Temperatures during the month of May this year broke global records.
The finding comes from NASA statistics which also revealed that the three warmest May months have all been in the last three years.
The result means it is increasingly likely that 2016 could become the hottest year the world has ever experienced since records began. As it is, the years 2014 and 2015 have already set records.
The Arctic in particular experienced abnormal heat, causing Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet to start melting unusually early, said NASA. At the same time, much of Australia experienced its warmest autumn on record.
Now dissipated, the El Niño weather pattern was responsible for part of 2016’s record-setting heat, but meteorologists say the underlying cause is decades of unabated emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases resulting from human activities.
May’s exceptional warmth was accompanied by extreme weather events including abnormally heavy rains throughout Europe and parts of the US along with “widespread and severe” bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef.
The first four months of 2016 were the warmest globally in 136 years.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is expected to release its global data on Friday. NASA and NOAA use slightly different methods of process temperature data.
Nations have agreed to limit carbon dioxide emissions to keep warming under 2°C (4°F) by the end of the century, but this may not be enough.
It was only on Wednesday that the first industrialised nation, France, ratified the Paris climate accord reached in December last year.
President François Hollande noted that the deal will not come into force unless at least 55 countries responsible for at least 55% of global greenhouse gas emissions ratify it.
So far just 17 states – typically island and low-lying coastal nations particularly vulnerable to the sea-level rise – have ratified it although 195 governments reached the historic agreement setting a target of limiting global warming to “well below” 2C compared with pre-industrial levels.
“The state of the climate so far this year gives us much cause for alarm,” said David Carlson, director of Geneva’s World Climate Research Programme, in a release from the World Meteorological Association.
