El Niño generally tends to increase global temperatures.
By comparison, absolute temperatures vary markedly over even short distances.Consistent with Schmidt's comment, the NASA / NOAA announcement stated that "[g]lobally-averaged temperatures in 2016 were 1.78 degrees Fahrenheit (0.99 degrees Celsius) warmer than the mid-20th century mean" and that the impact of El Niño warming was estimated to have "increased the annual global temperature anomaly for 2016 by 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit (0.12 degrees Celsius)." Comments from climate scientists reported in The Washington Post showed strong agreement in attributing the warming primarily to anthropogenic climate change, with some contribution from El Niño warming, though there were differing views on the significance of individual records.Deke Arndt leads the monitoring group at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information and offered an analogy in a report on NPR: "The long-term warming is a lot like riding up an escalator over time.The trend is faster for land than ocean, faster for Arctic regions, and faster since the 1970s than the longer period.Most of the observed warming occurred in two periods: around 1900 to around 1940 and around 1970 onwards; Attribution of the temperature change to natural or anthropogenic (i.e., human-induced) factors is an important question: see global warming and attribution of recent climate change.