• The last 10 years have been the hottest ever recorded, says NASA and the NOAA.
  • 2019 was the second hottest year on record - just a fraction cooler than 2016.

The last decade was the hottest since record-keeping began 150 years ago, according to the latest data from U.South. agencies the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The studies, released Wednesday, also confirmed that 2019 was the second hottest year on record, The New York Times reported. Their findings echo the conclusions of the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service, which also found 2019 to be the second-hottest year of the hottest decade.

"What is of import is the totality of evidence from multiple independent data sets that the Earth is warming, that human activity is driving information technology and the impacts are clearly being felt," Gavin Schmidt from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies told The Guardian. "These announcements might sound like a broken tape, but what is being heard is the drumbeat of the Anthropocene."

NOAA concluded that 2019'south boilerplate temperatures were well-nigh ane caste Celsius in a higher place the average for the 20th century. They were besides one.1 degree Celsius above the average from 1850 to 1900, before the burning of fossil fuels began in earnest, according to The Guardian.

2019 was merely a fraction of a caste cooler than the warmest yr on record, 2016, The New York Times reported. That year, temperatures were boosted by a strong El Niño. Only temperatures have been steadily rising since the 1960s, with every decade since then being warmer than the i before it. The heating has been especially pronounced in the last five years, which were also the hottest years on tape.

NASA Climate Change Temperature

This plot shows yearly temperature anomalies from 1880 to 2019.

Image: NASA

"We've entered a new neighborhood in the concluding five years," Deke Arndt, who leads the monitoring co-operative of the National Centers for Ecology Information responsible for the NOAA research, told The New York Times.

The consistency of the temperature rise has convinced researchers that the climate crisis is the result of human activeness.

"This shows that what'due south happening is persistent, non a fluke due to some atmospheric condition phenomenon: we know that the long-term trends are being driven by the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere," Schmidt said in the NASA press release.

Schmidt also told The New York Times that the researchers await for natural miracle that might influence climate, such as volcanic eruptions, and that no natural change can explain the amount of warming scientists have observed since the 19th century.

All of these cleaved records have devastating consequences. The New York Times pointed to the case of Commonwealth of australia, which was 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than its mid-twentieth century average during the summer of 2019. The rut has contributed to an ongoing drought, and to a celebrated wildfire flavour that has killed more a billion animals.

A warmer atmosphere too fuels wetter, more dangerous storms, HuffPost pointed out. In the last decade, the U.Due south. endured two times the number of billion-dollar extreme weather events as it did the decade before.

"Connected inaction on climate change only farther harms u.s.a.," Harvard Medical School professor of emergency medicine Renee Salas told HuffPost during a press call. "These temperatures are not simply statistics, simply they have names and stories."