With last month coming in as one of the warmest Augusts ever observed, 2020 is still likelier than not to be the warmest year on record.
Gavin Schmidt, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, places the current odds at 63 percent, but he also says that "if La Niña develops further, it’ll be a toss-up."
La Niña is characterized by cooler than normal sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific, which tend to depress global average temperatures.
