Four of the last five years have been the warmest since records began. Here, higher than normal temperatures are shown in red. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

We’ve known this is coming, but the latest annual report from NASA and NOAA has confirmed it: 2018 was the fourth-hottest year on record. The other four in the top 5 have all been in the last five years. And it’s set to get warmer.

2018, it turns out, broke quite a few records, none of them good.

Not content with being the fourth-hottest year since 1880, when it first became possible to collect reliable and consistent global temperatures, in the US 2018 was the wettest year in 35 years and the third wettest since precipitation records began in 1895. The top three costliest natural disasters globally were all in the US, making it their fourth-costliest year ever, at $160 billion.

And of course, it’s predicted to get worse.

Australia has already broken its January temperature record, and with a possible El Niño event around the corner, 2019 is likely to follow this trend.

NASA and NOAA’s Annual Global Analysis for 2018, released yesterday having been delayed by the government shutdown, is backed up by independent reports from the UK’s Met Office, the World Meteorological Organization, the Japanese Meteorological Agency, and the United Nations, so is pretty hard to argue against (though we are sure some will try).

Though there are minor variations from year to year, all five temperature records show peaks and valleys in sync with each other. All show rapid warming in the past few decades, and all show the past decade has been the warmest. NASA Earth Observatory/Joshua Stevens

2018 follows 2016, 2015, and 2017 as the fourth-warmest year, with global temperatures 0.83°C (1.5°F) warmer than the 1951-1980 period mean. Not only does this make the last five years the warmest in the modern record, but nine of the 10 warmest years have occurred since 2005, and 2018 is the 42nd consecutive year that global land and ocean temperatures are above the 20th-century average.