Odds of 2026 becoming the hottest year surge higher with El Niño

A strong El Niño is already worsening droughts and floods that are pushing up food prices and fueling wildfires. The event is now expected to make 2026 the hottest year on record, overtaking 2024, according to a monthly analysis released Thursday by the research nonprofit Berkeley Earth.

Another scientific body, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, forecasts that 2026 is still unlikely to supplant the 2024 heat record but will come a close second.

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El Niño — a natural feature of global weather marked by occasional heating of the eastern tropical Pacific — temporarily exacerbates human-caused global warming by pushing more ocean heat and moisture into the atmosphere for months. The current pattern is similar to previous, historically strong El Niños in 1997 to 1998 and 2015 to 2016, which brought dryness to Indonesia and the Philippines and parts of the Americas, and wet conditions to the US South and West. Only now, it’s hotter.

There’s some evidence that the Pacific hasn’t produced such conditions in a millennium, said Zeke Hausfather, research scientist at Berkeley Earth, citing a topic that climate researchers have recently debated.

“It may well be possible that this could be the strongest El Niño event in a thousand years,” he said.

Berkeley Earth is one of several scientific organizations that maintain global temperature datasets, all of which tend to report findings that fall within a tenth of a degree of each other. The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, with data through September, shows 2026 as the second hottest year to date.

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Berkeley Earth in January assigned a 12% probability that 2026 would surpass 2024 as the hottest year, and the chances had dropped by May. But the strength of the El Niño took many by surprise as it developed. The onset in June quickly flipped the odds, which are now 96%, and the El Niño may not peak until December.

Because atmospheric temperatures lag El Niño, scientists are confident 2027 will be even hotter than this year.

Last month was the second warmest September globally, at 1.65C above the pre-industrial norm. That’s just a negligible 0.06C behind 2023, when the global average temperature was so abnormally high that Hausfather memorably dubbed it “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas.”

“It is still quite hot, even if it’s not quite that bananas,” said Robert Rohde, the group’s chief scientist.

September 2026 also registered the highest departure from the norm for any month other than September 2023 and August 2026. Fifty-three countries set national heat records. Southwestern Europe, including Spain, Portugal and Italy, were particularly hard hit by aberrant late summer temperatures. Singapore, United Arab Emirates and Burkina Faso were among eight countries that broke national records by more than 0.5C.

The El Niño itself, which is measured as the sea-surface temperature in a particular eastern tropical Pacific region, surpassed monthly marks reached previously only in 2015 and 1877.

© 2026 Bloomberg

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