Last year, the Earth sweltered under the hottest temperatures in modern times for the third year in a row, U.S. scientists said Wednesday, raising new concerns about the quickening pace of climate change.
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Temperatures spiked to new national highs in parts of India, Kuwait and Iran, while sea ice melted faster than ever in the fragile Arctic, according to the report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The global average temperature last year was 1.69 Fahrenheit (0.94 Celsius) above the 20th-century average, and 0.07 degrees F (0.04 C) warmer than in 2015, the last record-setting year, according to NOAA.
This was "not a huge margin to set a new record but it is larger than the typical margin," Deke Arndt, chief of NOAA global climate monitoring, said on a conference call with reporters.
The mounting toll of industrialization on the Earth's natural balance is increasingly apparent in the record books of recent decades.
Another factor has been the Pacific Ocean warming trend of El Nino, which experts say exacerbates the planet's already rising warmth.