“Clear and Unequivocal”: Warming Isn't a Fluke

The 2010s marked the hottest decade on record, data published yesterday by NASA and NOAA confirm, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

2019 was the second-warmest year ever. 

The analyses tie the trend to emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, and “a litany of disasters that scientists say were worsened by climate change” in the last year alone.

“These trends are the footprints of human activity stomping on the atmosphere,” Gavin A. Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies that conducted NASA’s analysis, told the New York Times.

Schmidt says that overall, Earth is now about 1.2 degrees C hotter since the beginning of the industrial age—a number that he says makes the global goal of preventing 1.5 C of warming unachievable.