‘Exceptional’ extreme temperatures to continue into next year, UN reports

In April this year, roughly 146.5 million Indians were exposed to an extreme heatwave with temperatures hitting a sweltering 47℃. In Europe, provisional estimates of excess mortality across Europe exceeded 30,000 people over the summer, with approximately 16,000 excess deaths estimated during the 22–28 June heatwave alone. A few months later, a Himalayan glacier collapsed causing a catastrophic downstream flash flood in late August, which killed more than 1,300 people in Nepal. The streak of exceptional global temperatures, with melting ice and rising sea levels, will continue in the ongoing year and a very strong El Niño event is set to unleash more extreme weather well into 2027, a report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) revealed on Monday – ahead of crucial COP31 talks in Türkiye. The WMO State of the Climate Update 2026 details that the past 12 years have individually been the warmest on record, with the past four years topping the list. Global average surface temperature for the period of January to September 2026 was approximately 1.47°C above the pre-industrial average and is expected to rise till the end of the year due to El Niño’s warming effect, which has...