2026 Set to Be Among Four Warmest Years as El Niño Goes ‘Off the Charts’
ANTALYA, Türkiye — The year 2026 is on course to become one of the four warmest years since modern records began, the World Meteorological Organization said on Monday, as a strengthening El Niño threatens to push global heat and extreme weather higher still into 2027.
In its State of the Climate Update 2026, released on the opening day of the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, the UN agency said the global average surface temperature from January to September was about 1.47°C above the 1850–1900 pre-industrial average. The figure carries an uncertainty of ±0.13°C and is drawn from nine international datasets.
Twelve years at the top
The past 12 years, from 2015 to 2026, are set to be the 12 warmest years in the 177-year observational record, the WMO said, with 2023 to 2026 occupying the top four spots. The January-to-September figure is already comparable to the full-year averages for 2025 (1.43°C) and 2023 (1.46°C), and only slightly below the 2024 record of 1.55°C. Because the data run only to September, and El Niño is still strengthening, the final annual figure is likely to be higher.
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service has gone further, saying 2026 is virtually certain to finish above 1.5°C, with an 80% chance it ends as the second-warmest year on record, behind 2024. October was the hottest October ever recorded, at 1.75°C above the pre-industrial average.
An El Niño ‘off the charts’
El Niño, the natural warming of the tropical Pacific, has been intensifying since August and is expected to reach record strength by December, the WMO said. The agency declares an El Niño when sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific run 0.5°C above average; it forecasts that the current event could reach nearly four times that threshold between November 2026 and January 2027.
“This 2026/2027 El Niño is off the charts. It is different from any El Niño that we have monitored,” WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said in her press conference statement at COP31.
El Niño does not create new heat, Saulo explained — it releases heat stored in the ocean. “El Niño doesn’t add new heat to the planet. It releases heat from the ocean, which is the warmest ever measured. There is simply more heat available to release,” she said. El Niño typically lifts annual global temperatures by around 0.1°C to 0.2°C, and its greatest effect usually falls in the year after it develops, which is why the WMO warns 2027 could break temperature records.
Oceans at record warmth
The oceans have now set heat records for a tenth consecutive year, and the WMO said the imbalance between energy arriving from the sun and energy leaving Earth has reached its highest level since monitoring began. That imbalance has grown by 0.3 watts per square metre per decade since 2001, more than twice the rate of 0.13 watts per square metre per decade recorded between 1960 and 2025.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the world had “entered a new age of climate extremes”, adding that “a supersized El Niño is colliding with a planet already superheated by manmade climate change.”
What it means for the talks
The update landed as nearly 200 countries gathered in Antalya for COP31, which runs until 20 November, with disputes over fossil fuels and funding for vulnerable nations expected to dominate. The United States is not taking part — the summit opened on the tenth anniversary of the Paris Agreement, which the US has left, and the 1.5°C limit the agreement set is now effectively out of reach for 2026 as a whole, according to Copernicus.
Türkiye, the host, has its own climate spotlight: satellites caught methane leaking from a landfill outside Istanbul as the country prepared to host the summit.
The WMO plans to publish its final State of the Global Climate 2026 report in March 2027. Until then, its message is blunt: with El Niño still building and the oceans at record warmth, the heat of 2026 is not the end of the story — it is the run-up to what 2027 may bring.
