2026 is running as the third-hottest year in the instrumental record, behind 2024 and 2025, and the odds that it finishes hotter than 2024 have climbed to about 35 percent, up from roughly 7 percent in March, on a calculation by Zeke Hausfather of Berkeley Earth [1].
The rising odds are not a forecast made for effect. They track how warm the planet has stayed even as the El Nino that helped lift 2024 to its record has faded. Hausfather's read on where this goes is short: "It's going to keep getting worse," he said [1].
The ocean is holding much of that heat. About 82 percent of the world's ocean surface was in marine heat wave conditions in 2026, according to Europe's Copernicus climate service [1]. Warmer water bleaches reefs, shifts fish stocks away from the fleets and communities that depend on them, and feeds heavier rainfall onshore.
The most common way to wave off a record year is to blame El Nino, the periodic Pacific warming that nudges global temperatures up. That explanation does not carry the weight this time. Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at Climate Central, said the driver of the record warmth "is climate change in the background," a "much larger" force than El Nino, "which is just a tenth to two-tenths of a degree on top of that long-term trend" [1].
The distinction matters because it decides what the number means. A record set by El Nino recedes when El Nino recedes. A record set by the long-term trend, with El Nino adding only a fraction on top, becomes the floor for the years that follow.
2024 remains the hottest year measured and 2025 the second, so even a third-place 2026 would place the three most recent years as the three warmest on record [1].
