Greenhouse gas concentrations are at the highest levels in 3 million years.

The report confirmed that 2019 was the second-warmest year on record.

"We are currently way off track to meeting either the 1.5°C or 2°C targets that the Paris Agreement calls for."

The planet is "way off track" in dealing with climate change, a new United Nations report says, and experts declared that climate change is a far greater threat than the coronavirus.

"It is important that all the attention that needs to be given to fight this disease does not distract us from the need to defeat climate change," U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday, according to Agence France Presse.

Although emissions have been reduced with travel curtailed because of the virus, Guterres noted that "we will not fight climate change with a virus. Whilst the disease is expected to be temporary, climate change has been a phenomenon for many years, and and will remain with us for decades and require constant action.

"We count the cost in human lives and livelihoods as droughts, wildfires, floods and extreme storms take their deadly toll,” Guterres said.

The report confirmed that 2019 was the second-warmest year on record and the past decade the hottest in human history.

Last year ended with a global average temperature that was 1.1 degree Celsius above estimated preindustrial levels, second only to the record set in 2016, when a very strong El Niño event contributed to an increased global temperature atop the overall warming trend.

“We are currently way off track to meeting either the 1.5°C or 2°C targets that the Paris Agreement calls for,” Guterres wrote in the report.

"Greenhouse gas concentrations are at the highest levels in 3 million years – when the Earth’s temperature was as much as 3 degrees hotter and sea levels some 15 meters higher,” said Guterres at a joint news conference with World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas at U.N. headquarters in New York.

The main greenhouse gases that cause global warming are carbon dioxide and methane, which are emitted from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.

“Given that greenhouse gas levels continue to increase, the warming will continue. A recent decadal forecast indicates that a new annual global temperature record is likely in the next five years. It is a matter of time,” Taalas said.

“We just had the warmest January on record. Winter was unseasonably mild in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere. Smoke and pollutants from damaging fires in Australia circumnavigated the globe, causing a spike in carbon dioxide emissions.

"Record temperatures in Antarctica were accompanied by large-scale ice melt and the fracturing of a glacier which will have repercussions for sea-level rise," Taalas added.

Professor Brian Hoskins of Imperial College London told the Guardian that "the report is a catalogue of weather in 2019 made more extreme by climate change, and the human misery that went with it."

"It points to a threat that is greater to our species than any known virus – we must not be diverted from the urgency of tackling it by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to zero as soon as possible."