2010: The new warmest year on record?

The climate center (NCDC) reports that the Earth’s combined land and ocean average surface temperature from January-April was 56 degrees, which is 1.24 degrees above the 20th-century average.

El Nino — a periodic natural warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean — is partly to blame for the unusual warmth.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies also reports that 2010, so far, is the warmest out of 131 years. Both NCDC and NASA use data that goes back to 1880.