DALLAS - Global temperatures last year were the highest in a century, and North Texas did its part to push up averages.
And, reflecting the global trend, the 1990s were the hottest decade for North Texas.
The Earth's average annual temperature rose 1.20 degrees above a long-term average of 56.9 degrees Fahrenheit, an increase some scientists say only gives more fodder to the concept of global warming.
"It may indeed be evidence of acceleration," said Thomas Karl, director of the National Climate Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Karl spoke yesterday between sessions of the American Meteorological Society conference, which ends Friday.
Worldwide, the last few decades have been warmer than the whole 20th century, Karl said.Seven of the 10 warmest years have been in the 1990s.
With temperatures that soared to 110 degrees and were higher than normal in all but two months of 1998, the Fort Worth-Dallas area set a few of its own records.
Last year's average of 68.3 degrees beat the previous record of 68.2 degrees set in 1933 during the Dust Bowl era, said Skip Ely, meteorologist in charge at the Fort Worth office of the National Weather Service.
"It wound up being the second-warmest May, fifth-warmest June, second-warmest July, ninth-warmest August and second-warmest September," Ely said in a telephone interview.
Only March and April temperatures were below normal in North Texas, he said.
Local and national weather officials blamed El Nino for much of last year's heat, despite the fact that the traditionally cooler La Nina took control of most of the globe's weather by year's end.
El Nino and La Nina are terms that refer to heating or cooling of the Pacific Ocean and can affect weather globally.
El Nino helped to trigger the hot, dry weather in the spring in Texas, Ely said.With that kind of head start going into the traditionally hot summer months, the region ended up with above-normal temperatures into September even with the demise of El Nino, he said.
Other parts of the world felt the heat, too.
Western Europe and the United States experienced the warmest February in 100 years, according to NOAA statistics.In June, a record-breaking heat wave in central Russia sparked huge fires.
Australia recorded its highest annual average temperature since reliable records began in 1910, and Canada reported one of its warmest years since 1948.
In the United States, the average temperature tied with that of 1934 to produce the warmest year in records dating to 1895.
In a similar announcement released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on the Internet, scientists said that El Nino alone could not account for either the long-term warming trend or last year's extreme heat.
Global warming is believed by many researchers to be partly caused by the increasing amount of human-made gases in the atmosphere, formed by the burning of coal, oil and gas, the NASA report said.
But some scientists argue that the changes could be caused by normal climate fluctuations.
William Gray, a Colorado State University atmospheric scientist known for his predictions on how strong hurricane seasons would be, theorizes that the world has been warming up naturally, not artificially.
"Climate change has always been with us.You can't deny climate change," Gray said."Whether humans are affecting it much, we don't know. "
The first nine years of the decade are seven-tenths of a degree warmer than the global average for the past 119 years.
David Easterling, a scientist at the National Climatic Data Center, said: "When you start looking at some of the unprecedented events that have occurred, 16 months in a row that set a record
the evidence is really starting to mount that something is happening.
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