” her tour of the “shadow kingdom” of the deep seas and the 80 percent of the ocean floor whose details remain unmapped. When you look below the surface to consider life on the planet by volume, the oceans dominate even more.

A changing climate, a changing world

The vastness is also growing — not just because of melting Arctic and Antarctic ice, which could raise global sea levels by several feet this century and many more in the millenniums to come, but also because of what is known as “thermal expansion.” Heat expands the volume of water too and to date is responsible for at least one-third of all sea-level rise.

Last January, more than 40 percent of the planet’s oceans were experiencing marine heat waves, and by the end of the century, given continued warming, those heat waves could be permanent in much of the world’s seas. In shallow waters, coral reefs endured the temperatures of hot tubs, prompting the creation of three new levels of risk above what had been the highest level on the coral-bleaching scale. In a few decades, even in a rapidly decarbonizing world, it is considered likely that bleaching will kill nearly all the ocean’s coral reefs, which support a quarter of all marine life and provide food and other benefits to as many as one billion people.

A now-subsiding El Niño in the Pacific has helped push sea-surface temperatures above previous records for more than a year straight, with temperatures in the waters of the northern hemisphere so freakishly high they have been described as nine-standard-deviation anomalies. If you have read about scientists expressing alarmed confusion about recent records in global surface temperatures, they are generally more perplexed about what’s happening in the Atlantic, where hurricane activity is predicted to reach historic levels this summer and fall. Many ocean scientists now talk openly of “regime shifts”; others warn, “Expect chaos.” The Atlantic’s Marina Koren has put it more elegiacally: “The oceans we knew are already gone.”

Last year, an especially disquieting study examined the risk of the most famous of those possible shifts, the possible collapse of the large ocean system that transfers heat from the tropics up toward Europe and Greenland called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or A.M.O.C. This conveyor is what makes Western Europe comfortably warm, among other planet-stabilizing effects; with a total cessation, average temperatures in parts of the continent might be 15 degrees Celsius colder than they are today. The paper projected the system would reach a tipping point somewhere between 2025 and 2095, with a central estimate of midcentury, just a few decades from now.

Plenty of other scientists rushed to put the study in more reassuring context, calling into question its methodology and pointing to a whole literature of more stable projections. But the ultimate lesson of the episode was, for me, less a matter of outlier science or hysterical media than the catastrophic tail risks of continued warming. “This is not about being 100 percent or even just 50 percent sure that the A.M.O.C. will pass its tipping point this century,” the scientist Stefan Rahmstorf wrote in April in the journal Oceanography. “The issue is that we’d like to be 100 percent sure that it won’t.”

Unfortunately, the new research “greatly” elevated his estimate of that risk — once understood to be effectively zero and revised upward more recently to less than 10 percent. In February, another paper suggested that the A.M.O.C. was on a “tipping course,” and ongoing research suggests other ocean-circulation systems may be facing a one-in-three risk of collapse this century — perhaps higher.

These would be catastrophic transformations. But for now, we typically hear the alarm only when we strain our ears. “For most, the high seas are a remote realm, far offshore, that we have neither the chance, nor the desire, to visit,” writes Olive Heffernan, the founding editor of the journal Nature Climate Change, in her gripping book “The High Seas: Greed, Power and the Battle for the Unclaimed Ocean.”

“The high seas” is not a poetic term but a legal one, Heffernan reminds us, one that refers to “wild west” waters beyond the close reach of shore — up to two-thirds of the planet’s oceans, which remain ungoverned by any sovereign system of law. Even after the landmark U.N. treaty signed last year, barely 1 percent of the world’s oceans is protected, a share the U.N. hopes to raise to 30 percent. The rest remains mostly out of sight and out of mind. With average depths of nearly 13,000 feet, Heffernan calculates, the high seas make up 95 percent of the planet’s total available living space — a vast and distant elsewhere, into which we can casually dump not just pollution and heat but our sense of responsibility, as well."

[runrussellrun]

Yeah, let's keep pretending nothing is going on:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/26/opin ... -life.html

"The world’s longest-living vertebrate is not the friendly giant tortoise, the breathtaking blue whale or the saltwater crocodile, which can terrorize the imagination of toddlers and centenarians alike. It’s the shuddersome, floppy Greenland shark, which can live to 300, perhaps even longer, its life span slowed and distended by the deep cold of the northern oceans. Greenland sharks do not even reach sexual maturity until about age 150, which means that today there are, swimming slowly through the waters of the far North Atlantic, the equivalent of preteenagers born not long after the 19th-century heyday of New England whaling, as the Industrial Revolution was just metastasizing beyond the Anglosphere. Since then, measured by weight, 90 percent of the largest creatures sharing the oceans with them have disappeared.

This is not just a parable about the warming of the seas. By the global peak of whaling, in the 1960s, roughly 80,000 whales were still being harvested for their meat each year, more than a half-century after the bowhead, right and gray whales were brought close to extinction for their blubber and oil. Ninety percent of global marine fish stocks have now been fully exploited or overfished; 81 percent of monitored migratory freshwater populations have declined since 1970. And although the total mass of humans on earth is only about 0.4 metric gigatons, the physicist and oceanographer Helen Czerski writes in her hypnotic tribute “The Blue Machine,” we are collectively responsible for about 2.7 metric gigatons of life going missing from the seas — which are, after all, the only known oceans of water anywhere in the universe and the primal source of all known biology.

But the story of that warming is nevertheless astonishing, even for those of us anesthetized by exposure to the world’s rapid ecological transformation. More than 90 percent of all the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by the greenhouse effect goes into the oceans, and while climate-conscious humans may regard this as a lucky break for life on land, the math implies a different and less narcissistic emphasis: that the planet’s water, home also to a majority of its life, has absorbed nine times as much global warming as the world above the surface we know so well — and worry over so much.

This is a problem for the blue machine — “an engine the size of a planet,” Czerski writes, driving and distributing unimaginable scales of heat and energy, life and nutrients, around the globe, while also keeping the whole climate system (and the human civilization built on it) relatively stable. Most of the time, that is: Many of modern history’s greatest ecological disasters were produced by the flickering of ocean temperatures in the tropical Pacific as it shifted between El Niño and La Niña years, most significantly toward the end of the 19th century. A string of fallow El Niño harvests were so poorly managed by out-of-touch governments that they may have killed 50 million people (a share of the global population comparable to 320 million deaths today) and were later called, by the radical environmentalist Mike Davis, “late Victorian Holocausts.” This, mind you, is the “preindustrial” period we now use as a climate base line, against which are marked the perturbations of warming.

Famously, the oceans occupy 70 percent of the earth’s surface, with the Pacific alone so vast that if you consider a classroom globe from the right angle, you can see only the thinnest slivers of land. “The Pacific alone could swallow every landmass, every continent and island, and still have room for another South America,” Susan Casey writes in “Underworld,” her tour of the “shadow kingdom” of the deep seas and the 80 percent of the ocean floor whose details remain unmapped. When you look below the surface to consider life on the planet by volume, the oceans dominate even more.

A changing climate, a changing world

The vastness is also growing — not just because of melting Arctic and Antarctic ice, which could raise global sea levels by several feet this century and many more in the millenniums to come, but also because of what is known as “thermal expansion.” Heat expands the volume of water too and to date is responsible for at least one-third of all sea-level rise.

Last January, more than 40 percent of the planet’s oceans were experiencing marine heat waves, and by the end of the century, given continued warming, those heat waves could be permanent in much of the world’s seas. In shallow waters, coral reefs endured the temperatures of hot tubs, prompting the creation of three new levels of risk above what had been the highest level on the coral-bleaching scale. In a few decades, even in a rapidly decarbonizing world, it is considered likely that bleaching will kill nearly all the ocean’s coral reefs, which support a quarter of all marine life and provide food and other benefits to as many as one billion people.

A now-subsiding El Niño in the Pacific has helped push sea-surface temperatures above previous records for more than a year straight, with temperatures in the waters of the northern hemisphere so freakishly high they have been described as nine-standard-deviation anomalies. If you have read about scientists expressing alarmed confusion about recent records in global surface temperatures, they are generally more perplexed about what’s happening in the Atlantic, where hurricane activity is predicted to reach historic levels this summer and fall. Many ocean scientists now talk openly of “regime shifts”; others warn, “Expect chaos.” The Atlantic’s Marina Koren has put it more elegiacally: “The oceans we knew are already gone.”

Last year, an especially disquieting study examined the risk of the most famous of those possible shifts, the possible collapse of the large ocean system that transfers heat from the tropics up toward Europe and Greenland called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or A.M.O.C. This conveyor is what makes Western Europe comfortably warm, among other planet-stabilizing effects; with a total cessation, average temperatures in parts of the continent might be 15 degrees Celsius colder than they are today. The paper projected the system would reach a tipping point somewhere between 2025 and 2095, with a central estimate of midcentury, just a few decades from now.

Plenty of other scientists rushed to put the study in more reassuring context, calling into question its methodology and pointing to a whole literature of more stable projections. But the ultimate lesson of the episode was, for me, less a matter of outlier science or hysterical media than the catastrophic tail risks of continued warming. “This is not about being 100 percent or even just 50 percent sure that the A.M.O.C. will pass its tipping point this century,” the scientist Stefan Rahmstorf wrote in April in the journal Oceanography. “The issue is that we’d like to be 100 percent sure that it won’t.”

Unfortunately, the new research “greatly” elevated his estimate of that risk — once understood to be effectively zero and revised upward more recently to less than 10 percent. In February, another paper suggested that the A.M.O.C. was on a “tipping course,” and ongoing research suggests other ocean-circulation systems may be facing a one-in-three risk of collapse this century — perhaps higher.

These would be catastrophic transformations. But for now, we typically hear the alarm only when we strain our ears. “For most, the high seas are a remote realm, far offshore, that we have neither the chance, nor the desire, to visit,” writes Olive Heffernan, the founding editor of the journal Nature Climate Change, in her gripping book “The High Seas: Greed, Power and the Battle for the Unclaimed Ocean.”

“The high seas” is not a poetic term but a legal one, Heffernan reminds us, one that refers to “wild west” waters beyond the close reach of shore — up to two-thirds of the planet’s oceans, which remain ungoverned by any sovereign system of law. Even after the landmark U.N. treaty signed last year, barely 1 percent of the world’s oceans is protected, a share the U.N. hopes to raise to 30 percent. The rest remains mostly out of sight and out of mind. With average depths of nearly 13,000 feet, Heffernan calculates, the high seas make up 95 percent of the planet’s total available living space — a vast and distant elsewhere, into which we can casually dump not just pollution and heat but our sense of responsibility, as well."

what IS the end game of this "opinion" ?

Killing sea creatures, to eat and fuel our reading sessions, has WHAT to do with "warming".

seacoaster, you stated something about posting things, and NOT cowering away when "called out" (your words)

poof.......you run away anytime "fatty" comes around.

cue the mdlaxfan PM's

The hate , towards the "community", which suck IS a part of , continues

stay principled

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://e360.yale.edu/features/dengue-f ... ate-change

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.threads.net/@alsama7i/post/ ... cpwEMJf-rQ

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/13/us/cape- ... index.html

[Seacoaster(1)]

Pretty interesting:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate- ... ce-sheets/

"Think humans play a relatively small role in how Earth moves in space? It turns out we’re changing how our very planet rotates — and it’s affecting the length of our days.

For billions of years, Earth’s movements — how it spins and at what speed — have been primarily determined by forces beyond human influence, such as the pull of the moon and processes at our core and mantle. Now, the melting of Earth’s ice sheets, accelerated by human-driven warming, is influencing those motions.

The melting of Earth’s large ice masses has made days ever so slightly longer in recent decades and shifted Earth’s axis of rotation, according to two recent studies. The lengthening and shifts may be imperceptible to humans, but they can affect the accuracy of navigation systems or throw off calculations for satellite launches and landings. This extra slowing of Earth’s rotation is likely to stay for at least the next few decades, even if humans’ effect on the climate slows.

“Climate change is melting so much ice that we can see a huge impact on the very way how the planet is spinning,” said Surendra Adhikari, a geophysicist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an author of the two papers.

Days are getting longer

As temperatures rise globally, Earth’s polar regions have felt the brunt of the heat added since the 20th century. The melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets account for nearly one-third of global sea level rise since the early 1990s. But the melting is not affecting just sea levels.

As the polar ice melts, the water moves from the poles toward the equator — making our Earth rotate slower as it gets bulkier. Think of a figure skater who spins slower when her arms are stretched out compared to tucked into her body. The same applies to Earth’s rotation, said Benedikt Soja, a co-author and professor at ETH Zürich.

Soja and the team showed in findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal on Monday that recent, rapid melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice has increased the length of our days. Using past observations and projection models, they found the ice loss added time to Earth’s day between 0.3 to 1 milliseconds per century through the 20th century. But since 2000, the rate has accelerated to 1.33 milliseconds per century.

For billions of years, the speed of our planet’s rotation has dominantly been influenced by our moon. The moon yanks on the planet’s oceans and causes the tides to bulge, creating drag and slowing down Earth’s spin. Earth’s rotation has been predictably and consistently slowing down because of the moon’s gravitational forces — around 2.40 milliseconds per century, according to the study’s authors.

But the study “shows what we as humans can really impact in terms of changing Earth’s behavior and dynamics.”

Some scientists were not surprised by the study’s link to climate change. Richard Peltier, a physicist at the University of Toronto, published a study more than a decade ago stating “the changes in Earth rotation documented were caused by the global warming process.” Another recent study showed how this climate induced-day lengthening is affecting our timekeeping and delaying the leap second.

But the new research shows climate change is a bigger influence than previously thought and projects how Earth’s rotation may continue to change, if global warming worsens. By 2100, the scientists involved in the study estimated that the melting ice could lengthen days to 2.62 milliseconds per century, if greenhouse gas emissions are not drastically reduced. Even if emissions are curbed, Earth’s length of day is projected to lengthen by about 1.00 milliseconds per century for the next several decades.

The slowdown from melting ice “could become the new dominant factor, surpassing the moon, which for billions of years shaped the Earth’s rotation,” Soja said.

A few milliseconds here or there might not sound like a big deal, but it can add hours over billions of years. Perhaps more relevant to our lifetimes: These millisecond changes can also affect current technologies.

Our GPS and navigation systems rely on this precision “to the level of milliseconds, otherwise we would make very big errors in positioning and navigation,” Soja said.

Earth’s axis of rotation is shifting

Our planet isn’t just changing how fast it’s spinning, but also where it rotates.

Earth spins on an imaginary line from the North and South poles, but the line isn’t fixed. The points where the axis of rotation meets Earth’s surface drifts and wobbles a few inches per year and several meters every century.

Now, Soja, Adhikari and their team, were able to determine what factors have influenced these “polar motions” in unprecedented detail over the past 120 years. They found that the ice mass loss from the North and South poles play a role in these wiggles, according to another recent study published in Nature Geoscience.

“We could see that climate change, what happens on the surface, basically can also have a small impact on the dynamics that happen in the very interior of the Earth, like the Earth’s core,” Soja said.

Scientists have long known some of the natural processes that can induce mass changes on and within the planet, and thus affecting its axis of rotation. For instance, convection currents deep within the mantle can move tectonic plates on the surface. Heat flows in Earth’s outer core, which help generate the Earth’s magnetic field, also can shift mass.

Now, add climate change.

As ice is lost from the poles, the mass loss can throw off Earth’s geometry and have a bigger impact on shifting Earth’s spin axis. In fact, the new study found that such mass redistribution on the Earth’s surface, including ice melting and global changes in water storage, accounted for 90 percent of variations between years and decades.

Mostafa Kiani Shahvandi, lead author of both the Earth axis and day of length studies, said these surface processes, like the melting of ice, can move the axis more than processes inside Earth.

Adhikari said people haven’t thoroughly investigated the influence of climate change on polar motion, and even this is a starting point, adding: “We are opening questions for future research.”

[PizzaSnake]

Pretty interesting:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate- ... ce-sheets/

"Think humans play a relatively small role in how Earth moves in space? It turns out we’re changing how our very planet rotates — and it’s affecting the length of our days.

For billions of years, Earth’s movements — how it spins and at what speed — have been primarily determined by forces beyond human influence, such as the pull of the moon and processes at our core and mantle. Now, the melting of Earth’s ice sheets, accelerated by human-driven warming, is influencing those motions.

The melting of Earth’s large ice masses has made days ever so slightly longer in recent decades and shifted Earth’s axis of rotation, according to two recent studies. The lengthening and shifts may be imperceptible to humans, but they can affect the accuracy of navigation systems or throw off calculations for satellite launches and landings. This extra slowing of Earth’s rotation is likely to stay for at least the next few decades, even if humans’ effect on the climate slows.

“Climate change is melting so much ice that we can see a huge impact on the very way how the planet is spinning,” said Surendra Adhikari, a geophysicist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an author of the two papers.

Days are getting longer

As temperatures rise globally, Earth’s polar regions have felt the brunt of the heat added since the 20th century. The melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets account for nearly one-third of global sea level rise since the early 1990s. But the melting is not affecting just sea levels.

As the polar ice melts, the water moves from the poles toward the equator — making our Earth rotate slower as it gets bulkier. Think of a figure skater who spins slower when her arms are stretched out compared to tucked into her body. The same applies to Earth’s rotation, said Benedikt Soja, a co-author and professor at ETH Zürich.

Soja and the team showed in findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal on Monday that recent, rapid melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice has increased the length of our days. Using past observations and projection models, they found the ice loss added time to Earth’s day between 0.3 to 1 milliseconds per century through the 20th century. But since 2000, the rate has accelerated to 1.33 milliseconds per century.

For billions of years, the speed of our planet’s rotation has dominantly been influenced by our moon. The moon yanks on the planet’s oceans and causes the tides to bulge, creating drag and slowing down Earth’s spin. Earth’s rotation has been predictably and consistently slowing down because of the moon’s gravitational forces — around 2.40 milliseconds per century, according to the study’s authors.

But the study “shows what we as humans can really impact in terms of changing Earth’s behavior and dynamics.”

Some scientists were not surprised by the study’s link to climate change. Richard Peltier, a physicist at the University of Toronto, published a study more than a decade ago stating “the changes in Earth rotation documented were caused by the global warming process.” Another recent study showed how this climate induced-day lengthening is affecting our timekeeping and delaying the leap second.

But the new research shows climate change is a bigger influence than previously thought and projects how Earth’s rotation may continue to change, if global warming worsens. By 2100, the scientists involved in the study estimated that the melting ice could lengthen days to 2.62 milliseconds per century, if greenhouse gas emissions are not drastically reduced. Even if emissions are curbed, Earth’s length of day is projected to lengthen by about 1.00 milliseconds per century for the next several decades.

The slowdown from melting ice “could become the new dominant factor, surpassing the moon, which for billions of years shaped the Earth’s rotation,” Soja said.

A few milliseconds here or there might not sound like a big deal, but it can add hours over billions of years. Perhaps more relevant to our lifetimes: These millisecond changes can also affect current technologies.

Our GPS and navigation systems rely on this precision “to the level of milliseconds, otherwise we would make very big errors in positioning and navigation,” Soja said.

Earth’s axis of rotation is shifting

Our planet isn’t just changing how fast it’s spinning, but also where it rotates.

Earth spins on an imaginary line from the North and South poles, but the line isn’t fixed. The points where the axis of rotation meets Earth’s surface drifts and wobbles a few inches per year and several meters every century.

Now, Soja, Adhikari and their team, were able to determine what factors have influenced these “polar motions” in unprecedented detail over the past 120 years. They found that the ice mass loss from the North and South poles play a role in these wiggles, according to another recent study published in Nature Geoscience.

“We could see that climate change, what happens on the surface, basically can also have a small impact on the dynamics that happen in the very interior of the Earth, like the Earth’s core,” Soja said.

Scientists have long known some of the natural processes that can induce mass changes on and within the planet, and thus affecting its axis of rotation. For instance, convection currents deep within the mantle can move tectonic plates on the surface. Heat flows in Earth’s outer core, which help generate the Earth’s magnetic field, also can shift mass.

Now, add climate change.

As ice is lost from the poles, the mass loss can throw off Earth’s geometry and have a bigger impact on shifting Earth’s spin axis. In fact, the new study found that such mass redistribution on the Earth’s surface, including ice melting and global changes in water storage, accounted for 90 percent of variations between years and decades.

Mostafa Kiani Shahvandi, lead author of both the Earth axis and day of length studies, said these surface processes, like the melting of ice, can move the axis more than processes inside Earth.

Adhikari said people haven’t thoroughly investigated the influence of climate change on polar motion, and even this is a starting point, adding: “We are opening questions for future research.”

Pretty sure we are impacting the Third Pole as well.

Things will get increasingly fraught as the two Asian behemoths struggle over the headwaters of most of the subcontinent.

While both have significant gender imbalances in the “fertile” cohorts, my money is on India if they can secure water.

Russia, the US, and the EU will fade into irrelevance within the next fifty years (or less), depending on the amount of self-inflicted damage, i.e. further economic stratification, ethno-centric policies and religious extremism.

[youthathletics]

Pretty interesting:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate- ... ce-sheets/

"Think humans play a relatively small role in how Earth moves in space? It turns out we’re changing how our very planet rotates — and it’s affecting the length of our days.

For billions of years, Earth’s movements — how it spins and at what speed — have been primarily determined by forces beyond human influence, such as the pull of the moon and processes at our core and mantle. Now, the melting of Earth’s ice sheets, accelerated by human-driven warming, is influencing those motions.

The melting of Earth’s large ice masses has made days ever so slightly longer in recent decades and shifted Earth’s axis of rotation, according to two recent studies. The lengthening and shifts may be imperceptible to humans, but they can affect the accuracy of navigation systems or throw off calculations for satellite launches and landings. This extra slowing of Earth’s rotation is likely to stay for at least the next few decades, even if humans’ effect on the climate slows.

“Climate change is melting so much ice that we can see a huge impact on the very way how the planet is spinning,” said Surendra Adhikari, a geophysicist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an author of the two papers.

Days are getting longer

As temperatures rise globally, Earth’s polar regions have felt the brunt of the heat added since the 20th century. The melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets account for nearly one-third of global sea level rise since the early 1990s. But the melting is not affecting just sea levels.

As the polar ice melts, the water moves from the poles toward the equator — making our Earth rotate slower as it gets bulkier. Think of a figure skater who spins slower when her arms are stretched out compared to tucked into her body. The same applies to Earth’s rotation, said Benedikt Soja, a co-author and professor at ETH Zürich.

Soja and the team showed in findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal on Monday that recent, rapid melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice has increased the length of our days. Using past observations and projection models, they found the ice loss added time to Earth’s day between 0.3 to 1 milliseconds per century through the 20th century. But since 2000, the rate has accelerated to 1.33 milliseconds per century.

For billions of years, the speed of our planet’s rotation has dominantly been influenced by our moon. The moon yanks on the planet’s oceans and causes the tides to bulge, creating drag and slowing down Earth’s spin. Earth’s rotation has been predictably and consistently slowing down because of the moon’s gravitational forces — around 2.40 milliseconds per century, according to the study’s authors.

But the study “shows what we as humans can really impact in terms of changing Earth’s behavior and dynamics.”

Some scientists were not surprised by the study’s link to climate change. Richard Peltier, a physicist at the University of Toronto, published a study more than a decade ago stating “the changes in Earth rotation documented were caused by the global warming process.” Another recent study showed how this climate induced-day lengthening is affecting our timekeeping and delaying the leap second.

But the new research shows climate change is a bigger influence than previously thought and projects how Earth’s rotation may continue to change, if global warming worsens. By 2100, the scientists involved in the study estimated that the melting ice could lengthen days to 2.62 milliseconds per century, if greenhouse gas emissions are not drastically reduced. Even if emissions are curbed, Earth’s length of day is projected to lengthen by about 1.00 milliseconds per century for the next several decades.

The slowdown from melting ice “could become the new dominant factor, surpassing the moon, which for billions of years shaped the Earth’s rotation,” Soja said.

A few milliseconds here or there might not sound like a big deal, but it can add hours over billions of years. Perhaps more relevant to our lifetimes: These millisecond changes can also affect current technologies.

Our GPS and navigation systems rely on this precision “to the level of milliseconds, otherwise we would make very big errors in positioning and navigation,” Soja said.

Earth’s axis of rotation is shifting

Our planet isn’t just changing how fast it’s spinning, but also where it rotates.

Earth spins on an imaginary line from the North and South poles, but the line isn’t fixed. The points where the axis of rotation meets Earth’s surface drifts and wobbles a few inches per year and several meters every century.

Now, Soja, Adhikari and their team, were able to determine what factors have influenced these “polar motions” in unprecedented detail over the past 120 years. They found that the ice mass loss from the North and South poles play a role in these wiggles, according to another recent study published in Nature Geoscience.

“We could see that climate change, what happens on the surface, basically can also have a small impact on the dynamics that happen in the very interior of the Earth, like the Earth’s core,” Soja said.

Scientists have long known some of the natural processes that can induce mass changes on and within the planet, and thus affecting its axis of rotation. For instance, convection currents deep within the mantle can move tectonic plates on the surface. Heat flows in Earth’s outer core, which help generate the Earth’s magnetic field, also can shift mass.

Now, add climate change.

As ice is lost from the poles, the mass loss can throw off Earth’s geometry and have a bigger impact on shifting Earth’s spin axis. In fact, the new study found that such mass redistribution on the Earth’s surface, including ice melting and global changes in water storage, accounted for 90 percent of variations between years and decades.

Mostafa Kiani Shahvandi, lead author of both the Earth axis and day of length studies, said these surface processes, like the melting of ice, can move the axis more than processes inside Earth.

Adhikari said people haven’t thoroughly investigated the influence of climate change on polar motion, and even this is a starting point, adding: “We are opening questions for future research.”

The 'axis' issue has been long known and discussed.....if memory serves me, JHU72 discounted it when it was mentioned years ago....either here or on Laxpower.

[Seacoaster(1)]

Pretty interesting:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate- ... ce-sheets/

"Think humans play a relatively small role in how Earth moves in space? It turns out we’re changing how our very planet rotates — and it’s affecting the length of our days.

For billions of years, Earth’s movements — how it spins and at what speed — have been primarily determined by forces beyond human influence, such as the pull of the moon and processes at our core and mantle. Now, the melting of Earth’s ice sheets, accelerated by human-driven warming, is influencing those motions.

The melting of Earth’s large ice masses has made days ever so slightly longer in recent decades and shifted Earth’s axis of rotation, according to two recent studies. The lengthening and shifts may be imperceptible to humans, but they can affect the accuracy of navigation systems or throw off calculations for satellite launches and landings. This extra slowing of Earth’s rotation is likely to stay for at least the next few decades, even if humans’ effect on the climate slows.

“Climate change is melting so much ice that we can see a huge impact on the very way how the planet is spinning,” said Surendra Adhikari, a geophysicist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an author of the two papers.

Days are getting longer

As temperatures rise globally, Earth’s polar regions have felt the brunt of the heat added since the 20th century. The melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets account for nearly one-third of global sea level rise since the early 1990s. But the melting is not affecting just sea levels.

As the polar ice melts, the water moves from the poles toward the equator — making our Earth rotate slower as it gets bulkier. Think of a figure skater who spins slower when her arms are stretched out compared to tucked into her body. The same applies to Earth’s rotation, said Benedikt Soja, a co-author and professor at ETH Zürich.

Soja and the team showed in findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal on Monday that recent, rapid melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice has increased the length of our days. Using past observations and projection models, they found the ice loss added time to Earth’s day between 0.3 to 1 milliseconds per century through the 20th century. But since 2000, the rate has accelerated to 1.33 milliseconds per century.

For billions of years, the speed of our planet’s rotation has dominantly been influenced by our moon. The moon yanks on the planet’s oceans and causes the tides to bulge, creating drag and slowing down Earth’s spin. Earth’s rotation has been predictably and consistently slowing down because of the moon’s gravitational forces — around 2.40 milliseconds per century, according to the study’s authors.

But the study “shows what we as humans can really impact in terms of changing Earth’s behavior and dynamics.”

Some scientists were not surprised by the study’s link to climate change. Richard Peltier, a physicist at the University of Toronto, published a study more than a decade ago stating “the changes in Earth rotation documented were caused by the global warming process.” Another recent study showed how this climate induced-day lengthening is affecting our timekeeping and delaying the leap second.

But the new research shows climate change is a bigger influence than previously thought and projects how Earth’s rotation may continue to change, if global warming worsens. By 2100, the scientists involved in the study estimated that the melting ice could lengthen days to 2.62 milliseconds per century, if greenhouse gas emissions are not drastically reduced. Even if emissions are curbed, Earth’s length of day is projected to lengthen by about 1.00 milliseconds per century for the next several decades.

The slowdown from melting ice “could become the new dominant factor, surpassing the moon, which for billions of years shaped the Earth’s rotation,” Soja said.

A few milliseconds here or there might not sound like a big deal, but it can add hours over billions of years. Perhaps more relevant to our lifetimes: These millisecond changes can also affect current technologies.

Our GPS and navigation systems rely on this precision “to the level of milliseconds, otherwise we would make very big errors in positioning and navigation,” Soja said.

Earth’s axis of rotation is shifting

Our planet isn’t just changing how fast it’s spinning, but also where it rotates.

Earth spins on an imaginary line from the North and South poles, but the line isn’t fixed. The points where the axis of rotation meets Earth’s surface drifts and wobbles a few inches per year and several meters every century.

Now, Soja, Adhikari and their team, were able to determine what factors have influenced these “polar motions” in unprecedented detail over the past 120 years. They found that the ice mass loss from the North and South poles play a role in these wiggles, according to another recent study published in Nature Geoscience.

“We could see that climate change, what happens on the surface, basically can also have a small impact on the dynamics that happen in the very interior of the Earth, like the Earth’s core,” Soja said.

Scientists have long known some of the natural processes that can induce mass changes on and within the planet, and thus affecting its axis of rotation. For instance, convection currents deep within the mantle can move tectonic plates on the surface. Heat flows in Earth’s outer core, which help generate the Earth’s magnetic field, also can shift mass.

Now, add climate change.

As ice is lost from the poles, the mass loss can throw off Earth’s geometry and have a bigger impact on shifting Earth’s spin axis. In fact, the new study found that such mass redistribution on the Earth’s surface, including ice melting and global changes in water storage, accounted for 90 percent of variations between years and decades.

Mostafa Kiani Shahvandi, lead author of both the Earth axis and day of length studies, said these surface processes, like the melting of ice, can move the axis more than processes inside Earth.

Adhikari said people haven’t thoroughly investigated the influence of climate change on polar motion, and even this is a starting point, adding: “We are opening questions for future research.”

The 'axis' issue has been long known and discussed.....if memory serves me, JHU72 discounted it when it was mentioned years ago....either here or on Laxpower.

Don't recall that. But I am no scientist; I just thought the article was interesting. A very good friend of mine was in Greenland about a year ago, and says the rate of ice melt is jaw-dropping. What the consequences are, apart from a deep change to the landscape and life in the immediately altering areas, I have no idea.

[youthathletics]

All sharks in tested in Gulf of Mexico tested positive for cocaine: https://www.instagram.com/p/C9yNdypz_kW ... _copy_link

[PizzaSnake]

“But globally, the equivalent of South America is now used to grow crops, and the equivalent of Africa is used to graze animals. Combined, this is more of the world’s surface than is occupied by forests and more than 10 times as much land as is occupied by all human settlement.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/28/opin ... rices.html

[youthathletics]

Exothermic Core Pulse hypothesis worked again...

Initial find here --> https://x.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1820488862462087559
Took me to here --> https://theethicalskeptic.com/2020/02/1 ... our-peril/
Then to here --> https://be.creativesociety.com/storage/ ... Report.pdf

Reading the comments in in the 2nd link, they are filled with counter ideas that seem to parlay into far more natural occurring events. Not entirely ruling out humans can and should do better.