Is Global Warming Slowing The Earth’s Rotation?
On December 31, 2025, a Reddit user, Disastrous_Award_789 has claimed that the rise in global warming is slowing down earth’s rotation. This claim, shared on December 31, 2025, was picked from Climate SpotAI, a disinformation tracker tool.
VERIFICATION
Earth’s rotation is governed by conservation of angular momentum, similar to a figure skater spinning faster with arms in and slower with arms out. If mass moves farther from the rotation axis (e.g., from poles to equator), rotation slows slightly. Melting polar ice (from Greenland and Antarctica) moves water from high-latitude ice sheets toward the oceans and more equatorial regions. This changes Earth’s mass distribution and increases its moment of inertia, which very slightly slows rotation.
Over decades, the change in day length due to melting ice and other factors amounts to fractions of a millisecond, far too small to be noticeable in everyday life. Other natural processes such as tidal friction from the Moon and fluid motions in Earth’s core also affect rotation and, in some cases, can speed rotation.
The only practical impact of these tiny changes is how the Coordinated Universal Time, UTC, is kept. Scientists sometimes add or subtract “leap seconds” to align atomic clocks with Earth’s rotation. Research suggests that melting ice could delay the need for a negative leap second (one that would shorten time) by a few years. This is a very technical adjustment for precise timekeeping systems, not a sign that days are noticeably longer.
A lecturer with the department of Physics, University of Uyo, Dr. Abel Umoh, attested to this fact by saying that, “the effect of climate change on rotation speed is real but extremely small, measured in milliseconds over decades.” He added that, “this change has no immediate impact on human’s daily life.”
CONCLUSION
The claim that global warming is slowing the earth’s rotation is LARGELY TRUE. The effect of climate change on rotation speed is real but extremely small, measured in milliseconds over decades and this change has no immediate impact on human’s daily life.
