HEADLINE: “Putting The Alarmist Spin On The Earth’s Rotation”, By Willis Eschenbach

“So I ran across this headline and subhead out on the interwebz: “China Disrupts Earth’s Rotation: NASA Confirms Massive Project Is Slowing the Planet With Unprecedented Global Consequences”

BAD SCIENCE JOURNALISM

Putting The Alarmist Spin On The Earth’s Rotation

5 hours ago

Willis Eschenbach

54 Comments

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

So I ran across this headline and subhead out on the interwebz:

“China Disrupts Earth’s Rotation”: NASA Confirms Massive Project Is Slowing the Planet With Unprecedented Global Consequences

In a groundbreaking revelation, NASA confirms that China’s monumental Three Gorges Dam project is subtly altering Earth’s rotation, raising global environmental concerns.

Intrigued, I read on … and on … and on … and finally down near the end, I find that the NASA geniuses have estimated that the Three Gorges Dam will increase the length of a day by … wait for it … 0.06 microseconds.

And how big is that?

Well, it will increase the day length by a whopping 0.00000000007% …

And bizarrely, this hot-off-the-presses news is two decades old. The source of this claim is a 2005 NASA JPL paper that’s here.

In addition, the smallest directly observed change in Earth’s day length (LOD) is 0.001 seconds (1 millisecond), measured on August 2, 2001, when Earth’s rotation briefly accelerated. This measurement was made using space geodetic techniques, including Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) and Global Positioning System (GPS) data. Changes smaller than that can’t be measured with current technology.

So this claim about the Three Gorges Dam would have to be sixteen THOUSAND times larger to be even measurable …

I don’t know which is more aggravating—the hype that the media puts on these trivial issues, the fact that this is from a 2005 paper, the fact that the claim is sixteen thousand times too small to measure, or the fact that there are highly educated NASA scientists wasting their time on this nonsense.

People are screaming about how the proposed budget cuts to NASA are going to cripple US science … but given the fact that NASA megabrains have time to jerk around making calculations and claims about things that are far too small to even measure tells me that there’s plenty of NASA fat to cut.

But that’s not all the terrifying news for today. We also have the following story about how bad things are. Here’s the headline and subhead:

Scientists may have figured out why a potent greenhouse gas is rising. The answer is scary.
Methane emissions spiked starting in 2020. Scientists say they have found the culprit.

I gotta say, the demand for scared scientists must be at an all-time high. And just what does this ultra-terrifying methane “spike” look like out here in the real world? To determine that, I got the data about the changes in atmospheric methane and CO2, and converted them to calculated changes in downwelling radiation using the IPCC formulas for the conversions. Here’s a graph showing the “scary spike”.

Pretty scary, all right.

My explanation for all of this is that the climate alarmists feel the ground shifting under their feet as taxpayer dollars dry up, and they are running as fast as they can to keep the population terrified so their grift can continue.

Sigh … at least it seems like we’re winning the battle to end this expensive, suicidal con job that’s already cost us hundreds of billions of dollars.

My best regards to all, keep up the good fight

w.

PS—As is my habit, I ask that when you comment, you quote the exact words you are referring to. Prevents endless misunderstandings.

PPS—I’m fed up with the endless insults from various folks. I’m going to start snipping them out of comments. If you think that calling names is how adults discuss contentious issues, this isn’t the place for you.

BOTTOMLINE: “My explanation for all of this is that the climate alarmists feel the ground shifting under their feet as taxpayer dollars dry up, and they are running as fast as they can to keep the population terrified so their grift can continue.”