UN says climate change ‘out of control’ after likely hottest week on record

The UN secretary general has said that “climate change is out of control”, as an unofficial analysis of data showed that average world temperatures in the seven days to Wednesday were the hottest week on record.

“If we persist in delaying key measures that are needed, I think we are moving into a catastrophic situation, as the last two records in temperature demonstrates,” António Guterres said, referring to the world temperature records broken on Monday and Tuesday.

The average global air temperature was 17.18C (62.9F) on Tuesday, according to data collated by the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), surpassing the record 17.01C reached on Monday.

For the seven-day period ending Wednesday, the daily average temperature was .04C (.08F), higher than any week in 44 years of record-keeping, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer data.

That metric showed that Earth’s average temperature on Wednesday remained at the record high of 17.18C.

Climate Reanalyzer uses data from the NCEP climate forecast system to provide a time series of daily…