Perhaps accept leap seconds at the ends of months other than June or December, but issue a warning? (And similarly for negative leap seconds?) @dashdashado On Sat, Oct 6, 2018 at 7:42 PM Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
Hal Murray writes:
A leap second other than June or December is probably an error in the input data.
Only if the input is intended to be the current official list of leap seconds. The recent code change was intended to make the code match the official rules better, which lets us better test software on outlandish-but-valid input. It's like the long-existing tzdb code that supports negative leap seconds, something that would also be an input error in data intended to be the official list.
Steve Allen wrote:
This is definitely true in this era. Assuming (bad thing to do) that rotation of the crust does not undergo another strong deceleration the two dates per year should be enough for the next 40 years.
My eyeballing of the "extrapolated long-term trend" of Figure 18 of Stephenson et al. 2016 says that 2 leap seconds per year should be enough until 2300 or so.
This prediction is based entirely on historical data, though, and global warming is throwing another monkey wrench into such predictions. Although there's not a consensus on how global warming should affect length of day, you might be amused to read Mazzarella & Scafetta 2018, which reports that since 1850 the length of day has been negatively correlated with the global sea surface temperature, which suggests that global warming should mean that leap seconds will be rarer. If they're right, we may have to wait even longer than Stephenson et al. suggest before worrying about leap seconds other than June or December.
Stephenson FR, Morrison LV, Hohenkerk CY. Measurement of the Earth's rotation: 720 BC to AD 2015. Proc Royal Soc A. 2016 Dec 7;472:20160404. https://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2016.0404
Mazzarella A, Scafetta N. The Little Ice Age was 1.0–1.5 °C cooler than current warm period according to LOD and NAO. Clim Dyn. 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-018-4122-6