For more than a year, a new global record high temperature was set every passing month. Finally, for only the second time in 16 consecutive months, we have a split decision on last month’s average global temperature that may signal the record months are over, at least for now:
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said last month’s 60.6 degrees (15.9 Celsius) was merely the second hottest September on record for the globe. … NASA, which averages global temperature differently, considers last month as record hot. But the space agency didn’t have a big consecutive hot streak because it didn’t consider last June as record hot.
The trailing nine months virtually assure that 2016 will be the new record hottest year in the modern temperature database as measured by highly sensitive thermometers from land, sea, and orbital stations. But rest assured, fossil fuel shills and assorted cranks will now sweep in by the dozens to proclaim any concern about climate change as “over” and “resolved,” and announce a new global cooling regime is now in process.
- New Horizons is past Pluto, but it is not forgotten, and not done beaming back fascinating science. In January 2019 it will blaze past and image an example of the mysterious Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNO) that litter the outer edge of the solar system by the millions. It is these objects which have suggested the presence of an unseen Planet Nine.
- Ancient naturalists drawing on cave walls are helping modern researchers pin down the origin of one of Europe’s few surviving Ice Age megafauna.
I asked Assistant when my next flight was and it gave me the answer, complete with the Delta flight number and scheduled takeoff time. I never told Google about my flight. It just knew based on the confirmation email Delta sent me.
- Congratulations to the placoderms, those weird armored fish that thrived 400 MYA and were once thought to have died out without any modern descendants. It turns out, just about every land, lake, sky, and river vertebrate could be their descendent:
That work bolstered the idea that placoderms weren’t, in fact, their own odd group that dead-ended hundreds of millions of years ago — some were actually the ancestors of bony fish (and thus humans). But it was just one fossil, Ahlberg notes. “You don’t want to draw too big of conclusions from one animal.”