The Arctic is at its warmest for 2,000 years despite the fact natural cycles mean the area should be cooling, according to research which scientists say proves climate change is man-made.
The wide ranging study used computer simulations to reconstruct summer temperatures across the Arctic over the last 2,000 years.
It found that the area has been warming in the last one hundred years and reached its hottest years in the last decade.
However, the Arctic should be in a cooling period caused by a "cyclical wobble" in Earth's orbit around the Sun, that means the Earth has been getting less sun on the North Pole in the summertime.
David Schneider, from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, who carried out the research, said the Arctic should now be in a natural cooling phase but temperatures were not dropping.
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