UN report: 2026 on track to be among four hottest years on record as El Niño drives warming

Every indicator here is telling the same story. We're seeing the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is showing up in the ocean, in the atmosphere, in the melting of ice and the rising of sea levels.”

This year is on track to be one of the four hottest on record, driven by a powerful El Niño and perpetuating a warming streak of more than a decade, a UN report showed on Monday.

Countries are preparing to meet in Turkey ​from November 9 to 20 for the next round of climate talks and the World Meteorological Organization "State of the Climate" report provides the latest available data to inform their discussions.

Between January and September this year, the global average temperature was 1.47 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average and could rise further due to a major El Niño, the report showed.

The WMO report, which encompasses nine data sets, showed that each of the past 12 years, including 2026, was ranked among the 12 warmest ever recorded since records began in around 1850.

“Every indicator here is telling the same story. We're seeing the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is showing up in the ocean, in the atmosphere, in the melting of ice and the rising of sea levels,” WMO Head of Climate Information John Kennedy told reporters in Geneva ahead of the conference.

Planet increasingly accumulating heat

The EU's Copernicus climate service already said 2026 was all but certain to become the ​second calendar year after 2024 to exceed the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius ‌above pre-industrial levels set in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The planet is increasingly accumulating heat, the UN report said, with ocean temperatures continuing to rise this year from 2025 all-time highs.

Global mean sea levels have also reached a record this year as glaciers and ice sheets melt and seawater expands as it heats, the report said.

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