Search for our next world narrows; get used to heat

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The Korea Times

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Today`s Column

Search for our next world narrows; get used to heat

Posted : 2012-10-19 17:51

Updated :

By Dale McFeatters

Last month tied September 2005 for the hottest September on record. The previous record holder was September 2003, according to records that go back 132 years.

For the record, the average global temperature was 60.2 degrees, 1.2 degrees above normal, which doesn't sound too bad. We can live with that, even if to achieve that average some areas had to have temperatures in the three figures, but these are places that overdramatize ― attention Florida newspapers ― blizzards in the Northern Plains, Midwest and Northeast. So just swelter and shut up about it.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this is 16th time since 2000 the world has set a hot temperature record. And over the summer the U.S. kept setting heat records. For those keeping score at home, September was the 331st consecutive month with above-average temperatures.

There are various explanations for the unusual heat: long-term climate cycles, manmade global warming, oscillations far out in the Pacific by El Nino and La Nina, sharia and gay marriage, among them.

Some Republican congressman from a district that teaches the Earth is only 6,000 years old and snakes were able to talk, at least to Adam and Eve, will solve the problem by introducing a bill to abolish NOAA.

There wouldn't be unseasonable weather ― hurricanes, droughts, floods, freak windstorms ― if only that fool agency didn't tell us about it. The same member will probably also try to pass a bill resetting the calendar to 1916, our last cold record for the planet.

The paranoids among us will quickly sense that we, meaning mankind, are being set up for something.

Perhaps it was no accident that for millennia astronomers assumed Earth was alone in the universe. But just about the time we began experiencing extremes of heat, scientists began discovering planets, at first only a handful and now we're up to something like 842, with a potential of millions more.

It's a staple of science fiction, and likely a staple of a good many people's thinking, that when we irreversibly screw up this planet we'll move to another one.

Just recently astronomers discovered a planet roughly the size of Earth and in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, circling as a star described as "right next door," if you can call 25 trillion miles away "next door." But, as they say in real estate, "location, location, location" ― the closest one to Earth yet ― and in star system with a cool name, Alpha Centauri B.

There are a few drawbacks. It's 25 trillion miles away and would take tens of thousands of years with current technology to get there, but if you're going to quibble about every little thing we're never going to get this project off the ground. Besides, we're accumulating enough DVDs of movies, TV shows and uplifting university lectures to last the whole trip without even going into reruns.

The planet ― and we'll bet NASA will be happy to sell you the naming rights if the Chinese don't get there first ― circles its star every three days so if New Year's is your kind of holiday this planet is the place for you.

Astronomers hope to discover a Goldilocks planet in the three Centauri star systems ― a planet that's not too hot, not too cold, with water and a breathable atmosphere and, if it's inhabited, obliging natives, although that's not stopped us before.

If not we'll revert to the original planet, which has one other teensy drawback ― a surface temperature of 2,200 degrees but as the real estate agents say in the more climactically inhospitable regions of the U.S., Phoenix, for example, "It's a dry heat."

Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer for Scripps Howard News Service.

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