The World Meteorological Organization has warned that 2026 will rank among the four warmest years on record, with a strengthening El Niño set to add further heat and extreme-weather risks into 2027. The warning comes in the WMO’s State of the Climate Update 2026, released on Monday 9 November on the opening day of the COP31 climate conference in Antalya, Türkiye.
The global average surface temperature from January to September 2026 was 1.47 degrees Celsius above the 1850–1900 pre-industrial average, according to the WMO, drawing on nine internationally recognised temperature datasets. The figure is provisional rather than a final annual temperature, and is likely to rise before the end of the year as El Niño intensifies. The past four years, 2023 to 2026, are now the four warmest years in the record, and the past 12 years, from 2015 to 2026, are the 12 warmest ever documented.
WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said the findings “give new meaning to the phrase off the charts,” in a statement accompanying the report, and warned that natural climate cycles are colliding with an unprecedented baseline of trapped heat.
El Niño set to peak in December
The new development in Monday’s update is the El Niño forecast. The event has been intensifying since August and is expected to be the strongest on record by December, according to the WMO, and to continue into early 2027. El Niño typically boosts annual global mean temperatures by around 0.1 to 0.2 degrees, and it usually has its strongest effect on annual temperatures in the year after it develops — pointing to further heat in 2027.
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service has gone further, forecasting on measurements through October that 2026 is virtually certain to exceed 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, with an 80 per cent probability it will become the second-warmest year on record, behind 2024, which recorded 1.55 degrees. Berkeley Earth, the independent US climate research group, has forecast that 2026 will be the hottest year in recorded history, a more confident call than the WMO’s own assessment.
Final verdict due in March
The WMO update includes data up to September where available and therefore does not reflect the most recent impacts of El Niño. Its final State of the Global Climate 2026 report will be issued in March 2027, incorporating contributions from dozens of national meteorological services and UN partners.
Atmospheric concentrations of the three main long-lived greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — reached new record highs in 2025 and continued rising throughout 2026, the report says. With COP31 negotiators deadlocked over finance on day one, the WMO’s message to Antalya is that the margin for incremental action has all but vanished.
Sources: WMO via SciMex (9 Nov 2026); Okay News (9 Nov 2026); PTI via Swadesi (9 Nov 2026); Nexus Europa (9 Nov 2026).
