Yes, the following can contribute to orbital decay.
Perturbations due to Non-spherical Earth (including tidal drag)
Third-Body Perturbations (moon, planets, etc.)
Perturbations from Atmospheric Drag
Perturbations from Solar Radiation (Intense solar activity causes our atmosphere to expand outward in addition to the effects of solar wind itself)

"The space shuttle and the ISS both orbit within the thermosphere. The thermosphere is about a million times less dense than the atmosphere at sea level, but that's enough to affect the orbits of these satellites."

http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/faqs.html
12). How long will orbital debris remain in Earth orbit?
The higher the altitude, the longer the orbital debris will typically remain in Earth orbit. Debris left in orbits below 600 km normally fall back to Earth within several years. At altitudes of 800 km, the time for orbital decay is often measured in decades. Above 1,000 km, orbital debris will normally continue circling the Earth for a century or more.

IIS altitude: roughly 350 km
Hubble altitude: roughly 600 km
"The ISS will sink a couple of kilometers per year in the future because of atmospheric drag - in its current configuration"

Over a thousand more pieces of junk just added:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6398513.stm

The Black hole information paradox results from the combination of quantum mechanics and general relativity. It suggests that physical information could "disappear" in a black hole. It was a contentious subject for science since it violated a commonly assumed tenet of science—that information cannot be destroyed.

In 1975, Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein showed that black holes should slowly radiate away energy, which poses a problem. From the no hair theorem one would expect the Hawking radiation to be completely independent of the material entering the black hole. However, if the material entering the black hole were a pure quantum state, the transformation of that state into the mixed state of Hawking radiation would destroy information about the original quantum state. This violates Liouville's theorem and presents a physical paradox.

More precisely, if we have an entangled pure state and we throw in one part of the entangled system into the black hole while keeping the other part outside, we get a mixed state after we take the partial trace over the interior of the black hole. But since everything within the interior of the black hole will hit the singularity within a fixed finite time, the part which is traced over partially might "disappear", never to appear again. Of course, we don't really know what goes on at singularities once quantum effects are taken into account, which is why this is conjectural and controversial.

Hawking was convinced, however, because of the simple elegance of the resulting equation which 'unified' Thermodynamics, Relativity, Gravity and Hawking's own work on the Big Bang. This annoyed many physicists, notably John Preskill, who in 1997 bet Hawking and Kip Thorne that information was not lost in black holes. In 2004 Hawking had to pay out to Preskill when Hawking conceded that Preskill was in fact correct.

There are various ideas about how the paradox is solved. Since the 1998 proposal of the AdS/CFT correspondence, the predominant belief among physicists is that information is preserved and that Hawking radiation is not precisely thermal but receives quantum corrections. Other possibilities include the information being contained in a Planckian remnant left over at the end of Hawking radiation or a modification of the laws of quantum mechanics to allow for non-unitary time evolution.

In July 2004 Stephen Hawking announced a theory that quantum perturbations of the event horizon could allow information to escape from a black hole, which would resolve the information paradox. Basically, his argument assumes the AdS/CFT correspondence which states that an AdS black hole is dual to a thermal conformal field theory, which is unitary. However, as of 2004 the full details of the theory have yet to be published, so most peers are reserving judgment before accepting the result. When announcing his result, Hawking also conceded the 1997 bet, paying Preskill with a baseball encyclopedia (ISBN 1-894963-27-X) 'from which information can be retrieved at will'. Thorne, however, remains unconvinced of Hawking's proof and declined to contribute to the award.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_paradox

ahh, good old Cook Strait. Just off the coast from where I live in NZ, this stretch of water is notorious for big seas, and ferry captains who don't seem to be perturbed about heading into it with a ship-load of terrified passengers.

Not necessarily on this topic, but something that does perturb me is our unwillingness to stick with logical, well-reasoned, fallacy-free argumentation and discussion. And once we have a conclusion, supported by unimpeachable facts and reasoning, we can't stick with it. We flutter like a leaf in the breeze at the next idea that comes along and contradicts our conclusion.

The "We" I'm really commenting on also doesn't exist strictly. It's more of the generalized societal consensus portrayed in the media as representing all Americans. I'm sure if (any two real people) had a well reasoned debate, we could walk away from it convinced. But that's just two of us.

The real question becomes, why don't the people guarding the gates of information broadcasting (the news media?) get more fierce about defending the truth? I'm thinking of something you see really rarely in the mainstream media, or even in the cable media. Sometimes you get a ray of hope from Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, or folks like those. But more often than not you get a mishmash. The answer to the question of why here is probably advertizing and the business model that surrounds the media. Good luck with that one. Well, it is the free market, more or less.

So if it is the free market, then it is only materially influenced by demand (remember, economic demand is not just what we want, but what we are willing and able to buy.)

Therefore, only when people start demanding the truth, will it become a staple of the evening news.

Here's to some productive public discourse.