We report the monthly climate bulletins as they land, and by now the rhythm is familiar — July tied for second-warmest, with the hottest ocean ever measured for the month. But monthly numbers have a weakness: each one is small enough to argue with. With two-thirds of 2026 now measured, the annual picture is coming into focus, and it says something the monthly drumbeat cannot.
The annual projection
Carbon Brief's state-of-the-climate analysis, by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, puts 2026 on course to average around 1.51°C above pre-industrial levels — which would make it the second-warmest year in the instrumental record, a hair below 2024 at 1.52°C.
The rest of the leaderboard is where it gets interesting. Third place is 2023 at 1.43°C; 2025 sits at 1.41°C. So the top two years are effectively tied, separated by a hundredth of a degree, and then there is a visible step down of nearly a tenth of a degree to everything else. A record set in 2024 is not being approached slowly from below by a gradually warming world. It is being matched, two years later, with the two of them clustered well clear of the field.
A note on the 1.5°C figure, because it is easy to misread: a single year above 1.5°C is not the same as breaching the Paris threshold, which refers to a long-term average. But years like this one are what a long-term average is eventually made of.
Europe's fire season broke its own record
If the temperature ranking feels abstract, the fire data does not — though the honest framing here is regional, not global. Europe has just had its worst fire season on record. More land has burned in France this year than in the entire previous record year, roughly 40 percent more, and Spain's burned area has run near record levels too, as we covered when the Iberian fires peaked.
Fire is where a temperature statistic becomes physical. Sustained heat draws moisture out of soil and vegetation until a landscape stops resisting ignition, and what would have been a manageable fire in a wetter decade becomes one that outruns the crews sent to hold it. That is the same dryness now taking Europe's rivers and power plants down, and the same pattern behind the summer of compounding extremes at home.
Why the annual view matters
A month can be dismissed as weather. A year is harder to wave off, and a pair of years sitting a hundredth of a degree apart at the top of a 177-year record is not dismissible at all. That is why we publish the monthly figures and step back periodically to the annual frame — you can follow both on our data dashboard.
It also reframes what counts as news. "Second-warmest year" reads like a near-miss, as though the record held. The more accurate reading is that 2024 and 2026 have together established a new ceiling that the rest of the record does not come close to — and that in Europe, the most tangible consequence set a record outright while the global temperature merely came level.
What to watch through year-end
The projection is a projection. A cool final quarter could nudge 2026 into third; a warm one could edge it past 2024. Either outcome would be a footnote next to the thing that is already settled — that the two warmest years ever measured are now 2024 and 2026, and that Europe spent this summer discovering what that means on the ground. The useful response has not changed: cut the emissions driving the trend, and build the resilience to survive the version of it already here.
