The last time the Earth was this hot, the oceans were six to nine meters higher than they are today - that was 115,000 years ago.  A leading climate scientist says it doesn't appear as though anyone is doing anything about it.

"There's a misconception that we've begun to address the climate problem," said James Hansen, a former senior NASA climate scientist known as the father of climate change science.  He raised the issue into the public eye during the 1980s with his testimony to the US Congress. "This misapprehension is based on the Paris climate deal where governments clapped themselves on the back but when you look at the science it doesn't compute, it’s not true.

"Even with optimistic assumptions (future emissions reduction) will cost hundreds of trillions of dollars.  It's potentially putting young people in charge of a situation that is beyond their control.  It's not clear they will be able to take such actions," he added.

Hansen and eleven other scientists released a paper showing how 2016 temperature is likely to be 1.25 - 1.30 C degrees above pre-industrial times, following a warming trend where the world has heated up at a rate of 0.18 C degrees per decade over the past 45 years.  The atmosphere's concentration of the most potent greenhouse gases -  carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide -  has been accelerating in recent years.

The COP21 conference in Paris last December set a target of limiting global warming to just 1.5 C degrees.  Hansen and his colleagues say that won’t be possible unless we find ways to actually remove some of the carbon dioxide presently stored in the atmosphere.  The technology needed to remove that much CO2 from the air hasn't been invented yet, and might cost US$104 Trillion to $570 Trillion.  Hansen says such aspirations carry "large risks and uncertain feasibility", assuming anyone were working on it.

Hansen says that instead of having scientists and environmentalists talk about it, governments are going to have to step in.

"The science is crystal clear, we have to phase out emissions over the next few decades," Hansen said.  "That won't happen without substantial actions by Congress and the executive branch and that's not happening so we need the courts to apply pressure, as they did with civil rights."