The United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced 2014 is on track to be the hottest year ever recorded.
The statement is based on a combination of record-breaking global sea temperatures and the highest greenhouse gas emissions ever seen.
"What we saw in 2014 is consistent with what we expect from a changing climate," WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud explained today in a press release. "Record-breaking heat combined with torrential rainfall and floods destroyed livelihoods and ruined lives. What is particularly unusual and alarming this year are the high temperatures of vast areas of the ocean surface, including in the northern hemisphere."
These unusually-high sea temperatures may have contributed to devastating rainfall in some regions while triggering debilitating droughts in others; this year also saw 12 major Atlantic storms and a number of floods. The monthly precipitation rate over the Pacific side of western Japan for August was 301 percent above normal, while droughts swept across the Unites States and China.
Fourteen of the 15 warmest years on record were seen in the 21st century, and if December continues on its current temperature trend 2014 will be the hottest of them all.
"There is no standstill in global warming," said Secretary-General Michel Jarraud. "Record-high greenhouse gas emissions and associated atmospheric concentrations are committing the planet to a much more uncertain and inhospitable future."
The changing climate is believed to be a future threat to billions of people across the globe, but officials have noted the world is working to be more sustainable.
"Fortunately our political climate is changing too with evidence that governments, supported by investors, business and cities are moving towards a meaningful, universal climate agreement in Paris 2015 - an agreement that keeps a global temperature rise below 2 degrees [Celsius] by putting in place the pathways to a deep de-carbonisation of the world's economy and climate neutrality or 'net zero' in the second half of the century," said Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
