NASA made an adorable video explaining climate change. l think a lot of people will FINALLY get it.
You've probably *heard* that the earth is warming. But how do scientists actually *know* it's happening?
Here's your Hot Planet 101, courtesy of NASA. Take a minute to watch it, then we'll see how it's affecting life on earth right now.
If the symptoms of planetary fever are shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels, hotter heat waves, stronger hurricanes, and shifting plant and animal ranges, it's worth asking: Is that stuff really happening? Well, let's take them on one at a time.
1. Are the glaciers shrinking?
"The collapse of the Larsen [Ice Shelf] appears to have been due to a series of warm summers on the Antarctic Peninsula, which culminated with an exceptionally warm summer in 2002. Significant surface melting due to warm air temperatures created melt ponds that acted like wedges; they deepened the crevasses and eventually caused the shelf to splinter." — NASA Earth Observatory
Yo, this ice shelf the size of Rhode Island disintegrated in four months.
NASA's scientists estimate that the Larsen Ice Shelf Complex shed 2 to 4 billion metric tonnes into the ocean per year in 1996 and 2000. But in 2006, that increased a startling 10 times to 22 to 40 billion tonnes lost.
2. Are plants and animal ranges shifting?
Plants and animals get cues from the world around them. They know when to go dormant, where to grow, and when to reproduce by the temperature patterns around them.
As weather patterns change, those same cues lead them to live and breed in new areas. It might sound harmless, but scientists are concerned. Not every species is welcome in its new haunt.
An invasive species is any organism that is not native to an area and poses a threat to plants or wildlife native to the area. Usually, an invasive species is brought to an area by humans (sometimes by accident and sometimes intentionally to adorable and horrible effects).
But climate change is transforming the temperature trend lines across the United States, and species like the kudzu that normally stay in warmer climes are taking notice and slowly creeping their way north.
Many species that live in colder climates are simply migrating north as their stomping grounds become too warm for them. For some species, this is a gradual change, but for others, it's astonishingly fast ( the comma butterfly's habitat has shifted north nearly 7 miles annually over the last 20 years).
But this cutie pie (above — OMG, look at those ears!) lives in the mountains of the western U.S. The America pika can't fly to a new mountain range like a bird or butterfly. And because it can die from overheating in just hours, it can't hop to another zone either. It may just be doomed to slowly lose its habitat completely to warming.
3. Are sea levels rising?
Increases in sea level have tracked strongly with human activity. We started burning fossil fuel during the Industrial Revolution (1760-1850), and our use of coal, oil, and natural gas has increased every year. Sea levels, in response to steadily warming temperatures, also rose steadily.
Unfortunately, the sea level projections don't look like a straight line. It looks like an upward sloping curve. Sea levels aren't increasing at the same rate every year — that rate is increasing.
At present, sea levels are projected to rise by as much as 3 feet by 2100.
With the planet's ice reserves falling into the oceans faster than humanity has ever seen, the excess water has to go somewhere. 1.6 million people live in the islands scattered across the Pacific (3 million, if you count Hawaii), and they are all in danger of slowly losing their homelands.
But rising sea levels won't just affect faceless people of nations you've never heard of that you don't pronounce correctly (like Kiribati).
Ever heard that saying "A rising tide lifts all boats"? Let's revise that: "A rising tide sinks all coastal communities."
Nearly 40% of Americans live in a coastal county.
Rising sea levels could make significant portions of New York City unlivable.
4. Have recent heat waves been more intense?
Heat waves — unusually long periods of unusually hot weather — have become more frequent in the last 30 years.
The heat patterns that have emerged in the last 30 years have been shared across the globe. (I see you eyeing that big spike in the middle, but the extreme heat and drought that created the Dust Bowl was an anomaly almost exclusively experienced by North America.)
Global temperature has been rising since the end of the Industrial Revolution; there's no question about it.
Dark blue indicates areas cooler than average. Dark red indicates areas warmer than average.
"Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years." — NASA Global Climate
It seems Earth's hottest days are ahead of it.
5. Have recent storms been more intense?
Damn skippy. In the 23-year period from 1980 to 2003, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded 58 weather related disasters that cost at or over a billion dollars in damages.
"But yesterday it was unseasonably cold, and there's a massive blizzard in the Northeast."
Well, weather and climate are different. Weather is an event. Climate is a pattern of events. Any one of these years is an example of a weather event, but the red line is climate pattern (warming, obvi).
A Generation Jones teenager poses in her room.Image via Wikmedia Commons
An office kitchen.via 
An angry man eating spaghetti.via 
At least it wasn't Bubbles. 
You just know there's a person named Whiskey out there getting a kick out of this. 
An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
- YouTube youtube.com
Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.