NASA has some unsettling news.
In 140 years of modern record-keeping, 2019 was the second hottest year on record, which means that 19 of the last 20 years are now the warmest in recorded history.
In a video just over one-minute long, NASA gives a succinct rundown of climate trends since 1880. In 2019, Earth, relentlessly warming, was more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit (just over 1 degree Celsius) warmer than it was in the late 1800s. As the space agency pointed out, this warming resulted in 2019’s unprecedented fires and the ramped-up melting of Greenland’s vast ice sheet.
“We crossed over into more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit warming territory in 2015 and we are unlikely to go back,” Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in a statement. “This shows that what’s happening is persistent, not a fluke due to some weather phenomenon: We know that the long-term trends are being driven by the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.” Read more…
More about Nasa, Science, Global Warming, Climate Change, and Science