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posted by martyb on Friday September 02 2016, @07:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the looking-for-the-thermostat dept.

From The Guardian :

The planet is warming at a pace not experienced within the past 1,000 years, at least, making it "very unlikely" that the world will stay within a crucial temperature limit agreed by nations just last year, according to Nasa's top climate scientist.

[...] But Nasa said that records of temperature that go back far further, taken via analysis of ice cores and sediments, suggest that the warming of recent decades is out of step with any period over the past millennium.

[...] [Director of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies Gavin] Schmidt repeated his previous prediction that there is a 99% chance that 2016 will be the warmest year on record, with around 20% of the heat attributed to a strong El NiƱo climatic event. Last year is currently the warmest year on record, itself beating a landmark set in 2014.


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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by takyon on Saturday September 03 2016, @01:34AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday September 03 2016, @01:34AM (#396840) Journal

    Well, our understanding of life in the universe is going to increase dramatically in the next hundred years or so, before many significant off-world bases/colonies are established. We have a number of next-gen telescopes [nextbigfuture.com] going up in the next 2 decades that may be able to spot life on exoplanets or at least find liquid water. We also have missions such as JUICE [wikipedia.org] and future lander concepts that can check for microbes in icy subsurface oceans.

    We also have this finding [soylentnews.org].

    What's the point? We will be in a better position to fill in the Drake equation and predict where and when life can be found. With the Titan example, maybe it will have an atmosphere that is human breathable in a couple billion years, but the low gravity (0.14g) and other conditions aren't going to make it hard for something on the level of primates to develop from microbes from scratch. The fossil article I linked points to microbes easily forming, but complex life taking extra billions of years. And if we find microbes in icy subsurface oceans in our own solar system, we'll truly find that microbial life is the low-hanging fruit of the universe (there's also a panspermia argument, and asteroid impacts on Earth could have delivered microbes elsewhere in the solar system, but whatever).

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