1.47°C to September, a supersized El Niño, and the first El Niño health emergency

The World Meteorological Organization published its State of the Climate Update 2026 on Monday, timed for the COP31 talks in Türkiye¹. Strip away the adjectives and it is a ledger. The global average surface temperature from January to September was about 1.47°C above the pre-industrial average¹. The past 12 years have each been among the warmest on record, and the past four top the list; 2026 is on track to be one of the four warmest¹.

The driver for the coming months is El Niño, building since August and expected to be the strongest on record by December¹. WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo put the physics plainly: “El Niño doesn’t add new heat to the planet. It releases heat from the ocean, which is the warmest ever measured”¹. 2026 is on track to be the tenth year in a row of record ocean warmth, and sea level is the highest on record and accelerating¹.

The update also counts what this year cost. Roughly 146.5 million people in India were exposed to an extreme heatwave in April, with temperatures of 47°C¹. Provisional estimates put excess mortality in Europe this summer above 30,000, about 16,000 of them in the 22–28 June heatwave alone¹. A glacier collapse in the Himalaya in late August caused a flash flood that killed more than 1,300 people in Nepal¹.

Three lines in the report’s highlights deserve more attention than they will get. For the first time, the World Health Organization has classified El Niño’s expected health impacts as a health emergency¹. Water stored on land has declined globally since 2014; in 2025, 42% of the assessed area was below normal¹. And El Niño is already raising risks for agriculture where farming depends on rain and food insecurity is high¹.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres called it “a new age of climate extremes”¹. You may prefer the WMO’s drier phrase: El Niño as a “risk multiplier”¹. Multipliers are for planners. The useful response to a report like this is not alarm but preparation: heat plans in hospitals, water budgets, crop insurance and early warnings, the dull machinery that turns a forecast into fewer funerals.