Trajectories

The IPCC report warns that global average temperatures will hit 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2030 on current trajectories, the limit agreed at the Paris climate summit in 2015 — and seen as a tipping point by many scientists. That’s 10 years earlier than previous forecasts.

Sue Finley, now 80 years old and NASA’s longest-serving female employee, recalls her early days with the space agency when she worked as a human “computer,” calculating rocket trajectories by hand at a time when computers were huge and expensive to operate.