The UN weather agency World Meteorological Organization (WMO), in announcing this, says the arctic sea ice melted early and fast, and acts as another indicator of climate change and carbon dioxide levels, which are driving global warming.
WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said decades-long trends of climate change are reaching new climaxes, fuelled by the strong 2015/2016 El Nino.
The El Nino event, which turned up the Earth’s thermostat, has now disappeared, but “climate change, caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases, will not”, Taalas said.
He said it will result in more heat waves, more extreme rainfall and potential for higher impact tropical cyclones.
The average temperature in the first six months of 2016 was 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial era in the late 19th century, according to Nasa.
To calculate global temperature statistics for its annual state of the climate report, WMO uses datasets from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Nasa GISS) and the UK’s Met Office and reanalysis data from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF).
NOAA said the global land and ocean average temperature for January-June was 1.05 degrees Celsius above the 20th century average, beating the previous record set in 2015 by 0.20 degree Celsius.
Each month in 2016 was record warm. Most of the world’s land and ocean surfaces had warmer to much-warmer-than-average conditions.
June 2016 marked the 14th consecutive month of record heat for land and oceans and marked the 378th consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th century average.
The last month with temperatures below the 20th century average was December 1984.