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The Earth sizzled in March with the most unusually warm month in recorded history as average land surface temperatures easily exceeded levels deemed by scientists to constitute dangerous climate change.

The abnormal weather has continued into April as the most powerful tropical cyclone ever recorded in the Indian Ocean dumped rain at rates reaching 300 mm an hour, and Australian scientists declared the worst coral bleaching event ever on the Great Barrier Reef.

Combined global land and sea-surface temperatures in March were 1.22 degrees above the 20th-century average, beating the previous record for the month – set just a year earlier – by almost one-third of a degree, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. Each of the past 11 months have now broken global temperature records, the longest such streak in the agency’s 137 years of data collection.

Land surface temperatures for March, though, were 2.33 degrees above the 20th-century average, smashing the previous March record set in 2008 by 0.43 degrees. It was also the most unusually warm reading for any month, eclipsing February, NOAA said.

The record breaking conditions come as leaders of 150-plus nations are due to gather in New York this week to ratify the global climate pact agreed in Paris in late 2015 to limit global warming to 1.5-2 degrees, compared with pre-industrial times………

The most abnormally hot regions of the world last month included Australia, which set a record with minimum temperatures almost 2 degrees above the average for 1961-90, while the Arctic region was about 3.3 degrees above average, NOAA said.

The El Nino has played a role in boosting temperatures in the year. The stalling or reversal of equatorial trade winds in the Pacific that characterise such events created a huge pool of relatively warm water in the central and eastern Pacific that is now breaking up.

However, the first three months of 2016 were not only the warmest on record for surface temperatures by 0.28 degrees – set a year earlier – they also beat the same period in 1998 by 0.45 degrees during a similar strength El Nino, NOAA said.

For the first three months of this year, average land surface temperatures were 2.05 degrees above the 20th-century average and a full 0.95 degrees warmer than in 1998, the agency said.

Most powerful Indian Ocean storm

The list of extreme weather events this year continues to grow……….http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/worse-things-in-store-steaming-hot-world-sets-more-temperature-records-20160419-goaf58.html