This year is on track to be the hottest on record, or at least among the very warmest, the United Nations said on Wednesday in new evidence of long-term warming that adds urgency to 190-nation talks under way in Lima on slowing climate change.
Including this year, 14 of the 15 most sweltering years on record will have been in the 21st century, the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization said of the findings presented during the December 1-12 climate negotiations in Peru.
"There is no standstill in global warming," WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said in a statement. "What is particularly unusual and alarming this year are the high temperatures of vast areas of the ocean surface."
The WMO said average sea surface temperatures hit record highs in 2014. On land, it listed extremes including floods in Bangladesh and Britain and droughts in China and California.
Reliable global temperature records date from about 1850.
If temperatures stay similarly above normal for the rest of the year, "2014 will likely be the hottest on record, ahead of 2010, 2005 and 1998," the WMO said, based on temperatures for January to October. A cool finish would push 2014 down the list.
Skeptics who doubt climate change is mainly man-made often note that temperatures have not risen much since 1998, despite surging greenhouse gas emissions.
Environmentalists said the findings should spur action. The data "should send chills through anyone who says they care about climate change," said Samantha Smith, head of the WWF conservation group's Global Climate and Energy Initiative.
Among other WMO findings, Arctic sea ice was the sixth smallest on record in summer 2014 while Antarctic sea ice paradoxically expanded to a record large extent, apparently because of changing wind patterns.
In good news, the WMO counted just 72 tropical storms until mid-November 2014, against a long-term average of 89 a year.
PHOTO: A boat sits on the nearly dry lake bed behind the Nazare Paulista dam, part of the Cantareira water system that provides greater Sao Paulo with most of its water, in Nazare Paulista September 25, 2014.
CREDIT: Roosevelt Cassio.