Releasing its Status of the Global Climate report, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), a United Nations body, detailed the string of climate and weather records that were broken in 2015, including global temperature records, exceptional rainfall, devastating droughts, unusual cyclone activity and intense heat waves.

“The year 2015 will stand out in the historical record of the global climate in many ways,” said WMO secretary-general Petteri Taalas in the report.

“The future is happening now,” he said in a statement released alongside the report. “The alarming rate of change we are now witnessing in our climate as a result of greenhouse gas emission isunprecedented in modern records.” Global surface temperatures in 2015 shattered all previous records by a wide margin, the report shows, sitting 0.76C above the 1961-90 average. Temperatures over land, over the ocean and in the top 700 and 2,000 metres of the ocean all set new records.

“Our planet is sending a powerful message to world leaders to sign and implement the Paris agreement on climate change and cut greenhouse gases now before we pass the point of no return,” Taalas said.

Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick from the University of New South Wales in Australia said the language was very strong for the WMO. “They are usually very conservative,” she said.

“We have to put this report in context. 2014 was the hottest year on record to date too. We’ve had something like 15 out of the 16 hottest years on record since the turn of the millennium,” she said. “We haven’t experienced a month that has been below average for over 30 years ... I think people forget climate change started happening a long time ago, before a lot of us were even born. Honestly, it’s frightening.” The report follows Nasa figures showing that February 2016 was the most unseasonably hot month on record by a massive margin, which climate scientists described as “shocking”.

Taalas said “urgent and far-reaching measures to cut carbon dioxide emissions” were needed to avoid temperature rises of 3C. He said investment in disaster early warning systems was essential to help communities adapt to climate change.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2016

SEA LEVEL RISE: TO BE MORE THAN EXPECTED

The current rate of global warming could raise sea levels by “several meters” over the coming century, rendering most of the world’s coastal cities uninhabitable and helping unleash devastating storms, according to a paper published by James Hansen, the former NASA scientist who is considered the father of modern climate change awareness. The research references past climatic conditions, recent observations and future models. It warns that the melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets will contribute to a far worse sea level increase than previously thought.

Without a sharp reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, the global sea level is likely to increase “several meters over a timescale of 50 to 150 years”, the paper states, warning that the Earth’s oceans were six to nine meters higher during the Eemian period — an interglacial phase about 120,000 years ago that was less than 1C warmer than it is today.