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by Someone 752 days ago
It is statistically significant. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00850-x:

“Earth’s rotation seems to have accelerated, outpacing the time standard, and raising the possibility that an unprecedented ‘negative’ leap second might soon be required — a daunting prospect in a world reliant on consistent timekeeping.

• Agnew1 reports that human-induced melting of polar ice exerts a slowing effect on Earth’s rotation, effectively delaying a decision on the need for a negative leap second.”

Global warming moved the date that we would need a negative leap second out by 3 years.

1 comments

This paper was by a cosmologist with heaps of papers in other areas and just a single paper in this area, highly publicised in the climate change news.

All the reports around this were hyperbolic. I'd be waiting for a bit more research in this area. It reminds of other recent paper that said possible close passes by other stars had a huge impact on the environment according to simulations. No mention of the problem predicting orbits over tens of thousands of years.