This year will almost certainly blow past 2015 to be the hottest on record, the World Meteorological Organization announced Monday morning in Marrakesh, Morocco, at the 22nd session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The new data, released in the form of a provisional report intended to inform delegates at COP22, finds that “global temperatures for January to September 2016 were approximately 1.2°C above pre-industrial levels and 0.88°C (1.58°F) above the average for the 1961-1990 reference period.”
“Preliminary data for October indicate that [temperatures] are at a sufficiently high level for 2016 to remain on track for the title of hottest year on record,” according to a WMO statement. “This would mean that 16 of the 17 hottest years on record have been this century (1998 was the other one).”
The U.N. organization said it also found “record-breaking” signs of long-term climate change, including greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, “very low levels” of Arctic sea ice, and “significant and very early melting of the Greenland ice sheet.”
The report will be updated and rereleased in early 2017 to include data for the remaining months and potentially confirm the organization’s belief that 2016 has been record-breaking. “Another year. Another record. The high temperatures we saw in 2015 are set to be beaten in 2016,” WMO Secretary General Petteri Taalas said in prepared comments. “The extra heat from the powerful El Niño event has disappeared. The heat from global warming will continue.”