October continued global heat parade as 2015 soars toward record

Doyle Rice | USA TODAY

Last month was the warmest October on record worldwide, federal scientists announced Wednesday, further cementing the likelihood that 2015 will be Earth's warmest year since records began in 1880.

October also marked the sixth consecutive month a monthly global temperature record has been broken, according to the report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The Earth's temperature in October was 1.76 degrees above the average of 57.1 degrees.

Data from other agencies that keep weather records — NASA and the Japan Meteorological Agency — also confirmed it was the warmest October.

NOAA said that record warmth occurred across the entire southern half of Australia, part of southern and southeastern Asia, much of central and southern Africa, most of Central America and northern South America and parts of western North America.

Only a few spots were cooler than average in October: Argentina, part of northeastern Canada, scattered regions of western and central Russia and central Japan.

The first 10 months of 2015 were the warmest such period on record across the world's land and ocean surfaces, at 1.55 degrees above average, NOAA reported.

"The probability that 2015 will be a record warm year is now 99.9 percent," Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, tweeted Tuesday after NASA's data came out.

The record warm year is being fueled by a strong, naturally occurring El Niño and man-made global warming.

The year should end with a worldwide temperature about 1.8 degrees above pre-industrial levels, halfway to the stated international goal of limiting temperature rise to no more than 3.6 degrees from that baseline by 2100, according to the United Nations.

Climate talks to limit global warming are slated to get underway in Paris later this month.