MONTREAL — This year is likely to go down as the hottest, stormiest and driest ever on Planet Earth, making a strong case for the urgent need to combat global warming, said a report released Tuesday at the U.N. Climate Change Conference.

The report by the international environmental group WWF said 2005 is shaping up as the worst ever for extreme weather, with the hottest temperatures, most Arctic melting, worst Atlantic hurricane season and warmest Caribbean waters. It's also been the driest year for many decades in the Amazon, where a drought may surpass anything in the past century.

The report used data from U.S. government sources and the World Meteorological Organization. It was released on the sidelines of the U.N. conference reviewing and upgrading the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty that commits 35 industrialized nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions more than 5 percent by 2012.

Kyoto targets carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases blamed for rising global temperatures and disrupted weather patterns. Many scientists believe that if the temperatures continue to rise, deadly extreme weather will continue to kill humans, disrupt lifestyles and render some animal species extinct.

In October this year, the report noted, NASA reported that the global average temperature was already 0.1 Fahrenheit warmer than in 1998, the record year.

Lara Hansen, chief scientist for WWF's Climate Change Program, said there was more at play than the cyclical patterns explaining the number of hurricanes this year.

"There is a cyclical signature to hurricanes, but what were seeing now is even beyond what that cyclical nature would lead us to believe has happened," Hansen told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Washington. She pointed to the failure of the National Hurricane Center to predict how many hurricanes there would be in 2005.

Last year, the hurricane center predicted 18 to 21 storms, but so many were recorded that the official naming of them exceeded the Roman alphabet and had to be supplemented with letters of the Greek alphabet.

Waters in the Caribbean were also hotter for a longer period of time than previously measured, causing extensive bleaching from Colombia to the Florida Keys, she said.

Consequences also are being felt up North, where the smallest area of Arctic sea ice ever was recorded in September -- 500,000 square miles (1295,000 square kilometers) smaller than the historic average -- and a 9.8 percent decline, per decade, of perennial sea ice cover, the report said.

The numbers echo concerns of Canada's Inuit, who in their own report issued last week observed eroding shorelines, thinning ice and losses of hunting and polar bears, all having a major impact on their lives.

Hansen said some predictions indicate that the Arctic North could become ice-free by the end of the century, even possibly by mid-century.

"The rate at which we are losing sea ice goes beyond the normal models of what we would think would be happening," she said.

With so many environmental flash points, Hansen said the world must accept the urgency of preventing global warming, despite the lack of leadership from Washington.

"The most impact, the most quickly, with the longest guarantee of success is reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuel," she said.

The United States, which produces one-fourth of the world's pollution, has refused to join the Kyoto Protocol, resisting any binding commitments to curb global warming by capping industrial emissions of greenhouse gases, saying it would harm the U.S economy.

U.S. President George W. Bush instead has called for an 18 percent reduction in the U.S. growth rate of greenhouse gases by 2012 and commits about US$5 billion (euro4.3 billion) a year to global warming science and technology.

Source: Associated Press