The India Meteorological Department, in its draft climate summary, said 2017 was the hottest year recorded in the country’s history – the fourth straight year that the record has been broken, the Hindustan Times reported on Friday. The average temperature across India in 2017 was 0.71 degrees Celsius above the 1971-2001 average, the department said.

The period from October to December 2017 was the third warmest since 1901, the Met department said after analysing weather data.

Scientists on Thursday said 2017 was the hottest year on record without an additional boost by the natural climate cycle El Niño, The Guardian reported. There were extreme weather events worldwide over the year, from hurricanes in the United States and the Caribbean to scorching heatwaves in Australia and a drought and flood in Asia.

El Niño is a climatic phenomenon that causes irregular variation in winds and sea surface temperatures over the tropical Eastern Pacific Ocean. It occurs when water in the western tropical Pacific Ocean becomes abnormally warm. Its causes droughts in places in the Western Pacific that are usually damp, such as areas in Indonesia and Australia, and drier places such as the west coast of South America suffer floods.

Data published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Aeronautics Space Administration in the United States and the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office show that 17 of the 18 hottest years recorded since 1850 have occurred since 2000, The Guardian report said.

“This is the new normal,” The New York Times quoted Gavin A Schmidt, the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, as saying. “It is also changing,” he said. “It is not that we have gotten to a new plateau – this is not where we will stay. In ten years we are going to say ‘Oh look, another record decade of warming temperatures.’”