Guardian claims climate change has shifted Earth’s axis
Image: Tom Ridout/Alamy
A few days ago, the Guardian made another one of it’s sensational claims about the climate, but if you look at the article they published, all is not what it seems.
It is not a long article, so I will quote it in full in italics, interspersed with my own comments.
The massive melting of glaciers as a result of global heating has caused marked shifts in the Earth’s axis of rotation since the 1990s, research has shown. It demonstrates the profound impact humans are having on the planet, scientists said.
Whenever you see ‘scientists said’, you can almost guarrantee it is nothing more than an appeal to authority, in the hope you will accept it without question.
The planet’s geographic north and south poles are the point where its axis of rotation intersects the surface, but they are not fixed. Changes in how the Earth’s mass is distributed around the planet cause the axis, and therefore the poles, to move.
In the past, only natural factors such as ocean currents and the convection of hot rock in the deep Earth contributed to the drifting position of the poles. But the new research shows that since the 1990s, the loss of hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice a year into the oceans resulting from the climate crisis has caused the poles to move in new directions.
There are as everyone knows, two sets of poles; the true and the magnetic, and this article does not say which is being referred to. The magnetic poles wander around all by themselves, and have been every since we have been recording them.
The scientists found the direction of polar drift shifted from southward to eastward in 1995 and that the average speed of drift from 1995 to 2020 was 17 times faster than from 1981 to 1995.
Since 1980, the position of the poles has moved about 4 metres in distance.
The magnetic poles have been moving faster in recent years, but we don’t know if this is normal, or a prelude to one of the periodic complete reversals, which happen about every 700,000 years.
“The accelerated decline [in water stored on land] resulting from glacial ice melting is the main driver of the rapid polar drift after the 1990s,” concluded the team, led by Shanshan Deng, from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
This seems to me nothing more than an assumption.
Gravity data from the Grace satellite, launched in 2002, had been used to link glacial melting to movements of the pole in 2005 and 2012, both following increases in ice losses. But Deng’s research breaks new ground by extending the link to before the satellite’s launch, showing human activities have been shifting the poles since the 1990s, almost three decades ago.
Alarmists are fond of ‘linking’ one event to another, usually with no evidence being provided. I could ‘link’ the price of tomatoes to how fast my hair grows, but that doesn’t make it true.
The research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, showed glacial losses accounted for most of the shift, but it is likely that the pumping up of groundwater also contributed to the movements.
It is likely. Another assumption.
Groundwater is stored under land but, once pumped up for drinking or agriculture, most eventually flows to sea, redistributing its weight around the world. In the past 50 years, humanity has removed 18tn tonnes of water from deep underground reservoirs without it being replaced.
No evidence is provided to support this claim of non-replaced groundwater, so again it is an assumption presented as fact.
Vincent Humphrey, at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and not involved in the new research said it showed how human activities have redistributed huge amounts of water around the planet: “It tells you how strong this mass change is – it’s so big that it can change the axis of the Earth.” However, the movement of the Earth’s axis is not large enough to affect daily life, he said: it could change the length of a day, but only by milliseconds.
Vincent Humphrey’s comments here are possibly the most important part of this article, but note how the Guardian makes sure it says he was not involved in the research, effectively saying you can ignore what he says.
Prof Jonathan Overpeck, at the University of Arizona, US, told the Guardian previously that changes to the Earth’s axis highlighted “how real and profoundly large an impact humans are having on the planet”.
Professor Jonathan Overpeck is an alarmist who was Working Group 1 Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC 4th Assessment in 2007, and also Working Group 2 Lead Author for the IPCC 5th Assessment in 2014, so he is hardly likely to say anything else.
Some scientists argue that the scale of this impact means a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared. Since the mid-20th century, there has been a marked acceleration of carbon dioxide emissions and sea level rise, the destruction of wildlife and the transformation of land by farming, deforestation and development.
There has been an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere certainly, but as Greg Wrightstone has pointed out many times, there has been no increase in species loss. There has been deforestation due to development, but as for the transformation of land due to farming, so what? We are now producing more food on less land, creating record crop production almost every year, yet this is apparently a problem?
If this axis shift will have no effect on daily life, this is in effect a non-story, so is nothing more than a typical example of the Guardian fearmongering for the sake of it, to maintain the alarmist rhetoric that we are destroying the planet.
See more here: theguardian.com
The Australian climate scientist Jennifer Marohasy commented in June 2020 that:
“The Guardian newspaper is the nastiest of publications, employing the world’s whitest and most vindictive propagandists: male and female. For so many years it has targeted, and ran vendettas against, any academic who happens to be sceptical of catastrophic human-caused global warming. Graham Redfearn just makes stuff-up. Yet the most educated of our opinion leaders believe him, often on the basis it was published by The Guardian!”
About the author: Andy Rowlands is a university graduate in space science and British Principia Scientific International researcher, writer and editor who co-edited the new climate science book, ‘The Sky Dragon Slayers: Victory Lap‘
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Alan
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You could argue that the poles are going back to the positions they were in before the earth entered the ice age. That must be a good thing, surely.
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Barry
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I think I will start a new fear of the pole shifting creating anti gravity where in everything not attached securely will be flung off the earth to hover and watch the earth spin under you. Maybe we can get the UN to chain one leg to earth to prevent that happening. Better yet if you can organize a gofundme page I will make sure this doesn’t happen with of coarse most of the funding going to research in this area. Please send money earmarked for climate change.
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tom0mason
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The Guardian! All the credibility of a Unicorn fart.
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MARK MILLER
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LMAO!
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Moffin
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To stabilize things we have to get rid of the moon. The moon’s a plurry lunatic.
News papers need to peer review each other where the newspaper with the most consistently accurate reporting wins an ” Oscar “.
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julian
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“How real and profoundly large an impact” = 4 meters of pole shift? What superlatives would apply to a 30 meter pole shift?
“Study says” = someone made it up.
Guardian is the wokest of the woke. Greta Thunberg has more science schooling than the entire staff of the Guardian, -that is why they admire her so much.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Andy,
Neither the Guardian article nor you refer to the Law of the Conservation of Angular Momentum and the analogy of a spinning ice skater who changes the position of the arms and other parts of the body to change the rate of the rotation.
This omission seems to be more critically important than anything else that might be written.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Graeme Mochrie
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I read this article and interpreted it was another injection of fear into a population sensitised by decades of hyperbole and misinformation. If the past year of infection has shown anything it is that very few in the population have any scientific ability, and totally lack the ability to deconstruct and analyse what they read. The dark ages have not passed, enlightenment has been buried and even university educated people seem to leave, lacking critical thinking capacity.
How do you encourage non thinking people to think?
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MARK MILLER
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LMAO!
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Artelia
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IF anyone really cared about our planet, they would be introducing laws to make farming more environmentally friendly. This would make food healthier, our water cleaner,make less water go back out to sea, stop water run off, flooding, landslides, droughts, silting of rivers and estuaries. The way we FARM has such an impact on everything. Carbon, CO2 is stored in humus rich soils, in hedgerows, trees and shrubs. Animals, especially ruminants like COWS, horses and sheep are very beneficial for our soils and farms.
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F
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https://www.warningmessage.org/library/msccasl.htm – Climate change and Sunday Law
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