Those eager to put 2008 behind them will have to hold their good-byes for just a moment this New Year’s Eve.  The world’s official timekeepers have added a “leap second” to the last day of the year on Wednesday, to help match clocks to the Earth’s slowing spin on its axis, which takes place at ever-changing rates affected by tides and other factors.

The U.S. Naval Observatory, keeper of the Pentagon’s master clock, said it would add the extra second on Wednesday in coordination with the world’s atomic clocks at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC.  That corresponds to 6:59:59 p.m. EST (23:59:59 GMT), when an extra second will tick by — the 24th to be added to UTC since 1972, when the practice began.

UTC is the time scale kept by highly precise atomic clocks around the world, accurate to about a billionth of a second per day, the Naval Observatory says. For those with a need for precision timing, it has replaced Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT. The decision to add or remove a second is the responsibility of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, based on its monitoring of the Earth’s rotation.

The goal is to make sure clocks vary from the Earth’s rotational time by no more than 0.9 seconds before an adjustment. That keeps UTC in sync with the position of the sun above the Earth. Mechanisms such as the Internet-based Network Time Protocol and the satellite-based Global Positioning System depend on precision timing. The first leap second was introduced into UTC on June 30, 1972. The last was added on December 31, 2005.

They have been added at intervals ranging from six months to seven years, Daniel Gambis, head of the IERS Earth Orientation Center at the Observatoire de Paris, wrote in an explanatory piece this month (http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/). Among the reasons for Earth’s slowing whirl on its axis are the braking action of tides, snow or the lack of it at the polar ice caps, solar wind, space dust and magnetic storms, according to the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, another timekeeper.

By contrast, a leap day, February 29, occurs once every four years because a complete turn around the sun — our year with all its seasons — takes about 365 days and six hours.    In 1970, an international agreement established two time scales: one based on the Earth’s rotation and another on highly accurate atomic clocks.  The U.S. Naval Observatory’s master clock is based on a system that now includes 50 atomic clocks, 36 based on the element cesium and 14 known as hydrogen masers. With the Earth’s rotation gradually slowing, the periodic insertion of a leap second into the atomic time scale is needed to keep the two systems within a second of each other.

The Daily Telegraph’s Christopher Booker discusses the issue of man-made global warming and  the lack of results predicted by Al Gore and the others.  I believe that there is some climate change but I think that a “consensus” of scientists backing man-made global warming is falling by the wayside as evidenced by the Manhattan Declaration last March .  Many scientists now debunk the idea, including a prominent CNN meteorologist Chad Myers who said “You know, to think that we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant,” Myers said.

“Mother Nature is so big, the world is so big, the oceans are so big – I think we’re going to die from a lack of fresh water or we’re going to die from ocean acidification before we die from global warming, for sure.” Myers is the second CNN meteorologist to challenge the global warming conventions common in the media. He also said trying to determine patterns occurring in the climate would be difficult based on such a short span. “But this is like, you know you said – in your career – my career has been 22 years long,” Myers said. “That’s a good career in TV, but talking about climate – it’s like having a car for three days and saying, ‘This is a great car.’ Well, yeah – it was for three days, but maybe in days five, six and seven it won’t be so good. And that’s what we’re doing here.”

“We have 100 years worth of data, not millions of years that the world’s been around,” Myers continued. Dr. Jay Lehr, an expert on environmental policy, told “Lou Dobbs Tonight” viewers you can detect subtle patterns over recorded history, but that dates back to the 13^th Century. “If we go back really, in recorded human history, in the 13^th Century, we were probably 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than we are now and it was a very prosperous time for mankind,” Lehr said. “If go back to the Revolutionary War 300 years ago, it was very, very cold. We’ve been warming out of that cold spell from the Revolutionary War period and now we’re back into a cooling cycle.”