In a strange twist, global warming could even help out timekeepers by delaying the need for history's first "negative leap second" by three years, a study published on Wednesday suggested.

Experts fear that introducing a negative leap second—a minute with only 59 seconds—into standard time could cause havoc on computer systems across the world.

For most of history, time was measured by the rotation of the Earth. However in 1967, the world's timekeepers embraced atomic clocks—which use the frequency of atoms as their tick-tock—ushering in a more precise era of timekeeping.

But sailors, who still relied on the sun and stars for navigation, and others wanted to retain the connection between Earth's rotation and time.

There was a problem. Our planet is an unreliable clock, and had long been rotating slightly slower than atomic time, meaning the two measurements were out of sync.

So a compromise was struck. Whenever the difference between the two measurements approached 0.9 of a second, a "leap second" was added to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the internationally agreed standard by which the world sets its clocks.

Though most people likely have not noticed, 27 leap seconds have been added to UTC since 1972, the last coming in 2016.