THE WORLD is now hotter and wetter than it was 100 years ago.
New data released by the Met Office and a global team of experts show there have been dramatic changes since the beginning of the 20th century.
The number of cool nights across the globe have halved to an average of 18 days per year. And warm nights have increased by 55 per cent to 20 days per year.
It is also much wetter than it used to be with an increased number of heavy rainfalls (at least 10mm) over the last 60 years.
However, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggested that large data gaps may skew the data. They drew attention to a lack of information from Africa and northern South America and said the coverage is ‘still insufficient to provide a truly global picture of changes in extremes’.
But, according to The Carbon Brief the lead author, Dr Markus Donat said the research still provided significant trends despite the limitations.
He also said scientists thought there was a clear link between human activity and these temperature changes.
He said: “"A number of previous studies have attributed changes in extreme temperatures and extreme precipitation to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.”
An Eco Experts spokesperson said: “This new data set shows clearly our weather is behaving differently than it used to.
"Whether this is man-made change or not, it still means we should do all we can to behave in a way that is as responsible as possible.
“It will be interesting to see what the future looks like, and whether people will do all they can to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
The Met Office took observations from over 6,000 temperature stations and 11,000 precipitation stations around the world, which look specifically at how extreme events have changed between 1901 and 2010.
The new dataset, called HadEX2 is an update to a previous one that only covered the second half of the 20th century.
The analysis is published online in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres.