12 months to September second hottest ever

The 12 months to September 2019 have been the second warmest ever measured.  Note how after the last big El Niño year (1998) it took 12 years before the the average global temperature anomaly rose above the 1998 level.  In fact climate denialists shouted  no new warming from the rooftops, using the cherry-picked 1998 record year as the starting point.  After the 2016 El Niño, temperatures haven't paused, and in fact are already started rising again, to the extent that we are now looking at the second warmest average since reliable records start in 1880.

Source: NOAA

The chart below shows the five year moving average ending in September, which shows that the five years is the hottest ever recorded.  And of course, there are no signs of it levelling off, as indeed there weren't after 1998 either.  Note how the increase in temperatures has accelerated in recent years.  It's not getting better, people.  It's getting worse—over the last decade, the five year average has increased by nearly 0.3 degrees C, as opposed to the post-1975 trend of 0.2 degrees C. Assuming that this acceleration doesn't even worse, that means that global temperatures will have risen another 0.9 degrees by 2050.  Unless we act now.