Scientists reported a second straight year of record-breaking global temperatures on Wednesday - and predicted an even hotter 2016.

Researchers widely attributed the record temperatures to global warming caused by greenhouse gasses and the El Nino weather pattern, which tends to increase world temperatures by liberating heat from the Pacific Ocean.

"It's when you have a combination of the long-term warming, plus the temporary, upward blip from El Nino that you can set records like this," said Dr. John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas State Climatologist and a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University.

The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and NASA follow slightly different methods in tracking and analyzing global temperatures, but both put the 2015 temperature at about 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average.

It marked the fourth time in 11 years that Earth broke annual marks for high temperature.

"It's getting to the point where breaking record is the norm," Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe said. "It's almost unusual when we're not breaking a record."

Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies, said scientists are already seeing the impacts of global warming and predicted the temperature will continue to climb.

"It's happening because the dominant force is carbon dioxide" from burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.

Ronald Sass, a climate fellow with Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy, said the solution is drastically reducing greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. He advocated for greater use of carbon-capture technology and solar and wind energy, while curbing dependence on fossil fuels.

"It's probably going to get much worse if we don't do something rather soon about it," Sass said. "We've got to make up our minds by 2025 or 2030 to do something about it, or we're not going to be able to change it all."

Texas is also warming, though not as rapidly as the globe as a whole, Nielsen-Gammon said. The state's annual average temperature has stayed above the long-term average since 1997. In the bigger picture, he said, Texas is now warmer than it has been during any previous period, going back to 1895.

Texas' annual average temperature in 2015 was 65.8 degrees Fahrenheit - above the state's long-term average of 64.8 degrees, though it did not break the state's record high set in 2012.

Texas is located in a part of the globe that tends to be cooler during an El Nino, a warming of parts of the Pacific Ocean generally near the equator that alters weather worldwide.

Nielsen-Gammon said the recent El Nino helped keep temperatures in Texas down and rainfall and snow up, he said. The state recorded a record-setting 41 inches of rain in 2015, surpassing a record set in 1941.

Some climate change naysayers have criticized how the government tracks temperatures, but Nielsen-Gammon said that is not the only indication the Earth is heating up.

"We have ocean temperatures that show warming, satellite data that shows warming if you look over a long enough period of time," he said. "We've got changes in snow cover, changes in glaciers and in plant communities and so forth. So while we can't say how much the temperature has changed to the second decimal point, we definitely know which way it's been going."

Changing that, he said, will be a slow process. Impacts from the recent global climate change talks in Paris likely won't be seen for several decades, he said.

"The temperature will keep warming on a decade by decade basis for the foreseeable future," he said. "El Nino is still going strong and next year has a chance of being warmer than next year as a result of that. And then the year after will probably be cooler because of short-term variation. But we're not going to get anywhere near what we had 100 years ago."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.