2015 Closes in on Becoming the Warmest Year Yet

With each passing month 2015 is edging closer and closer to locking in its ranking as the warmest year on record for the planet, and the chances of that happening are now at 93 percent, according to calculations from NASA.

The strong El Niño event that has taken shape this year – which could rank among the strongest on record – has been a large factor in keeping global temperatures elevated, but the long-term warming signal arising from the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has also made such heat records more likely.

According to NASA’s global temperature archive, this September was the second warmest on record (going back to 1880), second only to September 2014.  The year-to-date is the warmest on record, and “with three-quarters of the year already done, the ability to change things in the last three months is limited,” Gavin Schmidt, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which keeps the temperature records, said in an email.

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