‘The planet has a fever’

The last decade was the hottest ever, and 2019 was the second-hottest year ever, according to a report from two federal agencies.

The annual global climate report from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) used data from thousands of weather stations, ship and buoy-based records of sea surface temperatures, and temperature measurements from Antarctic research stations, according to a January 15, 2020 CBS News article. The analysis found that the Earth’s average surface temperature rose every decade since 1880 and that the rate of increase more than doubled after 1981.

“The planet has a fever, and that’s a symptom,” Renee Salas, a Yerby Fellow at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment and Boston emergency medicine physician, told CBS. “We already know what the cause is, and that’s greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel combustion. The diagnosis is political will.”

Read the CBS News article: 2019 was second-hottest year on record, closing out hottest decade