Across North America and Europe, out-of-control wildfires are scorching landscapes while deadly heat waves linger over major population centers. At the same time, the world’s oceans have hit their hottest recorded temperatures for this time of year, with a rapidly strengthening El Niño forecast to reach unprecedented intensity that will send global temperatures soaring and disrupt weather patterns across every continent. While this summer of extreme heat may feel like an unrivaled climate catastrophe, 2026 has not yet claimed the dubious title of the world’s hottest year on record — at least, not yet. Current climate data ranks 2026 as the third-warmest year to date, trailing only 2024 and 2025. But leading climate scientists say that by the end of the calendar year, the combined force of accelerating human-caused global warming and an unusually strong El Niño makes it increasingly likely that 2026 will surpass 2024 to claim the top spot as the hottest year ever recorded, if not come extremely close.
Even if 2026 does break the record, climate experts widely agree that the new mark will not stand for long. While there is some debate among researchers over whether 2026 will take the crown this year, there is near-universal consensus that 2027 will exceed all modern temperature records, potentially by a substantial margin.
Recent years have seen global conflicts draw public and policy attention away from the climate crisis, but the current wave of heat and fire makes the issue impossible to ignore. “With wars around the globe in the last few years people didn’t pay much attention to climate change because the world was on fire in different ways. The world is now on fire again with climate change in a way that’s increasingly difficult to ignore,” said Zeke Hausfather, a leading climate scientist at Berkeley Earth. “It’s going to keep getting worse.”
Hausfather’s current analysis puts the probability that 2026 will overtake 2024 as the hottest year on record at 35 percent, a figure he has adjusted upward nearly every month since March, when the odds stood at just 7 percent. James Hansen, the former top NASA climate scientist widely regarded as the godfather of modern climate science for four decades of accurate long-term warnings about rising temperatures, predicts 2026 will edge past 2024 by the end of the year.
Ocean temperature data already points to this outcome, Hansen notes. Global daily sea surface temperatures matched 2024 levels starting in May, and have hit record highs almost every day since June. Since oceans cover more than 70 percent of Earth’s surface, there is roughly a six-week lag between ocean warming and a corresponding rise in the global average surface temperature, Hansen explained. That means widespread global temperature records are imminent. This year, 82 percent of the world’s ocean surface is experiencing damaging marine heatwaves, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) previously forecast just a 0.1 percent chance that 2026 would claim the number one spot, with a 66 percent chance it would rank as the fourth-warmest year on record. But Russell Vose, head of monitoring at NOAA, confirmed that those odds will be revised upward significantly when the agency releases its updated July analysis.
Hausfather says the shifting odds stem from updated forecasts that now predict El Niño will reach historically unmatched strength. El Niño is a natural temporary climate pattern characterized by warming of surface waters in the equatorial Pacific, which raises global average temperatures and amplifies extreme weather events across the globe. Most current projections show this El Niño becoming the strongest ever recorded.
Unlike natural El Niño events of the past, today’s event is releasing far more stored heat than historic averages, explained Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at Climate Central, a non-profit science and communications organization. “El Ninos always release pent-up heat in the ocean, but because of greenhouse gases trapping heat and 90% of it going into the world’s seas, there’s more heat to release,” Labe said. He added that overall ocean heat content, a key benchmark of human-caused climate change, continues to set new record highs year after year.
Crucially, climate scientists emphasize that the extreme heat and wildfire risk this summer cannot be blamed solely on El Niño, as the event’s full temperature impacts do not typically emerge for several more months. Instead, the rampant extreme weather of summer 2026 is exactly the outcome long warned by scientists as a consequence of burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.
“The driver of the record warmth is climate change in the background. And it’s a much larger — much, much larger — contribution than El Nino, which is just a tenth to two-tenths of a degree on top of that long-term trend,” Labe said.
Hansen added that the pace of warming is accelerating faster than many models predicted, for two key reasons. First, traditional industrial pollution that produces cooling aerosols (which have long masked the full intensity of greenhouse gas-driven warming) has declined in recent decades. Second, it appears the climate system is more sensitive to greenhouse gas emissions than many scientists previously anticipated.
This year’s heat waves have been particularly punishing in regions unaccustomed to extreme triple-digit temperatures, unlike the consistently hot tropics, researchers note. They have also been unusually intense at night, preventing residents from cooling down after daytime heat, disrupting sleep, damaging public health and reducing worker productivity, explained Samantha Burgess, global strategic lead at Copernicus.
Burgess pointed to Europe as a stark example, which saw an exceptional heat wave in May, a second in June, two more in July, and another ongoing heat event currently impacting France and Spain. “European heat waves are not in isolation. So there’s also been shocking heat waves in North America. There’s been shockingly hot conditions in South America as well. There’s been devastating heat waves in India,” Burgess said. “There’s always heat waves somewhere in the world sometime, but what is very unusual for Europe for this particular year is the frequency and extent of the heat waves.”
Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer said this summer’s events confirm decades of scientific warnings about the impacts of unmitigated climate change. “These are vivid pictures of not just the future, which is what we used to say, but on the whole of what climate change is doing,” Oppenheimer said. “There’s no question that climate change has increased the risk of wildfires. There’s no question that the climate change increased the probability of really hot, nasty, even unprecedented summers around the world.”
This coverage of climate and environment from The Associated Press is supported by funding from multiple private foundations, with AP retaining full editorial control over all content.