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A new Nature paper outlines the relationship between rising temperatures and the literal rotation of the Earth.
Thinking too hard about time is a little like thinking too hard about blinking; it seems natural and intuitive until suddenly you’re sweating and it makes no sense at all. At least, that’s how I felt when I came across an incredible new study published in Nature this afternoon by Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, suggesting that climate change might be affecting global timekeeping.
Our internationally agreed-upon clock, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), consists of two components: the one you’re familiar with, which is the complete rotation of the Earth around its axis, as well as the average taken from 400 atomic clocks around the world. Since the 1970s, UTC has added 27 leap seconds at irregular intervals to keep pace with atomic clocks as the Earth’s rotation has gradually slowed. Then that rotation started to speed up in 2016; June 29, 2022, set a record for the planet’s shortest day, with the Earth completing a full rotation 1.59 milliseconds short of 24 hours. Timekeepers anticipated at that point that we’d need our first-ever negative leap second around 2026 to account for the acceleration.
But such a model doesn’t properly account for the transformative changes the planet is undergoing due to climate change — specifically, the billions of tons of ice melting from Greenland and Antarctica every year.
Using mathematical modeling, Agnew found that the melt-off, as measured by gravity-tracking satellites, has again decreased the Earth’s angular velocity to the extent that a negative leap second will actually be required three years later than estimates, in 2029.
While a second here or there might not seem like much on a cosmic scale, as Agnew explained to me, these kinds of discrepancies throw into question the entire idea of basing our time system on the physical position of the Earth. Even more mind-bogglingly, Agnew’s modeling makes the astonishing case that so long as it is, climate change will be “inextricably linked” to global timekeeping.
Confused? So was I, until Agnew talked me through his research. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
How did you get involved in researching this? I’d never have expected there to be a relationship between climate change and timekeeping.
Pure accident. I’m a geophysicist and I have an avocational interest in timekeeping, so I know all about leap seconds and the history of atomic clocks. I thought about writing a paper figuring out statistically what the next century would bring in terms of leap seconds.
When I started working on the paper, I realized there was a signal that I needed to allow for, which was the change induced by melting ice — which has been studied, there are plenty of papers on this satellite gravity signal. But nobody has, as far as I can tell, related it to rotation. Mostly because, from a geophysical standpoint, that’s not very interesting.
Interesting. Or, well, I guess not interesting.
I mean, there is geophysical literature on this, but it’s largely, Okay, we see this signal, and gravity doesn’t mesh with what we think we know about ice melt. Does it measure what we think we know about sea level change? How does the geophysics all fit together? And the fact that it changes Earth’s rotation is kind of a side issue.
I did not know about this when I got started on this project; it appeared as I was working on it. I thought, “Wait, I need to allow for this.” And when I did, it produced the — I don’t want to use the words “more important” because of the climate change part, but it produced a secondary result, which was that this potential for a negative leap second became clear.
Walk me through how the ice melting at the poles changes the Earth’s rotation.
This is the part that’s easy to explain. Ice melts. A lot of water that used to be at the poles is now distributed all over the ocean. Some of it is close to the equator. The standard picture for what’s called change of angular velocity because of moment of inertia — ignore all the verbiage — but the standard picture is of an ice skater who is spinning. She has her arms over her head. When she puts her arms out, she will slow down — like the water going from the poles to the equator. And that’s it. This is the simple part of the problem.
So what’s the hard part?
The hard part is explaining the part about the Earth’s core. If you have two things that are connected to each other and rotating and one of them slows down, the other one has to speed up. I have not been able to think of an ice skater-like-metaphor to go with that, but the simple one is if you were to put a bowl of water on a lazy Susan and you spin the bowl, then the water will start to spin. It won’t spin initially, but then it will start.
If you started stirring the water in the other direction, that would slow the Lazy Susan down. And that’s the interaction between the core and the solid part of the Earth.
And is that causing the negative leap second to move back three years?
That’s why the leap second might happen at all. On a very long timescale, what’s happening is that the tides are slowing the Earth down. The Earth being slower than an atomic clock means that you need a positive leap second every so often. That was the case in 1972, when they started using leap seconds. The assumption was that the Earth would just keep slowing down and so there would be more positive leap seconds over time.
Instead, the Earth has sped up, entirely because of the core, and that’s not something that people necessarily anticipated. When you take the effect of melting ice out, it becomes clear there’s this steady deceleration of the core; the core is rotating more and more slowly. If you extrapolate that — which is a somewhat risky thing to do, you can’t really predict what the core is going to do — then you discover that there is a leap second, in 2029. The ice melting is going in the other direction; if the ice melting hadn’t occurred, then the leap second would come even earlier. Is this all making sense?
I think I’m grasping it.
Just so you know, one of the two reviewers of this paper was someone in geophysics who said, “I know all this stuff. I wasn’t familiar with the rotation part. This paper has an awful lot of moving parts.”
So, it’s just a difference of a second. Why does this even matter?
We are all familiar with the problem of not being synchronized — we just went through it. If you forget that we did Daylight Savings Time, then you’re an hour off from everybody else and it’s bewildering and a nuisance.
Same problem with leap seconds, except for us, a second is not a big deal. For a computer network, though, a second is a big deal. And why is that? Well, for example, in the United States, the rules for stock markets say that everything that is done has to be accurately timed to a 20th of a second. In Europe, it’s actually to the nearest 1,000th of a second. If we were all just farmers or something, it wouldn’t be a problem, but there’s this whole infrastructure that’s invisible to us that tells our phones what time it is, and allows GPS to work, and everything else.
The easiest thing to do would be to not have a negative leap second. Indeed, there are plans not to have leap seconds anymore because for computer networks, they’re an enormous problem. They arrive at irregular intervals; some human being has to put the information into the computer; the computer has to have a program that tells it when the leap seconds are; and most computer programs can’t tell whether it’s a plus or minus second because there’s never been a minus before. From the computer network standpoint, it would be simplest to just not do this.
So, you ask, why are we doing this? In 1972, when leap seconds were instituted, there were two communities that cared about precise time. One was the people who cared about the frequency of your radio station and other kinds of telecommunications. They wanted to use atomic clocks with frequencies that didn’t change, but that didn’t mesh with what the Earth was doing.
Who cares about time telling you how the Earth is rotating? Well, the answer then was that there were people who used the stars for celestial navigation. Back then, celestial navigation was used not just for ships, but for airplanes — if you flew across the ocean, there was a guy in the cockpit, an actual navigator, who would use a periscope to look at the stars and locate the plane, if only as sort of a backup system. That community is now gone. Almost nobody uses celestial navigation as a primary, or even a secondary, way of finding out where they are anymore because of GPS.
My own personal view — and I can warn you, there’s a huge amount of dispute about this — is that we’d be fine if we just stopped having leap seconds at all.
Is there a … governing body of time? That forces us to do leap seconds?
There’s a giant tangle of international organizations that deal with this, but the rules were set by the people in charge of keeping radio stations aligned because radio broadcasts were how time signals were distributed back in 1972. So the rule was created. Who makes that decision is something called the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, which uses astronomy to monitor what the Earth is doing. They can predict a little bit in advance where things are going to be, and if within six months things are going to be more than half a second out, they will announce there will be a leap second.
Back to climate change: It seems pretty amazing that something like melting ice can throw things off so much.
All the stuff about negative seconds is important, but it’s only important because of this infrastructure, because we have all these rules. Strip all of that away and the most important result becomes the fact that climate change has caused an amount of ice melt that is enough to change the rotation rate of the entire Earth in a way that’s visible.
How do you talk to people about the gigatons of ice that Greenland loses every year? Do you talk about “water that could cover the entire United States to the depth of X” to get it into people’s minds? Yes, these are small changes in the rotation rate, but just the fact that we can say, “Look, this is slowing down the entire Earth” seems like another way of saying that climate change is unprecedented and important.
How do we proceed, then, if climate change is messing with our system?
There was a lot of resistance to even introducing atomic time. Time was thought of as being about Earth’s rotation and the astronomers didn’t want to give it up. In fact, in the 19th century, observatories would make money by selling time signals to the rest of the community. Then, in the 1950s, the physicists showed up, ran atomic clocks, never looked at the stars, and said, “We can do time better.” The physicists were right. But it took the astronomical community a while to come around to accepting that was how time was going to be defined.
If we get rid of leap seconds then we’d really have cut the connection between the way in which human beings have always thought of time as being, say, from noon to noon, or from sunrise to sunset, and we’d be replacing it with some bunch of guys in a laboratory somewhere running a machine. For some people, it’s very troubling to think of severing the keeping of time from the Earth’s rotation.
You lose a bit of the romance, I think. But clearly, tying our way of describing the linear passage of sequential events to the Earth’s rotation is going to be messy.
Exactly right. There’s a quote from, of all people, St. Augustine, saying, “I know what time is, but if somebody asked me, I can’t tell them.”
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The administration is doubling down on an April 20 end date for the traffic control program.
Congestion pricing has only been in effect in New York City for three months, but its rollout has been nearly as turbulent as the 18-year battle to implement it in the first place.
Trump’s Department of Transportation escalated its threat this week to retaliate against New York if the state’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, or MTA, does not shut down the tolling program by April 20.
The federal agency reposted a CBS New York story on social media that purported it had agreed to allow congestion pricing to remain in place through October, calling the story “a complete lie.”
“Make no mistake — the Trump Administration and USDOT will not hesitate to use every tool at our disposal in response to non-compliance later this month,” the agency said in the post.
The post did not say what those tools might be, but a previous post from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on March 20 made a veiled threat to withhold funding from the state if it did not shut down the tolling program. “The billions of dollars the federal government sends to New York are not a blank check,” he said.
Duffy notified the MTA on February 19 that he was rescinding federal approval of its congestion pricing program, which charges a $9 fee for drivers who enter New York City’s central business district. The toll had only just gone into effect in early January, but there was already evidence that it was reducing traffic. The MTA immediately filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York challenging Duffy’s actions.
The CBS New York story reported on a joint letter that the MTA and USDOT submitted to the presiding judge mapping out a timeline for the case to proceed. The MTA agreed to file an amended complaint by April 18, and the DOT agreed to respond to it by May 27. Following that, the timeline allows for the back-and-forth over evidence leading up to a ruling to potentially stretch until late October. Both parties called for the judge to reach a decision based on written arguments, without a formal trial.
Despite agreeing to this timeline for the case — the whole point of which is to determine the legality of DOT’s order to terminate congestion pricing — the DOT maintains that New York City must stop charging drivers by April 20.
The MTA refuses to do so. “Congestion pricing is in effect,” Regina Kaplan, the attorney for the MTA, said during a pretrial conference call on Wednesday. “We believe it's working, and as we stated in our complaints, we don't intend to turn it off unless there's an order from your honor that we need to do so.”
In response, Dominika Tarczynska, from the U.S. attorney’s office, told the judge that Duffy is “still evaluating what DOT’s options are if New York City does not comply, and there has been no final decision as to, what, if anything will occur on April 20.”
The president’s executive order is already too late to save at least one Arizona plant.
The Trump administration is trying to save coal again. But despite the president’s seemingly forceful actions, there’s little indication he’ll be any more successful at it this time than he was the last time around.
Backed by coal miners in hard hats and high visibility jackets, Trump on Tuesday announced a series of executive orders meant to boost “beautiful, clean coal.” The orders lift barriers to extracting coal on public lands, ask the Department of Energy to consider metallurgical coal a critical mineral, push out compliance with some air quality rules by two years, instruct the Department of Energy to use emergency authorities to keep coal plants open, and direct theattorney general to go after state climate laws that Trump claimed “discriminate” against greenhouse gas-emitting energy sources like coal.
What’s not clear is how much these orders will boost the coal industry, let alone save it. It’s not even clear whether the specific plant Trump said he was saving will burn coal again.
During the announcement, Trump said that his administration would keep open the Cholla Generating Station, an Arizona coal plant that began operating in 1962. The plant’s final two units were slated to be retired this year.
“We will ensure our nation’s critical coal plants remain online and operational,” Trump said. “To that end, I’m instructing Secretary Wright to save the Cholla coal plant in Arizona.”
But according to Arizona Public Service, the utility that co-owns the plant, the plant has already stopped generating power. A spokesperson told me the utility was “aware” of the president’s statement and is “evaluating what it means for the plant.” APS plans on preserving the site, possibly for nuclear power and has “procured reliable and cost-effective generation that will replace the energy previously generated by Cholla Power Plant,” the spokesperson said.
The Department of Energy didn’t return a request for comment.
Trump’s orders repeatedly cite Section 202 of the Federal Power Act, which allows the Secretary of Energy “during a continuance of a war in which the United States is engaged or when an emergency exists” to allow energy facilities to continue to operate on a temporary basis that otherwise would not.
In 2017, the first Trump administration used Section 202 to allow two coal plant units in Virginia to continue operating occasionally when necessary for grid reliability, despite their having been due to close to comply with air quality regulations. Two years later, the electricity market PJM told the Department of Energy that a new transmission line had rendered the emergency authorization unnecessary, and the plants closed in 2019.
The executive orders “don’t seem to realize that natural gas killed coal and if they aren’t banning fracking, none of this matters,” Grid Strategies president Rob Gramlich wrote on X. “Nothing here seems to change the economics, and it’s the economics that have held coal-fired power production down.” (Gramlich is also a Heatmap contributor.)
Of course, the United States has plenty of coal. But many of its uses — including electricity generation — can be easily substituted with other sources, such as natural gas. That’s why U.S. coal production has been falling since 2008.
“Coal is increasingly uncompetitive in deregulated electricity markets,” Seaver Wang, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, told me. That’s because operating a coal-fired power plant comes with all sorts of extra costs that natural gas doesn’t, including the transportation and storage of coal — compare the barges and trains required to move rocks to the neat pipelines gas flows through. The energy research group Energy Innovation has foundthat nearly all coal plants are more expensive to run than the combinations of wind, solar, and storage that might replace them.
“I don’t see the demand drivers for this to remotely bring coal back. I have no idea who would ever invest as a result of this executive order or related policies,” Wang said.
While existing coal plants may stick around for another few years as a result of heightened demand or relaxed regulatory burdens, that’s a far cry from building new coal plants or opening new coal mines. A large coal plant hasn’t opened in the United States since 2013. In 2024, wind and solar generation surpassed coal generation on the grid, according to Ember.
Some 12.3 gigawatts of coal capacity are scheduled to be retired in 2025, according to the Energy Information Administration, making up two-thirds of planned retirements by capacity this year. But coal retirements have also been slowing down, according to EIA data. The 7.5 gigawatts retired last year was the least since 2011.
Jefferies analysts estimated that over 12 gigawatts of coal capacity is due for retirement in 2028. That could be pushed back thanks to the relaxation of the mercury and air toxics rules the president announced Tuesday.
“There is logic to delaying coal retirements to serve incremental high-density load customers like data centers,” the Jefferies analysts wrote. “Not all coal retirements are alike, and the economic-driven transitions will continue to draw support, but the calculus will change with more expensive renewables and natural gas alternatives from tariffs and potential changes to the Inflation Reduction Act.”
This is not the first time a Trump White House has tried to rescue this declining industry. During his first term, then Secretary of Energy Rick Perry proposed that coal and nuclear plants at risk of closing because of low demand have guaranteed payments, known as cost recovery, in order to stay open. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, with a Republican majority, said no to Perry by a vote of 5-0.
Despite the president’s promises throughout his campaign, the coal industry shrunk by a huge degree during his first term, part of a longer trend that brought down coal’s share in the electricity generating sector from about half in 2007 to 16% in 2023. During Trump’s time in office, coal mining jobs declined from 51,000 to 38,000 during the pandemic, and have recovered only to 40,000 today.
When it comes to mines, Wang said, investors would likely be leery of putting money into the sector, given the strong likelihood that a future Democratic administration would be far less friendly to coal. Coal investors “are going to be accounting for the fact that any policy swings are short lived,” Wang told me.
“We all know that lead times for mines are long. Everyone knows this administration only has four years in office. I don’t really expect that this will drive a lot of investment interest,” Wang said.
The critical mineral designation for coal, if it makes it through the Department of Energy’s process, may not change much initially, Wang explained. It could lead to some “beneficial outcomes in terms of agency prioritization,” he said. But much critical minerals policy is still being worked out, and there are few programs that specifically and programmatically target the critical minerals included on lists maintained by either the Department of Energy or the United States Geological Service.
“A lot of the politicking over critical minerals designation is about the expectation of future outcomes that would arise from broad bipartisan interest in critical minerals as a category,” Wang said.
And unlike with other critical minerals, the U.S. is essentially self-sufficient for coal’s industrial and energy uses. We’re not talking about graphite here, let alone praseodymium.
At least so far, the coal industry has not thrilled to having a more friendly figure in the White House, although the share prices of some coal companies are up in afternoon trading. Coal exports in January, the most recent month for which there is data, stood at 7.7 million short tons, compared to 8.4 million short tons a year prior. Central Appalachia coal prices stand at $78 per short ton, compared to $77.35 a year ago.
If nothing else, the announcements provided Trump with the type of photo-op he craves. He even got the opportunity to bash Hillary Clinton. “One thing I learned about the coal miners … they want to mine coal. She was gonna put them in a high-tech industry where you make little cell phones and things,” he told the audience in the White House. Of course, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Sunday touted the “army of millions and millions of people screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones” that Trump’s tariffs will also help generate. But no matter what the president says or does, the coal industry may still be screwed.
Current conditions: States left flooded from recent severe storms are now facing freezing temperatures • Firefighters are battling blazes in Scotland due to unusually warm and dry weather • Hospitals in India are reporting a 25% rise in heat-related illnesses compared to last year. Yesterday the country’s northern state of Rajasthan reached 115 degrees Fahrenheit, about 13 degrees higher than seasonal norms.
President Trump’s sweeping new tariffs came into effect at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, rattling the world’s markets and raising the risk of a global trade war. The levies, which include a 104% tariff on Chinese imports, triggered a mass sell-off in U.S. Treasury bonds, hiking yields as investors worry about a potential recession and flock to alternative safe-haven investments. The price of oil fell for the fifth day in a row to its lowest since 2021, with Brent futures at about $61 per barrel, well below the $65 level that oil producers need in order to turn a profit drilling new wells nationwide. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer explained recently, the tariffs are an outright catastrophe for the oil industry because they threaten a global downturn that would hurt oil demand at a time when oil cartel OPEC+ is increasing its output. Trump’s slate of tariffs will impact the cost of just about everything, from gasoline to e-bikes to LNG to cars. China imposed retaliatory tariffs, increasing them from 34% to 84% in response to the U.S. escalation. Meanwhile, the European Union will vote today on whether to impose its own retaliatory fees. European shares plummeted, as did Asian and Australian stocks.
As Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported today, a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change finds that the transition to clean energy could create a world that is less exposed to energy price shocks and other energy-related trade risks than the world we have today. “We have such a concentration of fossil resources in a few countries,” Steven Davis, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford and the lead author of the study, told Pontecorvo. Transition minerals, by contrast, are less geographically concentrated, so “you have this ability to hedge a little bit across the system.”
The White House issued several executive orders on Tuesday aimed at boosting U.S. coal production and use, pointing to rising electricity demand from artificial intelligence. The series of orders direct federal agencies to:
Trump also said he plans to invoke the Defense Production Act to spur mining operations, “a move that could put the federal purse behind reviving the fading industry,” Reutersreported. Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel, and its use has been in decline since 2007. As of last year, wind and solar combined surpassed coal for U.S. electricity generation.
President Trump signed a separate executive order on Tuesday that targets climate laws at the state level and seeks to remove threats to U.S. “energy dominance,” including “illegitimate impediments to the identification, development, siting, production, investment in, or use of domestic energy resources — particularly oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, geothermal, biofuel, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources.” The order references “state overreach” and suggests that some state and local governments are overstepping their constitutional authority in regulating energy through interstate trade barriers or fines on energy producers. It calls out New York and Vermont for their climate change superfund laws that require fossil fuel companies to pay for their planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. And it mentions California’s carbon cap-and-trade system.
The executive order directs the U.S. attorney general to compile a list of all state and local laws “purporting to address ‘climate change,’” along with ESG, environmental justice, carbon taxes, and anything involving “carbon or ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions,” and put a stop to their enforcement. “The federal government cannot unilaterally strip states’ independent constitutional authority,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul and New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “We are a nation of states — and laws — and we will not be deterred. We will keep advancing solutions to the climate crisis that safeguard Americans’ fundamental right to clean air and water, create good-paying jobs, grow the clean energy economy, and make our future healthier and safer.”
Wood Mackenzie issued its annual U.S. wind energy report this week. It finds that 2024 marked the worst year for new onshore wind capacity in the past decade, with just 3.9 gigawatts installed. Through 2029, the firm expects developers to install another 33 gigawatts of onshore capacity, 6.6 gigawatts of offshore capacity, and carry out 5.5 gigawatts of upgrades and refurbishings. The five-year outlook marks “a 40% decrease quarter-on-quarter from a previous total of 75.8 gigawatts.” The report warns of enduring “uncertainty” thanks to the Trump administration’s attacks on the wind industry. “Growth will happen, but it’s going to be slower,” wrote Michelle Lewis at Electrek. “[Trump] has managed to get some projects canceled, and he’ll make things more of a slog over the next few years.”
President Trump has pulled the U.S. out of international talks to decarbonize the shipping industry and vowed to reciprocate against any fees on U.S. ships, Politicoreported. The International Maritime Organization's Maritime Environmental Protection Conference is unfolding this week in London, where negotiators are trying to agree on a policy to curb shipping pollution through carbon taxation. Shipping accounts for about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Trump reportedly sent a letter to the conference saying “the U.S. rejects any and all efforts to impose economic measures against its ships based on GHG emissions or fuel choice. Should such a blatantly unfair measure go forward, our government will consider reciprocal measures so as to offset any fees charged to U.S. ships and compensate the American people for any other economic harm from any adopted GHG emissions measures.”
“What’s next, a mandate that Americans must commute by horse and buggy?”
–Kit Kennedy, a managing director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in response to Trump’s executive orders aimed at revitalizing the U.S. coal industry.