Two federal agencies announced on Monday that 1998 was the hottest year on record, but the pattern is even more extensive than that, experts say.
The 1990s will go down as the hottest decade on record, no matter how cool 1999 turns out to be, a Knight Ridder statistical analysis of 119 years of global temperatures indicates.
NASA, then the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, announced Monday in press releases that 1998 was the hottest year ever with an average temperature of 58.1 degrees - 1.2 degrees hotter than normal.
But the real story is the rapid acceleration of the warming since 1976, which has resulted in the hottest-ever decade, Tom Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center, said Monday.
The long heat wave has scientists working to assess how much of it is caused by increases in man-made greenhouse gases and how much is natural, produced by a spate of El Nino warmings of the Pacific Ocean.
"This is a signature that the global warming we expected is rearing its head," said Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a Colorado institution funded by the National Science Foundation.
But others see a different picture.
William Gray, a Colorado State University atmospheric scientist who made his reputation the past 20 years predicting 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 1990s have been so hot that 1999 would have to average at least 2 degrees colder than normal to keep the decade from being a record, according to the analysis of historical temperature data. And that is pretty much impossible, experts said, because the average temperature doesn't change that rapidly.
The 1990s as a decade, so far, is 0.70 of a degree warmer than the global average for the past 119 years. The previous hottest decade, the 1980s, was only 0.40 of a degree hotter than normal and before that the hottest decade, the 1940s, were less than 0.20 a degree above normal.
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