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posted by martyb on Wednesday February 06 2019, @10:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the Hot-Stuff dept.

NASA scientists announced Wednesday that the Earth’s average surface temperature in 2018 was the fourth highest in nearly 140 years of record-keeping and a continuation of an unmistakable warming trend.

“The five warmest years have, in fact, been the last five years,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the NASA group that conducted the analysis. “We’re no longer talking about a situation where global warming is something in the future. It’s here. It’s now.”

Over all, 18 of the 19 warmest years have occurred since 2001.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/06/climate/fourth-hottest-year.html


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  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:00AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Thursday February 07 2019, @07:00AM (#797645) Journal

    Well, yes, that is unfortunate. But at least Sulla has migrated southward to vote for the Donald, not sure if that is a good thing. But really, the problem lies here:
    Content will be temporarily unavailable to countries affected by GDPR compliance. [google.com] Oh, shit, GMOs detected! But there is a whole research program on Circumpolar agriculture [ulapland.fi]. And the real problem is, corn will not grow without dark. So eve if the far northern latitudes warm, the main starch crop of America will not grow.

    I like the story, from the Mayans, who used to track Venus across the sky, and speculated that the Orion Nebula was the home of the departed, Xibalba. Because the Mayans called themselves, and you know this is going to get all racist, right? Most cultures call themselves the "people", with the nasty racist Richard Spencer implication that all who were not the "people" were not human. But the Mayans called themselves "walking corn". I like that. You are what you eat, every civilization is more or less defined by its primary starch source, whether that be Wheat (bread), or Rice (rice), or Corn (Mayans), poi (Polynesians), or Barley (Czechs, and Germans derivatively).

    So, in conclusion, Global warming may not result in the mere moving north of humanity's main food crops, they may fail for reasons of latitude rather than tempurature, and so the consequences of Anthropogenic Global Warming need more thought, and planning. If we do not, it may be the case that no catfish survive, and we lose TMB. Of course, wait a minute, there might be an upside!

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