Our world is shrinking: Earth is roughly 5 millimetres smaller than the last measurement made 5 years ago

The world is smaller than we think, say scientists who say their new measurements could force other researchers to rejig their calculations.

Results of on international project show the Earth is roughly 5 millimetres smaller than the last measurement made five years ago.

But Dr Axel Nothnagel, a German researcher from the University of Bonn, says there is no evidence that the Earth itself is shrinking.

It's just that more accurate measurements, more data and better geophysical
models have led the researchers to come up with Earth's new size, a diameter of about 12,756.274 kilometres.

The researchers did not measure the diameter directly, however.

Nothnagel says that's impossible as the Earth has an irregular shape that indents and sticks out at certain regions by a hundred or so metres.

Their research, published in the Journal of Geodesy, used the technique of very long baseline interferometry or VLBI.

This uses radio telescopes in pairs or groups, as far away as several thousand kilometres, to receive radio waves from distant quasars.

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Temperature rises 'not caused by sun'

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Claims in a controversial Channel 4 programme that recent rises in global temperatures have been caused by the sun have been disproved by scientists.
The programme, the Great Global Warming Swindle, claimed that instead of greenhouse gases from human activity being to blame for a recent surge in temperatures, a change in solar activity was responsible because it influenced the number of cosmic rays that strike the Earth.

The film presented such changes in the sun as a viable alternative explanation for rising temperatures, and was widely cited in discussions of a recent poll that showed 56% of the UK public doubted the scientific cause of climate change.


But the new analysis, to be published in a Royal Society journal on Tuesday, shows that global warming since 1985 cannot have been caused by an increase in solar radiation or by a decrease in cosmic rays.
Mike Lockwood, a physicist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, said: "It is absolutely clear that the sun is nothing to do with the recent warming.


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Why rock won't save the planet

This Saturday, Live Earth, a series of huge concerts around the world, will use music and modern media, in the words of the organisers, to "trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis".
I sincerely hope that it works, but I fear that our refusal to acknowledge climate change has very deep roots - too deep to be addressed by feel-good concerts. After all, we have known about climate change for a surprisingly long time. The first serious warnings came in 1965 and climate change has been at the top of the political agenda for 15 years.

For years, the assumption has been that if people only knew more about the seriousness of the issue, they would act. We have had a decade of terrifying research, voluminous reports, portentous political statements, interactive websites, Sunday supplement pull-outs, and screaming banner headlines.


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