What are the chances the world could clock up 353 consecutive months with average temperatures higher than the norm of the 20th century without humans being responsible?

CSIRO's now-defunct climate adaptation flagship crunched the numbers and found the chances were less than one in 100,000.

The chances that humans are not responsible for the rise in average temperatures are less than 1 in 100,000. Credit:Reuters

In other words, there's a 99.999 per cent certainty that human activities – from burning fossil fuels to land-clearing – are responsible for the warming conditions.

"Everyone since February 1985 has lived in a warm world," said Mark Howden, a CSIRO chief research scientist and author of the peer-reviewed report published on Thursday in the Climate Risk Management journal. "In my view, that's pretty extraordinary."