At this point, it's safe to assume you'll see a story like this (just with a different month in the headline) again and again, given that Planet Earth's thermostat seems to be stuck on "record warm."

Three of the official climate reporting organizations around the world, including the Japan Meteorological Agency, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have each found that June was the Earth's warmest such month on record.

See also: 2015 is likely to beat 2014 as the warmest year on record

NASA and the JMA data was available late last week, but NOAA's data went online Monday morning.

In addition, NOAA found that the first six months of this year were the warmest on record, increasing the likelihood that 2015 will overtake 2014 for the warmest year title. According to NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina, the global average surface temperature was so far above average during June that it was the fourth-highest monthly departure from average for any month on record.

This is particularly noteworthy, since the two highest monthly departures have both occurred this year, in February and March. So the heat in 2015 isn't just breaking records, it's smashing them.

This, in part, is due to the development of a strong El Niño in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which tends to boost global sea and air temperatures. However, the El Niño alone cannot account for the full amount of warming, nor its consistency in recent years, which include years when no El Niño was present.

For example, 14 of the 15 warmest years since record-keeping began in the late 1800s have occurred since the year 2000.

Deke Arndt, the head of climate monitoring at NCEI, has compared the relationship between manmade climate change and El Niño to standing on an escalator. "Climate change is a long-term driver, so that’s like standing on an escalator as it goes up," he said on a press conference call last month. El Niño, on the other hand, "is like jumping up and down while you’re on that escalator."

"So, the longer that we go into history, we’re riding up the escalator. And now that we're getting an El Niño event, we happen to be jumping up at the same time, and so they play together to produce outcomes like what is likely to be the warmest year on record,” Arndt said.

June marked the third month this year that broke its monthly temperature record, joining March and May. The other months of 2015 were each in their top 5 warmest. The past 12 months ending in June (July 2014 to June 2015) set another record for the warmest such period as well, and according to NOAA, the 10 warmest 12-month periods have all been marked in the past 10 months.

The average global temperature across land surfaces in June was 2.27 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.26 degrees Celsius, above the 20th-century average. This was the highest June temperature over land on record, surpassing the previous record set in 2012 0.11 degrees Fahrenheit, or 0.06 degrees Celsius.

Record warmth was spread across the western U.S., parts of South America, central to western Africa, central Asia, and parts of southeastern Asia.

Temperature anomalies during the month of June from 1880 to 2015, showing 2015 as the warmest such month. Image: NOAA

In contrast, western Greenland and some parts of India and China were cooler than average, and northern Pakistan was much cooler than average, NOAA reported.

For the oceans, the June global sea surface temperature was 1.33 degrees Fahrenheit (0.74 degrees Celsius) above the 20th century average, which was the warmest for June, surpassing the previous record set last year. This also tied with September 2014 as the highest monthly departure from average for any month for the globally-averaged sea surface temperature.

Nine of the 10 highest monthly departures from average have occurred since May 2014, NOAA said.

The NOAA climate findings are based on an updated dataset that takes into account many more land surface weather stations as well as ocean buoys than previous versions did. The dataset was used in a recent paper published in the journal Science, which showed a smaller global warming "pause" since 1997 than other climate studies had.

The transition to the new data set, which NOAA says is more accurate, may shift some historical rankings slightly.