The Irony of Finding So Many Exoplanets in a Time of Climate Change

There was nothing quite like the slang used in the early days of the space program. Saying something was “OK” would not do when you could say “A-OK” instead. Saying, “Let’s get moving,” when you’ve been sealed in your spacecraft for hours waiting to launch while Mission Control sorts out technical glitches, was weak tea compared to the “Light this candle!” as an exasperated Al Shepard barked in 1961. And then, too, there was “screw the pooch.” A cleaned-up version of a decidedly coarser term, it meant, in the pilot’s argot, to crash your jet or lose your spacecraft or do anything else that amounted to not flying your mission as you were expected to fly it. We all screw the pooch sometimes—at work; in our relationships; with our finances. Now, it increasingly appears that the human species—given a single, fragile Earth to live on—has managed to screw the entire planetary pooch. New data released by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirm both that 2019 was the second hottest year on record—finishing behind only 2016—and that the 2010s as a whole were the hottest decade overall. Temperatures last year were 0.98º C (1.8º F) warmer worldwide than the mean from 1951 to 1980. And while 1.8º F doesn’t seem like much (could you tell the difference if the temperature rose from 66º to 67.8º while you were taking ...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized climate change newsletter Space Source Type: news