160 million hectares burned and sea temperatures at record highs: 2026 is shaping up to be a year of extreme warming

The first half of 2026 has already provided clues that this will be another record-breaking year linked to global warming, according to scientists and meteorological organizations. These signs range from wildfires across the planet to high ocean surface temperatures and record-low levels of Arctic sea ice. Scientists anticipate a second half of the year with even higher than normal temperatures due to the onset of El Niño, a natural climate pattern that increases surface water temperatures in the tropical Pacific, ultimately impacting the entire globe. Several experts are already pointing to a high probability that 2026 will end as the second-warmest year on record, or even exceed the previous mark set in 2024.

But, as Friederike Otto, professor of climate science at Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy, explains, El Niño is a “natural phenomenon that comes and goes.” The problem is that it occurs on a dangerous foundation: increasing global warming that will continue to worsen “as long as we don’t stop burning fossil fuels.” This is precisely where Otto focuses her attention, because, as this expert warns, many governments are “backtracking” on their climate goals despite “the devastating impacts of climate change that are already being experienced.”

Fires are one facet of the problem. The Netherlands has experienced an unusual wave of fires this month, prompting the Dutch government to request assistance last week from the European Emergency Aid Coordination Centre, which ultimately deployed firefighting personnel from France and Germany. What has happened in the heart of Europe at an unusual time of year is just a small snapshot of what has occurred in the first months of 2026 in many parts of the world. Between January 1 and May 6, more than 160 million hectares have been affected by fires worldwide, the highest figure for that period since at least 2012, when data collection began for the Global Forest Fire Information System, a tool managed by Copernicus, the European Earth Observation Programme.

Theodore Keeping, a researcher at Imperial College London and, like Otto, a member of the World Weather Attribution network, states that “this year the global fire season has started very quickly.” “Although in many parts of the world the fire season has not yet intensified, this rapid start, combined with the predicted El Niño, means we are facing a particularly severe year,” the expert adds. Based on the patterns of previous El Niño events, it is likely that the dry, hot conditions that fuel fires in Australia, the northwestern United States, Canada, and the Amazon rainforest will increase in the second half of the year, this scientist maintains.

Although some scientific studies point to climate change as a contributing factor to wildfires, attributing fires to warming is complex because these events involve numerous variables. However, a study published in Nature in late 2024 managed to quantify this relationship between warming and fire: climate change increased the area of ​​vegetation affected by wildfires by 15.8% between 2003 and 2019.

But the fires are just one part of the bigger picture linked to a climate crisis caused by greenhouse gases, the damage of which will intensify starting this Northern Hemisphere summer with the arrival of El Niño on an already overheated planet. For example, the ocean surface temperature last month was the second-highest ever recorded by the Copernicus Climate Change Service for April, practically tied with the 2024 figure, the highest to date. Meanwhile, in the Arctic region, the area covered by sea ice was 5% below average, the second-lowest for this month, slightly below the April record set in 2019, as reported in Copernicus’ latest climate bulletin.

Overall, last month was the third-warmest April on record globally — paleoclimatologists maintain that one has to go back thousands of years to find higher temperatures. So far, the first- and second-warmest Aprils were recorded in 2024 and 2025, respectively. This sequence is not a coincidence; it is simply the confirmation of a fact: the temperature at the planet’s surface is steadily rising due to the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, primarily from fossil fuels.

The cyclical phenomenon of ‘El Niño’

This underlying trend is then compounded by other factors, such as the natural and cyclical phenomenon of El Niño. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has already warned that “between May and July” conditions characteristic of an El Niño event are likely to return, bringing “above-normal land surface temperatures across almost the entire planet.” Furthermore, the WMO warned that “this could be an intense event,” although it will still be necessary to wait a few weeks to refine this forecast.

The WMO explains that El Niño events alter rainfall patterns in various regions of the planet — for example, they are associated with more extreme rainfall in some parts of South America — and generate global warming. “2024 was the warmest year on record as a result of the combination of the intense 2023/2024 El Niño event and anthropogenic climate change caused by greenhouse gases,” the WMO detailed in its latest bulletin monitoring this phenomenon.

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