As each month of 2016 continues to shatter world records with their warming temperatures, a top climate scientist from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said the Earth is actually experiencing a warming at an "unprecedented pace" in the last 1,000 years.
The Guardian reported that this trend will make it "very unlikely" to meet the 1.5-degree-Celsius limit set and agreed by different countries in the Paris climate accord in December last year.
An analysis of ice cores and sediments suggests that the global warming that we currently experience is beyond anything that we had in the past millennium.
"There's no period that has the trend seen in the 20th century in terms of the inclination [of temperatures]," Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies, told The Guardian.
With each warming month, Schmidt said there is a 99 percent chance that 2016 will be the warmest year on record, beating last year's temperature--which itself broke the benchmark set in 2014.
"There's no pause or hiatus in temperature increase," he said. "This is a chronic problem for society in the next 100 years."
Temperature reconstructions done by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revealed warming temperatures that rose by between 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over a period of 5 millennia or 5,000 years.
The rising temperatures, however, recorded in the past century is nearly 10 times faster.
NASA's website lists evidence showing the severity and seriousness of this rapid climate change. The warming that we currently experience severely impacts our planet and our existence, as seen from the fast-rising sea levels, shrinking ice sheets and glaciers, extreme weather conditions and ocean acidification.
There have been records of species being wiped out due to the drastic effects of climate change. One such example is the bramble cay, an Australian rodent that lived in a small outcrop in the Great Barrier Reef. It is documented as the first mammal whose extinction can be blamed on human-induced climate change.