I think it would be better to refer to the original paper, which can be found free online. http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/472/2196/20160404 Measurement of the Earth's rotation: 720 BC to AD 2015 F. R. Stephenson, L. V. Morrison, C. Y. Hohenkerk Published 7 December 2016.DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2016.0404 Cheers, Oscar van Vlijmen
----Origineel Bericht---- Van : eggert@cs.ucla.edu Datum : 08/12/2016 21:43 Aan : elseifthen@gmx.com Cc : tz@iana.org Onderwerp : Re: [tz] Earth's day lengthens by two milliseconds a century
Thanks for the heads-up; I installed the attached patch into the development repository.
When this news was published in today's Los Angeles Times, commenters jumped on the story and said that the math was all wrong, and that a 7-hour error after 2500 years cannot possibly be caused by an increase of the length-of-day by an average of 1.8 ms/century (i.e., 18 μ/s//year). The amusing thing wasn't merely that the commenters were scientifically illiterate: it was that they were sure they were right, that the "liberal" media were wrong, and that this had something to do with global warming being a hoax.
For what it's worth, the only paper I found on the subject of human-caused global warming's effect on the length-of-day estimated an increase on the order of 1 μ/s//year, mostly due to an increase in the estimated mean zonal wind between 10–60 degrees of latitude. See:
de Viron O, Dehant V, Goosse H, Crucifix M. Effect of global warming on the length-of-day. Geophys Res Lett 2002 Apr 12;29(7):50-1–4. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2001GL013672