The year 2016 may be on track to become the warmest on record, beating the hottest five-year period record set during 2011-2015, according to a new UN report which blamed human activities for extreme climate change.
The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), the weather agency of the UN, published a detailed analysis of the global climate and increasingly visible human footprint on extreme weather and climate events with dangerous and costly impacts.
The record temperatures were accompanied by rising sea levels and declines in Arctic sea-ice extent, continental glaciers and northern hemisphere snow cover.
All these climate change indicators confirmed the long-term warming trend caused by greenhouse gases.
Carbon dioxide reached the significant milestone of 400 parts per million in the atmosphere for the first time in 2015, according to the WMO report which was submitted to the UN climate change conference.
The Global Climate 2011-2015 also examines whether human-induced climate change was directly linked to individual extreme events.
"The Paris Agreement aims at limiting the global temperature increase to well below two degree Celsius and pursuing efforts towards 1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels," said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.
"This report confirms that the average temperature in 2015 had already reached the one degree Celsius mark. We just had the hottest five-year period on record, with 2015 claiming the title of hottest individual year. Even that record is likely to be beaten in 2016," said Taalas.
"The effects of climate change have been consistently visible on the global scale since the 1980s: rising global temperature, both over land and in the ocean; sea-level rise; and the widespread melting of ice," he said.
"It has increased the risks of extreme events such as heatwaves, drought, record rainfall and damaging floods," said Taalas.
The report highlighted some of the high-impact events. These included the East African drought in 2010-2012 which caused an estimated 258,000 excess deaths and the 2013-2015 southern African drought; and flooding in South-East Asia in 2011 which killed 800 people, 2015 heatwaves in India and Pakistan in 2015, which claimed more than 4,100 lives.
Hurricane Sandy in 2012 caused USD 67 billion in economic losses in the US, and Typhoon Haiyan which killed 7,800 people in the Philippines in 2013.
The report was submitted to the Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The five-year timescale allows a better understanding of multi-year warming trends and extreme events such as prolonged droughts and recurrent heatwaves than an annual report.
WMO will release its provisional assessment of the state of the climate in 2016 on November 14 to inform the climate change negotiations in Morrocco.
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