“It’s just incredible to me. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

That’s what Jessica Blunden, a climate scientist with the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told the New York Times in an interview following the agency’s release on Wednesday of new figures showing that last month was the hottest September since records began and offered further confirmation that 2015 is on track to be the hottest year experienced in modern human history.

Dr. Blunden pointed the Times to measurements in several of the world’s ocean basins, “where surface temperatures are as much as three degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average,” an increase described as “substantial” given the large size of these areas. “We’re seeing it all across the Indian Ocean, in huge parts of the Atlantic Ocean, in parts of the Arctic oceans,” she said. The bottom line, she added: “the world is warming.”

As Andrea Thompson at Climate Central notes, the findings show that “September 2015 was not only the hottest September on record for the globe, but it was warmer than average by a bigger margin than any of the 1,629 months in [NOAA’s records]—that’s all the way back to January 1880.”

NOAA’s latest assessment on global temperatures arrives just weeks ahead of high-profile UN climate talks in Paris, where world leaders will once again come together with the stated goal of reaching an international agreement for addressing the runaway temperatures—and associated social, ecological, and financial costs—associated with global warming and climate change.