Marked by rising sea temperatures and land temperatures as well as the occurrence of extreme weather events around the world, 2014 is on its way to becoming the hottest year on record, the United Nation's (U.N.) weather agency said on Wednesday as it debunked claims that global warming has stopped.
In a report released at the Lima Climate Change Conference in Peru, U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said that with only a month to go, 2014 is poised to become one of the warmest years if not the hottest since record-keeping started in the 19th century.
The agency's statement is based on data collected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the U.K. Met Office and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which already forecasted earlier in November that the year will be the hottest on record.
The average sea and air temperatures from January to October this year is 1.03 Fahrenheit higher than the 1961 to 1990 average temperature of 57.2 °F that the WMO uses as basis for charting climate change and 0.16 °F higher than the average for the last ten years, 2004 to 2013. The WMO said that if the trend continues for the last two months of the year, 2014 will become the warmest year on record ahead of the years 2010, 2005 and 1998.
Climate change skeptics point out that temperatures have not increased much since 1998 regardless of the surging emission of greenhouse gases that are primarily blamed for global warming but the WMO said the temperatures this year as well as the occurrence of extreme weather events are indicative of a warming trend.
"There is no standstill in global warming," WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said. "What we saw in 2014 is consistent with what we expect from a changing climate. Record-breaking heat combined with torrential rainfall and floods destroyed livelihoods and ruined lives."
The average surface air temperature over land for the first ten months of 2014 were about 33°F higher than the 1961-1990 average temperature, the fourth or fifth hottest for the period on record. Sea-surface temperatures worldwide also hit the highest on record at about 33°F above the 1961-1990 average.
Data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center likewise show that Arctic sea ice was at its sixth lowest on record this summer albeit the Antarctic sea ice expanded likely because of changes in wind patterns.
