Last year tied with 2005 as the warmest on record, according to U.S. agencies, but is likely to be overtaken soon by the next year with a strong El Nino weather event, experts said on Thursday. A gradual build-up of greenhouse gases from human activities is heating the planet but natural events such as El Nino, which every few years warms the surface of the eastern and central Pacific Ocean, can have a far bigger immediate impact. "It will take an El Nino year to break the record, so possibly the next one," said professor Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain.
Last year tied with 2005 as the warmest on record, according to U.S. agencies, but is likely to be overtaken soon by the next year with a strong El Nino weather event, experts said on Thursday.
A gradual build-up of greenhouse gases from human activities is heating the planet but natural events such as El Nino, which every few years warms the surface of the eastern and central Pacific Ocean, can have a far bigger immediate impact.
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"It will take an El Nino year to break the record, so possibly the next one," said professor Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain.
On Wednesday, the U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies said 2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest year since reliable data started in 1880, capping a decade of record temperatures.
Last year started with an El Nino, as did 2005 and 1998 which is rated the warmest year by the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
The WMO is likely to give a view of 2010's ranking in late January, after compiling temperature data that is also due from Jones' unit alongside NCDC and NASA. El Nino can disrupt world weather, with effects on everything from food to energy prices.
Knut Alfsen, research director at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo, said greenhouse gases from human activities caused the Earth to absorb more energy than it radiated into space.
"Most of that energy goes into the oceans -- so a record depends on the behavior of the oceans, typically an El Nino or La Nina event," he said.
Image from NASA shows 3-D visualization of the 1997-98 El Niño temperature anomaly (red band in the Pacific Ocean), with higher than normal sea surface temperature (SST) and wildfires in South America. [Image by R.B. Husar, Washington University; land layer from the SeaWiFS Project; fire maps from the European Space Agency; SST from the Naval Oceanographic Office's Visualization Laboratory; and cloud layer from SSEC, U. of Wisconsin, to the Visible Earth (http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?478).]
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