There's more than one way to measure a year. If you're simply tallying up the days, weeks and months, 2019 was altogether unremarkable. But if you're looking at global climate change, that couldn't be further from the truth.
In the past five years alone, in fact, we have experienced the warmest temperatures of the last 140 years.
"We crossed over into more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit warming [roughly 1.1 degree Celsius] territory in 2015 and we are unlikely to go back," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute, in a recent press release.
"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."
