Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Over the last couple of summer months, Europe has become an oven. Unlike Americans, Europeans rarely had their houses air-conditioned. Millions of them, therefore, suffered from extreme heat and rushed to install air conditioners. Countries like Spain, France, and Italy reported hundreds of deaths, sunstrokes, or illnesses due to the changed climate.
Weather experts now say this year may turn out to be the hottest year on record.
An unusually powerful El Niño is raising the odds that 2026 will surpass 2024 as the world’s hottest year on record, and regardless, 2027 is expected to set a new high, according to a monthly analysis of global weather data by Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit research group, according to a media report.
“We are likely to see something quite dramatic in the next year or so,” Robert Rohde, chief scientist at Berkeley Earth, said on Thursday. “It will be giving us weather conditions that we would normally expect to be a decade or more away. It’s going to be a big deal.”
El Niño, a months-long recurring weather phase, brings powerful consequences for the globe — drying out some regions, like Western and Southern Africa, Australia and India, while potentially raising rainfall in others, such as the southern US, Bloomberg reported.
Scientists gauge the strength of an El Niño from sea-surface temperatures in a specific region of the Eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. Projections suggest temperatures will rise an extraordinary 4 degrees C above normal in that patch of ocean, compared with 2.75 degrees C for the El Niño of 2015 to 2016.
The crushing heat in the late spring and early summer this year probably came too early for El Niño to have made it worse.
This El Niño started in June and is coming on so strong that the odds of 2026 becoming the hottest year have jumped from 12% in July to 69% in August, according to Berkeley Earth.
Last month, heat waves fuelled destructive wildfires in France and Spain and a heat dome baked parts of the US. It was the hottest or second-hottest July ever recorded, according to the major climate datasets. In the contiguous US, the month’s average high temperature broke a record set 90 years ago, at the peak of the Dust Bowl.
So much of the world is sweltering that it’s easier to name the place that isn’t: “It’s been a very, very cold Antarctic winter,” Rohde said.
In many countries, especially emerging markets, the brutal heat and drenching rains brought by El Niño are set to exacerbate the economic pain caused by the Iran war. For example, warming seas have halted anchovy fishing in Peru.
Scientists heavily caveat annual temperature rankings, emphasizing that climate change happens over decades and El Niño can have a strong influence on a single month or year. But the warming caused by greenhouse gas pollution is always there and increasing.
“El Niño is a giant hammer that the climate gets hit with,” said Berkeley Earth scientist Zeke Hausfather, “so it is going to scramble a lot of different things.”