Too hot, too fast, says UN Living on the edge: A Sri Lankan man walks past a house damaged by sea erosion in Colombo. The planet has warmed faster since the turn of the century than ever recorded, almost doubling the pace of sea-level increase and causing a 20-fold jump in heat-related deaths, the United Nations said. The decade to 2010 was the warmest for both hemispheres and for land and sea, the UN's World Meteorological Organisation said. In a report examining climate trends for the beginning of the millennium, almost 94 per cent of countries logged their warmest 10 years on record. "The decadal rate of increase between 1991-2000 and 2001-10 was unprecedented," the organisation's secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, said. Rising concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases are changing our climate, with far-reaching implications for our environment and our oceans. When measured globally, every year of the decade except 2008 was among the 10 warmest on record, the report showed. The trend has also continued since 2010, beyond the scope of the report, in most parts of the world. Australia's most recent summer was its hottest on record, and 2013 has so far been its second-hottest year on record. The report underlines the challenge the globe faces in containing temperature gains since industrialisation to the 2 degrees ceiling set by UN climate treaty negotiators. The planet is on course to warm by about at least 4 degrees by 2100 because emissions are still rising, according to many national science and energy agencies, and the World Bank. Deaths from heat waves surged to 136,000 in the 10-year period from fewer than 6000 the previous decade A total of 511 disasters related to tropical cyclones killed 170,000 people, but deaths from storms and floods fell. Said Mr Jarraud: "Despite the significant decrease in casualties due to severe storms and flooding, the report highlighted an alarming impact on health and mortality rates caused by the European and Russian heat waves." He said the report demonstrated that there had been no "pause" in global warming since the mid-1990s, as some have claimed. "There's no plateau," he said. If you filter out the very short-term variability, the last decade was the warmest by a significant margin. While air temperatures rose, most of the extra heat trapped on Earth was being stored in the deep ocean, where it was bound to released, he said. Sea levels rose about 3 millimetres a year, almost double the 20th century rate of 1.6 millimetres a year. The report came as Europe voted to approve a plan to bolster its carbon market, designed to cut emissions and curb temperature rises. Bloomberg, New York Times