The annual global climate assessment offers more evidence that the dangerous warming unleashed mostly by humans' burning of fossil fuels is continuing virtually unabated. And combined with the recent news that global emissions of heat-trapping gases reached a new record high last year , it's a sign that so far, international efforts to contain the climate crisis are failing. "This shows that what's happening is persistent, not a fluke due to some weather phenomenon: we know that the long-term trends are being driven by the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere," Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies said in announcing the report. A NOAA visualization shows that across much of the planet, global temperatures in 2019 were hotter than the historical average. In 2019, global surface temperatures were 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (0.98 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 1951-to-1980 mean, NASA scientists said.

Source: CNN January 15, 2020 17:20 UTC