Earth is heating at an alarming rate, a NASA scientist said to me in 1979. Today I can’t stop thinking about that remark.

I was packing up after interviewing him about his work, where he went to Antarctica several times a year. I had a new job as News Writer/ Editor in the LBJ Space Center newsroom. 

"You want to know a story that is big,” he said, “I see it firsthand. I’ve been going to Antarctica for thirty years. It’s shocking, the ice shelf is disappearing, you can see a difference in a few weeks' time.” [Note: I do not remember exact words.]

“Do you realize the significance of that?”  he asked.

“When all that ice melts, it will release an enormous amount of water into the atmosphere and ocean, do you see how that will affect the dynamics of the entire planet?” 

I think I just stared at him with my mouth open. I was 31 years old, had just gotten my bachelor's degree, and finagled my way into a job at NASA Houston.

I don't think it registered with me what he was saying, it was so hard to grasp, the Antarctic is melting?

About 5 years later I wasn't in Houston anymore, but I never forgot that conversation, especially in the past 20 years as the impact of what he said has become real clear. When news reports started to come out about global warming, I would read everything I could get my hands on, and could understand. 

About a month ago age 77, I was in my kitchen thinking, what can I write about, and I remembered that NASA geologist, who I'm not going to name because I later learned when he said that to me he was leaking. Next time I saw that scientist in the company cafeteria he made it real clear that he couldn't talk about how the Earth is heating too fast there where so many other employees were nearby.

Then around 1983 the Air Force showed up, moved into offices down the hall from us in full uniform at NASA Houston, and it didn’t feel like a cool civilian agency anymore. I got a job in a PR firm in Beverly Hills.

A few weeks back Donald Trump's denial of global warming and climate change was in the news at the same time as floods fires mayhem and stories about the melting Antarctic. Here in my kitchen in Tahoe I said to myself, after 2025 no one will call global warming a hoax again; and I thought about my colleague at NASA wherever he is today and those very critical words he said to me in 1979.

Planet Earth is heating at an alarming rate. 

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-Kay Ebeling, producer of Heating Planet blog