August was the joint hottest month ever recorded globally, according to the European climate agency Copernicus.

Dr Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at Copernicus, described August as "a remarkable month in the global climate record", adding that its impacts had been "increasingly being felt by communities, economies and ecosystems across the world".

She said the combination of record air temperatures, record ocean heat and Europe's exceptional summer showed how climate change was now driving extremes across "both the atmosphere and the oceans".

UN climate chief Simon Stiell said the record clearly demonstrated humanity's impact on the climate.

"The evidence is irrefutable: this is the spiralling price of humanity's fossil fuel addiction, and the global climate crisis it is fuelling," he said.

Researchers at Copernicus pointed to two overlapping factors behind the record temperatures. The ongoing burning of fossil fuels continues to drive long-term warming, while the rise of a powerful El Nino weather pattern is compounding the effect.

El Nino is a natural climate pattern in which a band of the eastern Pacific Ocean turns unusually warm, releasing large amounts of stored ocean heat into the atmosphere and pushing global temperatures higher for around a year.

The current El Nino is still strengthening and could become one of the most powerful on record, according to the Copernicus team.

Researchers warned that the biggest impact of the phenomenon on global temperatures is expected over the coming year, suggesting the current run of record-breaking months may have further to go.