Humans have just lived through the hottest decade on record , data from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show. And 2019 was the second hottest year on record.

The data, released Jan. 15, shows that the past five years have been the five warmest since record-keeping began 140 years ago. Separate temperature data sets from NASA, NOAA, the Berkeley Earth research group, the U.K.s Met Office Hadley Centre, and the Cowtan and Way analysis all confirm this past decade has been the warmest.

In fact, every decade since the 1960s clearly has been warmer than the one before, said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASAs Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in a press statement.

The data builds on a series of reports released over the past few years confirming that climate change is not some distant threat but has arrived, is caused by humans, and will affect us all.

We are experiencing the impacts of global warming unfolding literally in real time, Noah Diffenbaugh, a Stanford earth science professor and senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, said on a Tuesday press call with climate experts organized by the communications group Climate Nexus.

The latest report, he said, provides clear evidence that people and ecosystems are being impacted across the world, from the equator to the poles, both in oceans and on land, from coastal areas to the high elevations.

From the Amazon to Australia, California and Lebanon, hundreds of thousands of acres of land were burned last year. These hot, dry tinderbox conditions are more likely as the planet heats up. People and animals have died, others have lost their homes, and staggering amounts of carbon once stored in the trees have been released back into the atmosphere.

This past decade also saw record-breaking heat waves which science tells us are more likely to happen, or to become more severe, with climate change. In one study , scientists said they were virtually certain that the 2018 heat wave across the Northern Hemisphere would not have occurred without climate change.

We know that the planet is warming faster than any time during the history of human civilization on this planet, Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, said in a Tuesday statement distributed by Climate Nexus. Climate change isnt just a science issue, or an environmental issue: its a human issue that matters to all of us living on this planet today, whether we know it or not.