Earth is wobbling and days are getting longer — and humans are to blame

[Admin]

New studies, which utilized AI to monitor the effects of climate change on Earth's spin, have shown that our days are getting increasingly longer and that our planet will get more wobbly in the future. These changes could have major implications for humanity's future.

Earth is wobbling and days are getting longer — and humans are to blame : Read more

 

[Betamax_man]

Here we go again, blame humans with that old chestnut 'climate change'. It's getting rather boring now.

There's only one thing that the climate myth does, and that's increase the cost of living for ordinary folk.

 

[COLGeek]

Here we go again, blame humans with that old chestnut 'climate change'. It's getting rather boring now.

There's only one thing that the climate myth does, and that's increase the cost of living for ordinary folk.

I respectfully disagree. There is no doubt that human activity exacerbates natural climate cycles. The science is conclusive on this fact.

The evidence is literally all around us and cannot be ignored. Else, it will be at the peril of future generations.

What is wrong with being responsible stewards of our environment? Don't get me wrong, making a buck is fine, but if we can't breath the air, drink the water, grow our food, what is the point of that dollar?

 

[Betamax_man]

I respectfully disagree. There is no doubt that human activity exacerbates natural climate cycles. The science is conclusive on this fact.

The evidence is literally all around us and cannot be ignored. Else, it will be at the peril of future generations.

What is wrong with being responsible stewards of our environment? Don't get me wrong, making a buck is fine, but if we can't breath the air, drink the water, grow our food, what is the point of that dollar?

Well we're going to have to agree to disagree. The computer models are flawed. Yes the earth is warming, but has been a lot warmer than it is now. The obsession of CO2 is unbelievable. Without CO2, life dies, full stop. In the reign of the dinosaur, CO2 was much higher than it is now. Did humans create that? Of course they didn't. It's just another way to extract cash from the masses so the rich have more control. Wake up.

 

[COLGeek]

Well we're going to have to agree to disagree. The computer models are flawed. Yes the earth is warming, but has been a lot warmer than it is now. The obsession of CO2 is unbelievable. Without CO2, life dies, full stop. In the reign of the dinosaur, CO2 was much higher than it is now. Did humans create that? Of course they didn't. It's just another way to extract cash from the masses so the rich have more control. Wake up.

Emissions are certainly more than CO2. Regardless, our disagreement stands and that is okay.

 

[Helio]

I can’t imagine how these milliseconds per century changes will have any important relative impacts compared to other changes.

It’s important to note that Space.com articles make an effort to be intellectually honest. To note that 2022 was the shortest day on record is an example of this.

When “climate change” is argued I always try to separate people’s arguments of “kind” from “degree”. There’s no question that the climate has been warming, ever since the ice age, Further, the human increase to greenhouse gases, like CO2, will only enhance the temp. rise, unless, somehow, Earth can counter it. The greening of the planet, for example, isn’t enough to offset the temp. rise effects from CO2 increases, however.

But the question remains as to how much CO2, and other gasses, will raise the temperature independent of all the other many variables, including solar flux ( which varies ~ 10% in the UV), volcanoes, oceanic meridonal flows, etc.

Ultimately, climate models will reveal the actual sensitivity of our climate to a host of changes for all the important variables.

I encourage folks to read “Climate Uncertainty and Risk”, Judith Curry.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Considering that the Earth has had both more and less ice, more CO2 in the atmosphere and less, more oxygen in the atmosphere and less, generally slowing rotation ever since the Moon was created, higher and lower mean temperatures, etc. etc. etc., these articles that seem to imply that everything would be constant if it wasn't for humans tend to disgust me.

What I want to see is what effects the changes are projected to have on me and the rest of the species on the planet, how soon and how much.

We are committed to most of the changes that will occur over the next 50 to 100 years whether or not we change our ways soon, because the effects are largely coming from emissions that we have already released - and some natural changes along with them.

Whether or not the Earth's climate is "self-correcting" to the extent that we could still have another ice age is not established. So, it is not something that we should be betting on for our own well being. Even if it is self-correcting, and the ocean and atmospheric circulations change to cause another northern hemisphere ice age, we are all still in for a lot of warming first, in the terms of an individual human lifetime. And, another ice age would also be a tremendous impact on human infrastructures and populations.

We need to just recognize that our environment does change, and will change, and we need to deal with it as it happens. We don't really understand how to control Earth's climate so as to keep it constantly the same as it has been for the last 100 years. In fact, the last 100 years is not "typical" or "average" for the conditions over the previous 3 million or so years, anyway. And, before that, what was typical was also different from what became typical.

So, can we please have articles that do their best to explain the science that we think we can understand, and make room for that by deleting the guilt-trip innuendo? " - and humans are to blame" in a title is a clear tipoff that the article is click-bait for a political agenda. Days would still be averaging longer and the axis still would be wobbling if humans never existed.

I have been suggesting that climate modelers use those effects in their long-term climate models to see if they would provide better agreement between the models and geological evidence of past climates, because they do affect the Milankovitch cycle periods.

 

[trailrider]

Emissions are certainly more than CO2. Regardless, our disagreement stands and that is okay.

Has anybody found the thermostat for that big ball in the sky? The sun is nearing its solar maximum (if it hasn't reached it already), and it has been throwing out an interesting assortment of flares and carrona mass ejections. There are other solar cycles besides the 11 year one. Think that might have anything to do with global warming.

If CO2 is a big culprit, how about getting China and India to cut back on their use of coal. For an energy source, how about Solar Powered Satellites, and fission and fusion reactors?

If anyone is so hard over on what humans are doing to Earth, think about getting in touch with SpaceX and booking a ride to Mars aboard a Starship, when they become operational?

 

[Ken Fabian]

these articles that seem to imply that everything would be constant if it wasn't for humans tend to disgust me.

I find that attitude a bit dismaying, more so from you than other commenters, whom I don't expect to be informed or well reasoned.

The holocene had exceptional climate stability unprecedented in over more than 100,000 years until humans changed things -

Also it isn't a case of current global warming returning the world from a cold period back to a previous, more conducive warmer state - this change takes us from a higher than before global average temperature with unusual stabilty into uncharted territory. It hasn't been entirely stable during the Holocene either yet civilizations have risen and fallen from much less climate variablity in that period. People treating the destabilization of global climate, upon which agricultural production depends, as a crisis is not them being hysterical or alarmist.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Ken,

I criticized an article which states "Earth is wobbling and days are getting longer — and humans are to blame". Your statements about "climate stability in the Holocene" are not relevant to the criticism. There was far more ice melting between 25,000 years ago and 15,000 years ago than there has been in the last 10.000 years. So, wobble effects, day length effects, etc. are not "unprecedented" at the levels we are seeing now. And, even what we are seeing now is not all due to human actions. (And, your graph really needs to go back about 3 million years - it doesn't even go back to the previous warm period - so there really isn't a comparison between "natural" and "human influenced" in it.)

What I criticized is the article writers' attempt at propaganda that is easily discredited. That just provides evidence for others who do not want to believe that humans have caused any of the changes we see actually happening. That is why I am saying that writing stuff like that is backfiring if the intent is to make people worry about climate change.

I also think that article writers who talk about "stopping" sea level rise are undermining their own efforts. They talk about effects that are too near-term for us to actually stop.

What I think we really need is some specifics about what near term changes are going to be, and how soon and how bad. If they can predict that, they will gain some credibility among the skeptics and nay-sayers.

I am personally dealing with sea level rise issues on property that I own and a nearby historic town. We are planning for it and executing the plans, rather than telling everybody to "save us" by changing their ways. We know that (1) the changes that will cause us severe damage will occur, no matter what the world's human population does now, and (2), the same flooding has happened several times before in the last few million years, anyway. The real issue for us is how fast it will be occurring.

Similar concepts would be useful for other climate change issues. Where will it get hotter, wetter, drier, etc, and how much and how fast. Those are harder to predict than sea level, because they are not averaged over the whole globe. Some places will get more habitable, and some less habitable.

Our real problem is our current population density. When such major changes happened before, humans were hunter-gatherers, not farmers and industrialists. We can't move around as easily as our long-ago ancestors could. Yes, we have the technology to move farther and faster, but we don't have any relatively uninhabited areas to move into, now. Large scale migration will cause wars.

Frankly, with the population density we have now, even another ice age would cause similar problems at the global level - people would need to move in massive numbers for that, too.

We even have problems with depletion of resources if the climate does not change at all. For instance, a lot of industrial scale farming that "feeds the world" with exports is drawing down groundwater supplies and is not indefinitely sustainable. And, as Jan Steinman keeps posting, we really don't have an inexhaustible supply fossil fuels, either.

Humans are clearly going to have to change to adapt. I am sorry to say that I don't see us doing so collectively in an intelligent manner. And, I expect the unintelligent manner will involve a major population crash with a lot of agony.

But, that doesn't mean we should all just give up and not try to be intelligent and get others to behave intelligently.

And, to be intelligent about the realities of our situation, I strongly suggest that the people who purport to inform us about science stop with the "click bait" titles and unrealistic slants to their articles.

 

[Betamax_man]

Ken,

I criticized an article which states "Earth is wobbling and days are getting longer — and humans are to blame". Your statements about "climate stability in the Holocene" are not relevant to the criticism. There was far more ice melting between 25,000 years ago and 15,000 years ago than there has been in the last 10.000 years. So, wobble effects, day length effects, etc. are not "unprecedented" at the levels we are seeing now. And, even what we are seeing now is not all due to human actions. (And, your graph really needs to go back about 3 million years - it doesn't even go back to the previous warm period - so there really isn't a comparison between "natural" and "human influenced" in it.)

What I criticized is the article writers' attempt at propaganda that is easily discredited. That just provides evidence for others who do not want to believe that humans have caused any of the changes we see actually happening. That is why I am saying that writing stuff like that is backfiring if the intent is to make people worry about climate change.

I also think that article writers who talk about "stopping" sea level rise are undermining their own efforts. They talk about effects that are too near-term for us to actually stop.

What I think we really need is some specifics about what near term changes are going to be, and how soon and how bad. If they can predict that, they will gain some credibility among the skeptics and nay-sayers.

I am personally dealing with sea level rise issues on property that I own and a nearby historic town. We are planning for it and executing the plans, rather than telling everybody to "save us" by changing their ways. We know that (1) the changes that will cause us severe damage will occur, no matter what the world's human population does now, and (2), the same flooding has happened several times before in the last few million years, anyway. The real issue for us is how fast it will be occurring.

Similar concepts would be useful for other climate change issues. Where will it get hotter, wetter, drier, etc, and how much and how fast. Those are harder to predict than sea level, because they are not averaged over the whole globe. Some places will get more habitable, and some less habitable.

Our real problem is our current population density. When such major changes happened before, humans were hunter-gatherers, not farmers and industrialists. We can't move around as easily as our long-ago ancestors could. Yes, we have the technology to move farther and faster, but we don't have any relatively uninhabited areas to move into, now. Large scale migration will cause wars.

Frankly, with the population density we have now, even another ice age would cause similar problems at the global level - people would need to move in massive numbers for that, too.

We even have problems with depletion of resources if the climate does not change at all. For instance, a lot of industrial scale farming that "feeds the world" with exports is drawing down groundwater supplies and is not indefinitely sustainable. And, as Jan Steinman keeps posting, we really don't have an inexhaustible supply fossil fuels, either.

Humans are clearly going to have to change to adapt. I am sorry to say that I don't see us doing so collectively in an intelligent manner. And, I expect the unintelligent manner will involve a major population crash with a lot of agony.

But, that doesn't mean we should all just give up and not try to be intelligent and get others to behave intelligently.

And, to be intelligent about the realities of our situation, I strongly suggest that the people who purport to inform us about science stop with the "click bait" titles and unrealistic slants to their articles.

Have you noticed, climate alarmists cherry-pick the data to fit their agenda?

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Cherry picking data and examples is normal behavior for politics and propaganda. Only direct lies seem to be out of place in that arena.

But, "science" is supposed to be different - more objective, considering uncertainty and not dismissing "inconvenient" information.

In the case of this article, it isn't so much the actual science that is the issue, but rather its use to "blame" humans instead of looking at the issue objectively and perhaps with some insights on what similar thinking could lead to in the way of better understanding.

The consequences of needing to add or subtract a "leap second" are just not serious issues for the average person living on Earth. The actual lengths of days (the number of seconds between noon one day and noon the next day) varies over the year, anyway, because the Earth's orbit is somewhat elliptical, so the daily number of degrees of revolution around the Sun varies during the year. So even with constant rotational speed, the total number of degrees needed to complete a solar day varies by enough to warrant tables like this: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/sunrise?month=6 . Look at the changes in solar noon time, which compares actual rotation to the standard 24 hour clock. But, it really doesn't have any more effect on the climate than we are already accustomed to.

So, when the article says "These changes could have major implications for humanity's future," in the context of "humans are too blame," I see that as conflating some interesting tidbits of science with a political agenda in a misleading manner. Yes, the total of the natural effects and human-induced effects are seemingly significant to climate changes in the long-term future. But they are not overall dominated by the human effects, and we are still having a hard time understanding exactly how those factors cause ice ages that come and go on the frequencies seen in the geological data.

Plus, we could not stop the Earth from wobbling or the day from getting longer no matter how hard we tried, anyway.

Humans have already lived through bigger changes in wobble and day length due to the ice ages coming and going. So, my opinion is that scientists, and publications purporting to report "science", should be working to promote understanding, not trying to mislead readers to promote agendas.

 

[Burt Reynolds]

This topic has been so politicized. Institutional corruption is inevitable, human nature and all. That’s government, religion, science, corporations, etc.. Trust in our institutions are at an all time low, as this corruptions has been laid bare by the indelible ink that is the internet. I read the US government promised to lower the global thermostat (or prevent an increase) by x degrees Celsius if we give them over a trillion bucks. Seriously. These models are known to be flawed, these scientific studies are funded by the same institutions that need your tax dollars, and click bait articles like this just contribute to the deterioration of some people’s trust.

Yes, we should treat or environment MUCH better than we are. But I stopped believing in these BS claims after the 845th climate prediction made didn’t come true. I’m done.

 

[COLGeek]

Cherry picking data and examples is normal behavior for politics and propaganda. Only direct lies seem to be out of place in that arena.

Humans have already lived through bigger changes in wobble and day length due to the ice ages coming and going. So, my opinion is that scientists, and publications purporting to report "science", should be working to promote understanding, not trying to mislead readers to promote agendas.

Just keep in mind that selective uses of data is not exclusive to one side of the argument.

I agree on greater objectivity and if one were to take a step back, remove any blinders, they would see data/studies from around the globe that suggests we have serious issues.

It is more than okay to disagree with each other. The loudest voice is not always the most correct.

What is bad for humanity is to ignore all the "indicators on the dashboard" of the planet. While no single "indicator/gauge" tells us if our "engine" is fully healthy, when multiple "indicators/gauges" start flashing we might better take a look under the hood.

 

[NilesCanada]

Ken,

I criticized an article which states "Earth is wobbling and days are getting longer — and humans are to blame". Your statements about "climate stability in the Holocene" are not relevant to the criticism. There was far more ice melting between 25,000 years ago and 15,000 years ago than there has been in the last 10.000 years. So, wobble effects, day length effects, etc. are not "unprecedented" at the levels we are seeing now. And, even what we are seeing now is not all due to human actions. (And, your graph really needs to go back about 3 million years - it doesn't even go back to the previous warm period - so there really isn't a comparison between "natural" and "human influenced" in it.)

What I criticized is the article writers' attempt at propaganda that is easily discredited. That just provides evidence for others who do not want to believe that humans have caused any of the changes we see actually happening. That is why I am saying that writing stuff like that is backfiring if the intent is to make people worry about climate change.

I also think that article writers who talk about "stopping" sea level rise are undermining their own efforts. They talk about effects that are too near-term for us to actually stop.

What I think we really need is some specifics about what near term changes are going to be, and how soon and how bad. If they can predict that, they will gain some credibility among the skeptics and nay-sayers.

I am personally dealing with sea level rise issues on property that I own and a nearby historic town. We are planning for it and executing the plans, rather than telling everybody to "save us" by changing their ways. We know that (1) the changes that will cause us severe damage will occur, no matter what the world's human population does now, and (2), the same flooding has happened several times before in the last few million years, anyway. The real issue for us is how fast it will be occurring.

Similar concepts would be useful for other climate change issues. Where will it get hotter, wetter, drier, etc, and how much and how fast. Those are harder to predict than sea level, because they are not averaged over the whole globe. Some places will get more habitable, and some less habitable.

Our real problem is our current population density. When such major changes happened before, humans were hunter-gatherers, not farmers and industrialists. We can't move around as easily as our long-ago ancestors could. Yes, we have the technology to move farther and faster, but we don't have any relatively uninhabited areas to move into, now. Large scale migration will cause wars.

Frankly, with the population density we have now, even another ice age would cause similar problems at the global level - people would need to move in massive numbers for that, too.

We even have problems with depletion of resources if the climate does not change at all. For instance, a lot of industrial scale farming that "feeds the world" with exports is drawing down groundwater supplies and is not indefinitely sustainable. And, as Jan Steinman keeps posting, we really don't have an inexhaustible supply fossil fuels, either.

Humans are clearly going to have to change to adapt. I am sorry to say that I don't see us doing so collectively in an intelligent manner. And, I expect the unintelligent manner will involve a major population crash with a lot of agony.

But, that doesn't mean we should all just give up and not try to be intelligent and get others to behave intelligently.

And, to be intelligent about the realities of our situation, I strongly suggest that the people who purport to inform us about science stop with the "click bait" titles and unrealistic slants to their articles.

@Unclear Engineer thank you for taking the time to post responses that should be published separately on this website: they are that eloquent. I was just about to abandon space.com for their one-sided climate reporting, but now realize that there are other well-informed STEM readers who have the patience to sort through the chaff.

Kudos to you and @Betamax_man for speaking up.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

COLGeek,

I think you know that I agree that there are serious issues facing humanity, and that most of them are fundamentally caused by human activities that damage our environment.

So, please take to heart my plea for this website to step back from the click-bait and agenda-specific propaganda content, and report the news objectively and provide for discussion of the science in an objective manner.

I also look at https://spacenews.com/ for industry news, and https://phys.org/space-news/ for science news, along with other science sites. So I am aware of the differences with what Space.com chooses to report and chooses to not report, and how it sometimes slants the articles that it does report.

But, Space.com does provide a better forum for discussions of those things, which is the main reason that I still participate here.

I know that it takes effort to moderate a forum like this to keep it from devolving into useless, even nasty banter between political foes. And, I appreciate that you do not completely obstruct posts about hypotheses that are on the fringes of (or even beyond) credibility, unlike some other forums that seem to believe that compliance with the Big Bang Theory must be enforced on all posts.

So, please consider the effects of your style. Do you really need whatever extra "clicks" you get from headlining this story as "Earth is wobbling and days are getting longer — and humans are to blame ," instead of something more objective like "Human activities having some detectable effects on Earth's day length and axis wobble"?

 

[warptek]

I've got the answer. Equatorial thrusters. I propose a ring of thrusters around the equator and simultaneously firing them for 3 seconds. Heck, we can even take care of that pesky wobble.

 

[Classical Motion]

I say block, catch and divert incident sunlight to the poles. Making the poles tropic zones. Being heated from the poles will form temperature bands around the planet. Banded climate zones with an equatorial glacier. A ring of ice. The height of the ice can be modulated with pole intensity. We might gain much new land and keep our water.

Manufacture our own climate. How would life respond to constant light? Could life adapt to uninterrupted light? Does plant life need a dormant period? Or a daily light cycle?

What of the microscopic and the algae?

Would production levels jump? Or a mass extinction?

 

[Unclear Engineer]

I'm betting on mass extinction if we try to control our planet's climate to suit our whims. We don't seem to have the "owners' instruction manual" and would probably screw it up with "unintended consequences". We seem to be really "good" at creating those!

Even with human-engineered systems, my philosophy for staying out of trouble is "Don't mess with it unless and until you have a full understanding of how it works."

People who try things with incomplete understandings do things like blow up Chernobyl and melt Three Mile Island unit-2, because they thought they new what they were doing, but they were missing an important concept.

 

[Classical Motion]

That’s a poor comparison. Using such one could say all concepts are disproved with miss-application.

Which would mean all concepts.

And with the tenacity of life, I’ll bet it can consume all the energy we can give it. And I’ll bet all would adapt very quickly.

It’s just supposition. I would think indoor farmers might know such things, at least for eatable plants.

And if the plants are subject to constant light, the micro world around them is too.

But I have no direct knowledge. From what I know constant light might kill a plant.

On the other hand, the restrictions of light might hide and limit what life can really do.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

We will almost certainly get a chance to try to develop an artificial ecosystem in some sort of habitat on the Moon, where we could use bioengineered versions of plants, and maybe microbes, etc. to support humans. It would be nice if it naturally turned exhaled CO2 into oxygen and vegetables, along with recycled pee and poop.

But, small systems like that tend to be dynamically unstable. Something goes off-target and the whole system tends to collapse. If human life in a colony on the Moon or Mars depends on such a system NOT failing, then it will probably need at least some sort of redundancy in isolated sections. And probably some back-up stores or mechanical alternatives.

We will probably learn a lot trying to make such a system work successfully and reliably. But, trying to replace the multi-faceted ecosystem on Earth with such a simplified engineered system would probably end up failing, because the external system on Earth is always changing and challenging. In comparison, the Moon is a pretty stable and predictable set of external conditions.

Regarding whether natural plants need periods of darkness, yes, many are evolved to use changes in the length of photo periods to determine when to bloom and set fruit. It serves as sort of a plant calendar to the seasons. But, algae probably does not need that. Plants are more evolved than most of us realize. Some do make clicking sounds when disturbed. Some algae seem to be able to chemically determine their situations in mixed species liquids and "decide" when to release toxins. And then there is this https://www.geturbanleaf.com/blogs/lighting/how-long-should-you-let-plant-sleep , which says that plants "do math" at night to adjust to the periods of darkness. Sounds interesting, but I can't vouch for it being accurate.

 

[Ken Fabian]

Unclear Engineer - I find it dismaying that at the point in time when every real world indicator of climate change shows strong signs of global warming and acceleration of the disruption of an exceptional period of climate stability that was especially kind to humans, which multiple top level science based reports tell us (if we couldn't figure it out) will have very serious consequences you appear more concerned that an article showing Earth's rotation is affected is alarmist than concerned about the climate problem.

Changes to Earth's rotation isn't especially surprising given the state of the world's ice sheets - losing 60 tons of ice per year now for every human on Earth, which spreads that mass and some extra (from local gravity effects) towards the equator - and, sure, that specific impact of melting ice sheets seems unlikely to present as problematic but it is indicative of the wide ranging consequences of climate change. Looking closely at any potential change that climate change might conceivably induce finds that fingerprint.

The sea level effects of ice loss does appear to matter much more than Earth rotation effects but to view concerns about it as over the top hysterics sounds like over the top hysterics. I don't expect climate policies to be affected - I want them based on the top level science based advice, within which this impact seems almost inconsequential - for the sake of the many effects that are not inconsequential.

The "always changing" arguments have it backwards - always changing is indicative of high susceptibility of climate to change . Suggestions a warmer world might be, will be a better world passes over the importance to agriculture of climate stability. An exceptional period of climate stability has just been ended as a consequence of human actions and there are good reasons to think that the stability - not any particular global temperature - is what matters most for species and ecosystems doing well at the time.

The problem is serious enough that getting political is entirely appropriate and pressing people's buttons about it to induce more engagement - given that those holding the highest Offices widely refuse to see it as a duty of care - is legitimate politics. But you seem to have no great issue with people holding hard to doubt and denial - it just doesn't press your buttons?

Climate science has given the world a gift beyond price- the window of opportunity to act. Activists sounding the alarm in response to the inadequacies of the responses to it in mainstream law and governance is symptom of those greater failures, not their cause.

 

[Atlan0001]

Environmentalists know what they can do with their lusts for power and their tyrannical herd instinct to imprison and indoctrinate 'All Mankind' to the human herd (the herd human). I'm of the philosophy and bents of Moses, Patrick Henry, and Malcolm Reynolds of 'Firefly' fame. As Winston Churchill was wont to say, never in the history of Mankind will so many owe so much to so few of Mankind, because otherwise environmentalism is going to face the Chinese war of a thousand (million, billion, trillion) little cuts that will bleed its inevitable eventual infinities of tyrannies to death . . . and the world and Frontier-less (freedom-less) Mankind with it.

If environmentalist tyrants (and it is an advocacy of power and tyranny) can have their way here, then the resistance should be allowed its way too!

At any and all costs, open the space frontier to Mankind's breakout, colonization, and expansion in a growing freeing! Otherwise, it will be as I said above! Mankind is not a lower, less complex, complicated, and chaotic, more nakedly singular species of mind-life!

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Ken,

As I posted earlier, your argument about the "exceptional stability" of the climate in the "Holocene" lacks perspective. For proper perspective, you need to go back over several periods of alternating glaciation and melting. That will show you that in previous interglacial periods, which were short compared to the periods over which glaciers and ice caps built up, there were periods not really dissimilar to the last 15 thousand years - at least until the last couple of hundred, where humans seem to have started substantially affecting the atmospheric chemistry. About 120,000 years ago, sea level was about 25 feet higher than it is, now. And, about 25,000 years ago, sea level was about 325 feet lower than it is now, because there were ice caps in North America and Eurasia as much as 2 miles thick. Humans did not cause any of that variation.

And, considering that those effects have repeated cyclically for about the previous 3 million years, if humans had not caused unnatural CO2 emissions (and other effects) "the best science" is that there would be another ice age coming. That would also be quite a disruptive climate change.

So, to me, "the best science" is that we have built up a large population during a short period of unusually beneficial climate, and no matter how that period comes to an end, it will mean trouble for sustaining such a large population. Jan Steinman probably will add that we also used fossil energy sources that we will exhaust, and not have those available to deal with extreme heat or extreme cold, whichever we get.

So, we all three seem to agree that we are going to have some severe problems coming at us at a global level. How we deal with it is what is being debated.

Politics is clearly going to be involved in reaching a solution, or in avoiding reaching a solution.

Part of our problem is that our leaders, both career political and media "influencers", have very low trust among large segments of our populations. So, when they start trying to convince people to do things that the people really do not want to do, or to stop doing things that they really want to do, there is a tendency to just look for an excuse to not trust those "leaders" so they can continue to do as they want..

All I am trying to do is ask that people who want to convince others to make uncomfortable changes to stop using hype tactics that are so transparently unrealistic that they further erode trust.

I took issue with the title and some of the text in this story because it seemed to be a blatant example of improperly hyping a scientific finding to make it appear to be a serious and unprecedented problem. It clearly is not unprecedented in Earth's history, and it really is not a problem in of itself. At most, it is a side effect of the big problems we will have when the ice caps in Greenland and some of Antarctica melt and raise sea level, inundating major portions of our coastal infrastructures. Changes in rainfall and temperatures will also affect agriculture and even habitability in various ways in different regions.

That is what we need to concentrate on. What is coming, how fast, and how do we deal with it.

Yes, making people who live high energy demand life styles feel guilty about the effects of their energy uses on others might help them curtain some energy uses and even try to help the ones most affected by the changes. But, "blaming" them for seemingly inconsequential micro second changes in the Earth's rotation rate, and pretending nothing like that happens naturally to even greater degrees, is just throwing away the trust we need to get people to do the things you are championing.

 

[Atlan0001]

There are so few people, even here on the forums, who understand anything of history and freedom and how far freedom fighters will go, even in a nature's unrealized war of littlest cuts leading to rivers of blood, to get it.

To talk anything, anything at all, benign-like but the opening of the space frontier and accelerating expansion of life from the Earth into it, is to talk fantasies and nonsense. Stephen Hawking knew that when he gave Mankind an optimistic maximum of 1,000 years to extinction if breakout did not begin ASAP!

Moses told the Pharoah of Egypt in no uncertain terms in a parallelism to modern speak, "Give my people space frontier and freedom, or watch your world, your whole world, die around you!" Moses's Jews were willing to die, too, with the death of that world if it came down to that. Ours would die anyway, as Stephen Hawking among others, including me, predict, even without a fight because of the sheer nature of a black-hole-enclosed and enclosing world system.

Otherwise, Earth has been slowing down in its rotation on its axis, the Moon widening out in its orbit, since day-one billions of years ago! I remember a reading an article by a geologist when I was young, talking about when the Earth had a fourteen hour day, midnight to midnight, rather than the twenty-four it has now. Its inexorable slowing down in it rotation, and the Moon's inching out in its orbit of the Earth, is nothing new.