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2026 set to rank among four hottest years on record, UN weather agency says
The World Meteorological Organization's State of the Climate Update 2026, released as COP31 opened, puts January–September warming at 1.47°C above pre-industrial levels, with a strong El Niño set to push heat further into 2027.
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The year 2026 is on track to finish as one of the four hottest on record, the World Meteorological Organization said on Monday, releasing its State of the Climate Update on the opening day of the COP31 talks in Antalya.
Between January and September, the global average surface temperature ran about 1.47°C above the pre-industrial average, a figure the WMO drew from nine datasets. The past 12 years have each ranked among the 12 warmest since records began around 1850, and the past four years — 2023 to 2026 — are the four warmest of all.
The report lands against a backdrop the WMO describes plainly: a very strong El Niño is building, and it is expected to unleash more heat and extreme weather well into 2027. The update's data run only to September, so the full force of that El Niño is not yet in the numbers.
The figures themselves are solid — the 1.47°C January-to-September anomaly, with an uncertainty of ±0.13°C, sits close to the whole-year averages for 2025 (1.43°C) and 2023 (1.46°C) and below the 2024 record of 1.55°C, all confirmed in the WMO's own release. Where the reporting diverges is on what comes next: Berkeley Earth puts the chance of 2026 setting a new annual record at 95%, while the WMO itself is more cautious, ranking the year only among the top four. Copernicus has separately said 2026 is virtually certain to be the second calendar year after 2024 to exceed 1.5°C. The final WMO verdict, with full-year data, will not come until March 2027.
The timing is deliberate. Negotiators from nearly 200 countries are gathered in Antalya for two weeks, and the WMO report is the scientific baseline they will argue over — on finance, on adaptation, and on whether the 1.5°C threshold set in Paris is now a line the world crosses in practice even while it remains a long-term goal on paper. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the world had entered a new age of climate extremes, with a supersized El Niño colliding with a planet already superheated by manmade warming.
The leaders' summit at COP31, on 11 and 12 November, is the first test of whether the numbers move the negotiations; the conference runs until 20 November.