Not only is it spinning WAY faster, it is spinning around a center that is different from the past 5 Billion years or so. It is centered around Washington DC.
You too? For a while now I've felt like time is moving at the speed of a 78rpm record and I'm stuck at 33.
The part I'm disagreeing with is "The force that creates rotation is magnetic" ... never heard that. If you google it, the first result says "because it formed in the accretion disk of a cloud of hydrogen that collapsed down from mutual gravity and needed to conserve its angular momentum. It continues to spin because of inertia." Nothing about magnetic fields. Inertia relates to the first law of dynamics I quoted above, it will continue to spin until a force acts on it to stop it ... the rotation slows due to friction but for it to speed up would take an opposite force greater than the friction ... which is why the scientists say it's unusual.
These democratic socialist communist fascist socialist communists aren't content with destroying America. They're trying to destroy clocks, too!
A little clarification if you don't mind. By "It continues to spin because of inertia", you refer to the Earth itself as "it"? And I'd argue against the notion that there are "no" external forces to speed or slow its inertia. Splitting hairs, but I'd say that there are "no significant" external forces. Other celestial bodies do act on it in an insignificant way (e.g., the moon causing tides). The gravity of the sun and its rotation is the most significant force acting on the rotation of the Earth because of its distance and size. There isn't another force that is significantly large sized enough to either add or reduce that inertia. EDIT: After thinking about it, there actually is. The Moon's orbital distance increases about an inch per year and that increase acts on the rotation of BOTH bodies causing an approximate 15us (had to look that part up) increase in the length of the day.
So this phenomenon is actually kind of related to diminishing marginal returns. As you age, every future time unit (day/month/year) represents a progressively smaller percentage of your life, e.g., from 10 years old to 11 years old represents 10% of someone's life, but from 50 to 51 years old represents only 2%.
Bad math .... it says "if the rotation rate continues to speed up" ... not assuming it stays the same. Plus, you have to factor in how far we've wondered from the last positive leap second.
The hole in the ozone was creating drag as we rotated. Once we got the hole smaller, we spun faster. I just made that up, but it sounds legit
Well, staying at the same rate wasn't the assumption the scientist was making when he said a leap second might need to be added, the article assumes continued acceleration, not the speed staying the same.
Atmospheric tides, caused by the sun's heating of the atmosphere, also have a significant accelerative impact on earth's rotation. More energy retained = more acceleration. Hypothetically, anyways.
Has this been proved out? It's informative and something I never thought about, but makes sense in theory.
OK, if it accelerates at 1.59 milliseconds per year in 34 years we would need a negative leap one second.
Not in any true scientific sense, but since it sounds good to liberals it automatically becomes “settled science”.
Now you are just forgetting to factor in how far we are currently from requiring a leap second. If we are currently 30 milliseconds away from requiring a leap second, or 500 milliseconds away, it makes a significant difference in how many years it will take to get there. I get your post was to make the scientist sound dumb, but he probably knows more about this than you and I do, and wouldn't have suggested it as a possibility if we were decades or centuries away from it happening.
The article also says there is a 70% chance we have reached minimum velocity which means we won't have to have a negative leap second.
