This Year Could Still Become the Hottest Year on Record

This year could still become the Hottest Year on Record, according to a monthly analysis from Berkeley Earth, which now puts the odds of 2026 surpassing 2024 at near-certain levels. The research nonprofit's assessment, released in October 2026, marks a sharp reversal from January, when it gave the record only a slim chance, and it sets up a direct disagreement with the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which expects this year to finish a close second instead.

The swing is the story. Berkeley Earth put the chance of a new record at 12% in January, and the odds fell further by late spring. Then the Pacific changed. The onset of a powerful El Niño in June flipped the calculation within weeks, and by autumn the group's analysts were describing a record as the expected outcome rather than a long shot, with the odds now standing at 96%. One of its researchers has even raised the possibility that the current Pacific warming could be the strongest such event in a thousand years.

September supplied the receipts. The month ranked as the second warmest September worldwide, sitting just behind the extraordinary September of 2023, and fifty-three countries set national heat records. Southwestern Europe bore the brunt of the late-summer heat, while several countries broke their national marks by wide margins. The European Union's Copernicus service, working from data through September, also ranks this year as the second hottest to date, a middle position between Berkeley Earth's bolder call and the American agency's caution.

Two trackers, two different answers

The split between the trackers is not a dispute about whether the planet is warming. Berkeley Earth and the American agency use different datasets and methods, and their readings usually land within a fraction of a degree of each other. Here they diverge on the finish line: one group reads the Pacific surge as enough to carry this year past the previous record-holder and claim the Hottest Year on Record crown, while the other reads the same months as falling just short. Readers should treat both as serious estimates, not as competing certainties, since the final ranking will rest on the last months of data.

Whatever the final ranking, scientists agree on what comes next: because air temperatures lag the Pacific by months, the heat now building in the ocean is expected to spill into next year. That lag is why researchers expect the coming year to run hotter still, even if this year stops short of the record. The pattern has repeated in past strong Pacific warming events, when the calendar year after the peak often delivered the bigger temperature headlines.

What the Pacific is doing now

The Pacific itself keeps strengthening. The World Meteorological Organization forecasts sea-surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific reaching record levels across the final quarter of the year, and it puts the chance that the event persists through February 2027 at near certainty, according to its seasonal climate update. The event is already worsening droughts and floods, pushing up food prices and fuelling wildfires, as reported by Bloomberg in its coverage of the Berkeley Earth analysis.

There is also a counterweight to the alarm. The warming surge is, at its core, a natural cycle, not a human invention, and researchers continue to debate how unusual its strength truly is. The World Meteorological Organization has said there is currently no evidence that climate change makes such events stronger or more frequent, even as a warmer baseline makes record-shattering temperatures more likely when one arrives. That distinction matters: the Pacific supplies the spike, while the long-term warming trend raises the floor it spikes from.

What to watch now is the December peak. If Pacific temperatures crest as forecast and the final months of global data stay hot, Berkeley Earth's call will harden into the record books; if they ease, the American agency's second-place finish will look prescient. Either way, the odds have already told their story: a year that began as a long shot for the record books is ending as the favourite to claim the Hottest Year on Record title, and the heat it leaves behind will shape the year after it. Related coverage: Belgium heat deaths doubled by climate change in June, Australia's highest court just killed a coal project, and Canada's first plan to fight environmental racism is here.