According to Environment Canada, 2026 is expected to be among the hottest years in recorded history.

Climate Scientist Bill Merryfield says the annual global mean temperature forecast suggests that this year will be comparable to 2023 and 2025 and approaching 2024, which remains the warmest year ever observed.

“That remains the record, bit there year we’re forecasting we’ll be within about a tenth of a degree of that.”

He says this is due to steady rise in global temperatures due to increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but that rise is also punctuated with the rises and falls of El Nino and La Nina seasons.

He explains that during a La Nina, there are cooler-than-normal ocean temperatures across the tropical pacific, which tends to pull heat out of the atmosphere. Meanwhile, El Nino years tend to dump that heat back out into the atmosphere and give the warming of the earth a boost.

Merryfield says the global mean temperature in 2026 is predicted to fall in the range of 1.35 °C and 1.53 °C above pre-industrial levels.

“That doesn’t mean that every place on the planet is necessarily going to have record heat, but in general for Canada, the temperature rise on average is about twice as fast as the earth as a whole, and when you get into the northern regions, it’s about three times as fast.”

This is the 13th consecutive year that global temperatures will remain at least 1.0 °C above pre-industrial levels. The average mean temperature compared to the latter part of the 1800s has risen about 1.5 degrees in recent years, which is exactly what the Paris agreement was signed to prevent in 2015.

Merryfield assures that exceeding 1.5 °C above the pre-industrial global mean temperature in a single year does not constitute failure to meet the Paris Agreement’s goal, however if this trend continues, the damage has a greater risk of being irreversible.