"The series of warm years is continuing," Soobasschandra Chacowry, a director at the WMO, told journalists.

The year is also finishing with an above average number of hurricanes and deadly typhoons, with floods killing thousands in the Philippines and Haiti and storms wreaking $43 billion in damage in the United States. Droughts swept Africa, India and Australia and contributed to record forest fires in Alaska. The global mean surface temperature in 2004 is expected to reach 0.44 degrees Celsius above the 1961-1990 annual average of 14 degrees, with October the warmest October ever recorded.

"It is expected from models that the air temperature will go on rising and the surface temperature will go on rising and the glaciers will go on melting," said WMO scientist Gilles Sommeria.

"There is the likelihood of an increase in extreme events in the coming decade."

PINNED BLAME

Sommeria said the rise in greenhouse gases was man-made.

"The controversy on the greenhouse effect is somewhat artificial," he said, pointing to a 2001 UN report predicting global temperatures will rise by 1.4-5.8 degrees by 2100, mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels such as gasoline and coal -- the sharpest rise over a century in the last 10,000 years.

Environment ministers from 80 countries met on Wednesday for the final days of a UN conference on climate change that has been unable to crack US resistance to join international efforts against global warming.

The conference of nearly 200 nations has turned into a polarized affair, with the European Union and nations supporting the Kyoto protocol to cut greenhouse gases in one camp and the United States, the world's biggest polluter, in the other.

Just two months before Kyoto goes into force thanks to Russia's recent ratification, the United States has made it very clear it will not sign up for Kyoto's mandatory caps on emissions after Washington withdrew from the agreement in 2001.

Scientists say rising temperatures are likely to disrupt the climate and trigger more floods, storms and droughts. As glaciers melt, sea levels may rise, swamping low lying Pacific islands and coasts from Florida to Bangladesh.

Chacowry urged governments and people to take heed of year-to-year developments in the abnormal weather patterns documented in the WMO study.

In the last century, the global surface temperature rose by over 0.6 degrees Celsius, with the rate of change since 1976 three times higher than for the past 100 years on the whole, the WMO said.