August joint-hottest month on record as climate change and El Niño drive heat

Dr Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at Copernicus, described August as "a remarkable month in the global climate record", and its impacts had been "increasingly being felt by communities, economies and ecosystems across the world".

The combination of record air temperatures, record ocean heat and Europe's exceptional summer showed how climate change was now driving extremes across "both the atmosphere and the oceans", she said.

World's oceans hit highest temperature on record

UN climate chief Simon Stiell said the record clearly showed humanity's impact on the climate.

"The evidence is irrefutable: this is the spiralling price of humanity's fossil fuel addiction, and the global climate crisis it is fuelling," he said.

On top of the ongoing impact of the use of fossil fuels, the rise of a powerful El Niño is making matters worse, the researchers have said.

El Niño is a natural climate pattern in which a band of the eastern Pacific turns unusually warm, releasing vast amounts of stored ocean heat into the atmosphere and nudging global temperatures upwards for around a year.

The one currently being experienced is still strengthening and could become one of the most powerful on record, according to the Copernicus team.

The biggest impact of this natural phenomenon on global temperatures is expected to hit over the coming year, meaning the current run of records may have further to go.