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CALGARY — Chris Severson-Baker, executive director of the Pembina Institute, made the following statement in response to the Government of Canada’s federal electricity strategy announcement:“This is an important recognition from the Canadian...

The growth of battery storage in evening peaks has been stunning, and in the last ew months has completely pushed out gas generators in the Sunshine state.

The post Big batteries took a bite out of gas generators’ evening peak party, then they ate the whole dinner appeared first on Renew Economy.

Ashish Kothari

Originally publish by Meer on 13 May 2026.

Grassroots movements from across the Global South gather in Indonesia to confront war, inequality, and ecological collapse through collective alternatives.

Hope. Esperanza. Harapan. These words were frequently invoked by …

This is a guest blog co-authored by Risalat Khan, Senior Strategist, Insurance and Finance at The Sunrise Project Inc and Kenny Stancil, Deputy Research Director at the Revolving Door Project.

If you’ve opened an insurance bill lately and felt your stomach drop, you’re not alone. For many of us, insurance is a core part of the financial safety net, but the cost of insuring our homes, our cars, our farms, and our health is climbing fast.

Insurance companies blame rising ‘natural’ disaster losses and rebuilding costs, but they’re leaving out a crucial part of the story: Fossil fuel pollution, which insurers continue to support (through practices like underwriting and investment), is supercharging the extreme weather that is driving up insurance prices.

We call it the pollution premium — the hidden surcharge that fossil fuels add to the cost of protecting the things we care about most.

 

In early 2024, the Global Week of Action (GWA) called on the insurance industry to end their role in driving the climate crisis through their insurance of fossil fuel projects. This action was in Nigeria by Voices of the Vulnerable on 29 Feb 2024. Photo: Voices of the Vulnerable

Climate disasters are getting more expensive

The costs of the climate crisis are rising, for the insured or uninsured alike. In 2024, global economic losses from tropical cyclones, floods, wildfires, and other extreme weather events made worse by planet-heating emissions reached USD 368 billion, well above the 21st century average. 

Only $145 billion of those $368 billion in losses were insured. The remaining $223 billion landed directly on families, communities, and governments with little safety net and grueling paths to recovery. This massive protection gap serves as a reminder that across much of the world, the costs of the climate crisis fall directly on people without insurance.

Behind those numbers are real human beings. Typhoon Yagi killed 816 people and caused $12.9 billion in losses across China and Southeast Asia. Hurricane Helene killed 243 people and caused $75 billion in losses across the US, Mexico, and Cuba. Spain’s flash floods in Valencia killed 231 people and caused $16.1 billion in damage. Of the $104 billion in damages unleashed by those three storms, just $22.1 billion was insured. That leaves households and government budgets to absorb the rest.

In a changed climate, nothing is just a random act of nature anymore. Estimates suggest that over a third of all weather-related insured losses since 2000 — roughly $600 billion — may have been caused by climate change. The climate share of losses rose from 31% to 38% over the past decade, growing at 6.5% per year — faster than the growth in overall insured losses. 

Even people with insurance are not spared. As climate disasters become more frequent and intense, insurers face more and more claims. To stay profitable, they raise premiums — the regular payments you make to stay covered. This is the extra amount that fossil fuel-driven climate change quietly adds to your insurance bill every month regardless of where you live.

The pollution premium, in other words, is escalating for all of us.

Activists protesting against insurance companies investing in fossil fuels. Photo: Leon Kunstenaar

Premiums are rising around the world

As climate disasters grow more costly, we can see the impact in how insurance companies charge policyholders across the world.  

In the United States, homeowner insurance premiums increased by 29% from January 2021 to January 2026, and personal auto insurance rose nearly 25% over the same period. These mounting costs are among the biggest contributors to overall inflation.

France raised its mandatory natural catastrophe surcharge on property insurance from 12% to 20%, effective January 2025. In northern Australia, premiums climbed more than 130% in real terms between 2007 and 2022, a 6% growth year on year.

Across most low- and middle-income countries, insurance coverage is usually less than 10%, and sometimes far less, leaving uninsured communities and businesses to bear most of the risks and losses from climate disasters.

This is a global problem. And it’s getting worse.

Insurers are dropping out, leaving ordinary people to  pick up the tab

Insurance companies aren’t just raising premiums; they’re abandoning some communities altogether. 

In the United States, nearly two million home insurance policies were not renewed between 2018 and 2023, and the national average nonrenewal rate increased by 32%. Some of the biggest insurers have stopped writing new policies altogether in certain places in recent years, citing extreme weather risks, including Allstate and State Farm in California, Farmers in Florida, and AIG in parts of more than a dozen states in the US.

Across much of the world, the situation is even bleaker. In Asia, only 17% of losses from climate disasters are covered by insurance and in Latin America, the rate is just 19%. In Africa, only 0.5% of climate-related losses had insurance coverage — leaving hundreds of millions of people entirely exposed when floods, droughts, and storms destroy their homes and harvests. When there is no insurance safety net, the costs land directly on families and governments, and sometimes a major disaster can cost an entire year’s GDP for a small country!

For communities accustomed to higher rates of insurance protection, the retreat of private insurers forces governments to step in as the insurer of last resort. In the US, these emergency backup programs have more than doubled since 2018 and now cover more than $1 trillion worth of property. Not only are there concerns about their ability to pay out claims in the event of major catastrophe, the costs are passed onto the public in the form of higher premiums.

People left without affordable options face hard choices. Some turn to smaller or less regulated insurers — companies that may not be able to pay out when disaster actually strikes. Others simply go without insurance entirely. In 2024, 6.1 million US households had no home insurance at all. In Europe, only around a quarter of weather-related losses are insured. Across Asia and Latin America, it is less than one in five.

Either way, ordinary people are left exposed and paying into a system that may not protect them, or taking on all the risk themselves.

The pattern is the same everywhere: as fossil fuel pollution turbocharges climate disasters, insurance becomes less affordable, less available, and less reliable. But when insurance disappears, the costs don’t. They land on strained families, communities, and government budgets instead.

Local climate activists, working with the Insure Our Future Network, gathered outside AIG Headquarters in Manhattan on May 12, 2021 during their annual shareholders meeting to demand that AIG take action on climate change. Photo: by Erik McGregor

They knew. We’re paying.

None of this is happening by surprise. As far back as the late 1970s, ExxonMobil’s own scientists accurately predicted the warming we’re now experiencing. The fossil fuel industry knew that its products cause planet-wrecking pollution, but spent decades funding doubt and delay instead.

The insurance industry also knew. As early as 1973, Munich Re warned about climate change impacts. Yet most insurance companies continue to insure and invest in fossil fuel expansion regardless, even though we have known since 2021 that such expansion is incompatible with limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C, beyond which destructive impacts grow exponentially worse.

As of 2024, just 32 companies were linked to over half of global fossil fuel emissions. Meanwhile, fossil fuel subsidies reached USD 7.4 trillion the same year. Put simply, governments are subsidizing the industry most responsible for unleashing climate chaos and forcing households to pay for the ensuing damages.

And the costs keep growing: beyond insurance, fossil fuels are driving up healthcare costs through air pollution, pushing up food prices through supply chain disruptions, and adding billions to public health budgets through heatwaves, vector-borne diseases, and more.

The fossil fuel industry profits while we pay the pollution premium.

This is a political choice — and we can change it 

Here’s the good news: the solutions exist, they are affordable, and the public wants them. We can bring down the pollution premium by replacing fossil fuels with clean energy and making polluters pay.

Make polluters pay. Every premium hike, every dropped policy, every government bailout is a cost that belongs on the balance sheets of the companies that caused this crisis. New York’s Climate Change Superfund Act is designed to collect $75 billion over 25 years from major oil and gas companies — money that goes directly back to communities bearing the costs of extreme weather. And the public is ready: 71% of US voters support requiring fossil fuel companies to pay their share of climate damages. Globally, 8 in 10 people agree.

Expand cheap renewable energy. In 2024, 91% of newly built renewable capacity produced electricity at a lower cost than the cheapest new fossil fuel alternative. The benefits are substantial; renewables helped avoid $467 billion in fossil fuel costs in 2024, supporting energy security, affordability, and resilience.

Build resilience. In Alabama, homes constructed to wind-resistant “Fortified” standards filed 55% to 74% fewer claims after Hurricane Sally. If every affected home in two counties had met those standards, insurers could have saved $112 million on payouts and policyholders $35 million in deductibles. We can prepare before a disaster strikes.

But pursuing resilience without decarbonization is like running on a treadmill that keeps speeding up. Real risk reduction requires adapting to climate change and reducing emissions.

We don’t have to keep paying the pollution premium. Governments can end fossil fuel subsidies, tax polluters, and accelerate the shift to clean, affordable renewable energy. The money is there. The technology is there. The public support is there. What’s missing is political will — and that’s something we can build together.

It’s an open question whether the insurance industry will become an ally in this fight or continue to prop up fossil fuels. Insurance companies and executives are still profiting from the status quo. Offloading liabilities while raising premiums — and investing our premiums into dirty industries — is padding their bottom line. The climate crisis is treated as someone else’s problem. 

Yet, there is precedent: health insurers took tobacco companies to court in the 1990s, and today, property insurers have the option of doing the same with the fossil fuel industry. Ultimately, our political representatives must safeguard our communities by making fossil fuel polluters pay, and forcing insurers to become part of the solution.

The post Out of Pocket: Pollution Premiums – the real cost of fossil fuels on our insurance bills appeared first on 350.

The power of fungal networks Channel Comment brendan 14th May 2026 Teaser Media

NSW fast-tracks $60 million in community funds to help head off community concerns about the state's potentially biggest renewable energy zone.

The post NSW fast tracks $60m to win over local communities, years before first poles erected in new renewable zone appeared first on Renew Economy.

Australia's growing throng of solar panels, batteries and electric cars will be managed by a new regulator in a multimillion-dollar budget commitment welcomed by investment and climate groups. 

The post Australia’s growing throng of solar panels, home batteries and electric cars to be managed by new regulator appeared first on Renew Economy.

Industry says retrospective tax on renewables announced in budget could deter foreign investment when it's needed most.

The post A “keep out” sign for investment: Alarm bell sounds over new retrospective tax on renewables appeared first on Renew Economy.

One of the segments flowing rivers of gold from the data centre boom is backup diesel gensets. Our major cities could be awash with them. But batteries provide a better solution.

The post Diesel backup gensets are big winners from the data centre boom. Our cities would be better off with batteries appeared first on Renew Economy.

Congress could be days away from passing a bill that strips local communities of stable funding for multimodal transportation and deprives the entire country of predictable rail dollars that the overwhelming majority of Americans demand.

In a letter sent on Tuesday, Senate Democrats pressed the upper chamber’s appropriations committee to resist the Trump administration’s demands and renew multi-year funding for a raft of vital multimodal grant programs when they write the next federal transportation law.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, colloquially known as the BIL, will expire on Oct. 1, and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is scheduled to begin marking up the replacement bill as soon as next week.

That committee’s chairman, Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), said in November that he would lobby for a “traditional highway bill” to replace the BIL, and promised that lawmakers would refrain from “spending money on murals and train stations or bike paths or walking paths” — a suggestion Trump echoed in his budget proposal, which recommends draconian cuts to multimodal programs.

What the BIL Did Right

For all of its flaws, the BIL did at least one thing right: It provided local communities with historic levels of “predictable, multi-year funding” for multimodal transportation projects for five years, thereby insulating projects from the fickle whims of Congress’s annual appropriations process.

Since infrastructure projects generally take several years to plan and complete — especially ambitious ones like new rail lines, high quality bike paths and major road diets to keep pedestrians safe — this funding structure allowed communities to dream bigger about their transportation futures.

It also allowed locals to apply for far more grant money directly, rather than forcing them to rely on state-level Departments of Transportation, who far too often redirect gas tax receipts generated on city roads to pay for highway expansions in the suburban and rural periphery.

The BIL created a similar opportunity for the American rail industry, which secured its first predictable, multi-year funding streams in U.S. transportation history — finally allowing train operators to plan long-term expansions and start building out the expanded network that 92 percent of Americans want.

How Trump’s Proposal Could Halt Transportation Progress

If Congress accepts the Trump administration’s budget proposal, those rail programs would lose an astonishing 84 percent of their funding in fiscal year 2027, and they wouldn’t be guaranteed any money beyond that year. That would make it impossible for Amtrak and its peers to plan for the future.

Meanwhile, a host of programs that fund multimodal transportation would lose 96 percent of their 2027 funding — with no assurance of more money later. Safe Streets and Roads for All, for instance, would be zeroed out completely in FY2027, while the Capital Investment Grants program, a major source of transit funding, would receive a 48-percent cut.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who led the letter’s release and serves as ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, recently oversaw the publication of a 26-page report that described these efforts as “Main Street improvement” programs. The same document noted that these programs are especially vulnerable to budget cuts despite attracting so much interest that the Department of Transportation rejected more than 1,000 applications for funding.

“Congress must reject President Trump’s budget cuts and reauthorize surface transportation programs with advance appropriations that continue to provide dependable multiyear funding for our entire transportation system — not just part of it,” Cantwell’s office wrote.

Future-proofing the federal transportation program

Unfortunately, in an era of federal clawbacks, the mere existence of robust, multi-year funds for multimodal priorities doesn’t always mean that communities will actually receive their designated money — at least without a lot of lawsuits.

The Trump administration recently gained the dubious distinction of becoming “the first administration in at least three decades to fail to approve a new transit project in its first year,” according to Transportation for America’s Steve Davis. And that’s in addition to months of freezes, clawbacks, delays, and rescissions of programs that the administration deemed too “green” or “woke.”

That’s why advocates have launched parallel efforts to persuade Congress to stop negotiating the next transportation bill until Trump stops holding existing funds hostage — and, when negotiations resume, to build more guardrails to prevent future executive interference.

Recommended Trump Is Holding Affordable Transportation Projects Hostage, and Congress Could Call His Bluff Kea Wilson May 7, 2026

Until that happens, though, average Americans will continue to suffer from a lack of affordable, safe and multimodal transportation options — and that’s costing them real money.

Two years ago, the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated that discontinuing infrastructural investment and canceling money for freight priorities — as Trump’s proposed cuts would do — would cost the average U.S. household more than $700 per year. And that’s to say nothing of the missed opportunity costs of everything our transportation network could be if we funded multimodal priorities.

“Our roads are more than just highways — they are also hubs for community activity, hosts to small businesses, routes to and from schools, and drivers of economic activity,” Cantwell’s office wrote in its report. “Our federal investment strategy must reflect that reality and empower communities to make the most of their infrastructure.”

An earlier version of this article misstated Senator Cantwell’s role on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. We regret the error.

• At 18 cents a gallon, suspending the federal gas tax would only save drivers a few pennies on pump prices that have topped $4.50, on average (Wall Street Journal; paywall). Gas stations often pocket the difference, and encouraging people to drive more during a shortage could push prices even higher (CNN). It would also drain the already insufficient highway trust fund (PBS). Even if state gas taxes were suspended, too, gas would still be 35 percent higher than before the war on Iran (NBC News).
• Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy continues to get dunked on for filming a reality TV show funded by companies his department regulates. (NPR)
• Too many transit projects get bogged down because an agency tries to engineer its way around a problem rather than try to work things out with other agencies involved. (Infrastory)
• Electrifying bus fleets involves a lot more than just acquiring the buses. (Metro Magazine)
• Waymo and Waze recently started sharing pothole data with cities, and now a company that sells security cameras for trucks is offering the same service. (TechCrunch)
• After the H Street streetcar was unceremoniously shut down, the D.C. Metro is now considering a bus rapid transit line along H Street to get Commanders fans to the new RFK Stadium because a rail station won’t be open by 2030. (WUSA)
• The board of Vancouver, Washington transit agency C-Tran voted to support light rail along the controversial I-5 bridge connecting the city to Portland. (The Columbian)
• The Charlotte city council reversed course on supporting new toll lanes on I-77. (Observer)
• An Atlanta city council member pulled a bill to separate “heels” and “wheels” on the Atlanta Beltline, which transit advocates said would preclude future rail, but supporters said would protect pedestrians from the scourge of e-scooters. (AJC)
• New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced a plan to improve cleanliness, reliability, access and safety for NJ Transit. (NJ Business Magazine)
• Is Florida private passenger rail company Brightline headed for bankruptcy? (Palm Beach Post; paywall)
• A Kansas City program is helping small businesses find empty storefronts along the streetcar line. (KSHB)
• Unfortunately, America’s fondness for oversized SUVs is spreading to Europe. (The Guardian)
• A new report established a baseline for English roads’ carbon footprint to help reduce emissions in the future. (Smart Cities World)

The bizarre planning rules that make fossil gas connections a default for new homes, and add costs in a state that leads the world in rooftop PV and home batteries.

The post Bizarre planning rules that force new home owners to pay for gas connections, whether they want it or not appeared first on Renew Economy.

Tim Buckley from Climate and Energy Finance joins to discuss the good, bad and the ugly from the federal budget, how to fix the Capacity Investment Scheme, and other news.

The post Energy Insiders Podcast: Budget’s fossil fail, and how to fix the CIS appeared first on Renew Economy.

May 13, 2026 For Immediate Release:
Ute Mountain Utes, Navajos/Dine, Greenaction & Allies to Protest Energy Fuels’ uranium mines and the mill/dump next to White Mesa Ute Community – Saturday, May 16, noon

 

 

Click Here To Download the Press Advisory –> PRESS-ADVISORY_WMCC_La-Sal_Protest (1)

Click Here to Download Flyer –> May 16 No Uranium Protest at La Sal Junction

Support Green and Red Podcast and get the latest at https://www.patreon.com/greenredpodcast. In our latest, Scott talks with writer and Flotilla participant Zukiswa Wanner about the Global Salmud Flotilla. They talk…

The California Senate Rules Committee voted unanimously to advance Dorene D’Adamo’s reappointment to the State Water Resources Control Board despite vocal opposition from Tribal, environmental, and fishing groups.

Critics accused D’Adamo of favoring powerful agricultural and water interests, arguing during the hearing that those groups have had outsized influence over the Bay-Delta Plan process, while Tribal and environmental voices have been sidelined and ignored.

The reappointment hearing comes ahead of an expected September vote on the updated Bay-Delta Plan, which relies on negotiated “voluntary agreements,” also known as the Healthy Rivers and Landscapes program, that would allow major water users to avoid enforceable regulatory standards intended to restore river flows and protect the Delta ecosystem.

“The State Water Board has consistently tipped the scales on behalf of agriculture and urban water interests, and as a result, we have multiple species headed towards extinction,” Max Gomberg, Senior Policy Advisor to the California Water Impact Network told the committee members. “This committee should not condone the ongoing environmental catastrophe in our Delta via regulatory capture of this board.”

Gary Bobker, Program Director for Friends of the River, stated, “I do want board members who are outraged about this crisis in the Bay Delta and the way it affects many communities, and who push timely and effective action to address the root causes.”

Read more from the Sacramento Bee here. 

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Plans to construct a 400 megawatt, four-hour battery between two solar farms in north-east Victoria have been waved through the federal EPBC queue.

The post Developer of Australia’s most powerful battery gets green light for new four-hour project appeared first on Renew Economy.

Every year, Health Care Without Harm and the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments come together to honor a nurse who sees beyond the bedside – someone who understands that true healing requires clean air, safe water, and a stable climate. A nurse whose environmental activism and accomplishments have made a significant contribution to environmental health.

We are thrilled to announce Yasna Palmeiro-Silva, Ph.D.,  MPH,RN, as the 2026 Charlotte Brody Award recipient. A registered nurse from Chile, Palmeiro-Silva has transformed her experience in ICU bedside care into a powerful nurse-scientist voice at the intersection of climate change, population health, and global policy. 

From critical care to climate advocacy

Palmeiro-Silva didn’t start out as a climate researcher. She began her career as an ICU nurse, primarily working with cardiovascular disease and surgery patients – but something kept nagging at her.

“During my shifts, I noticed every single time that we were having younger and younger patients,” she reflected. “This is not okay. This is not sustainable. Because of their quality of life, but also because as a society, we cannot afford to have ill people.”

The realization that the hospital could not solve problems rooted in how we live, build our societies, and work drove her to take action. She left the ICU to study public health, then earned her Ph.D. in global health from University College in London. Her thesis linked climate change and public health in Chile. Today, she lives in Seattle, Washington, but her work continues to span continents.

Changing laws in Chile

One story Palmeiro-Silva shared stands out as a testament to what one nurse-scientist can achieve.

In Chile, the intersection of climate change, heat, and health was barely discussed until just three years ago. Palmeiro-Silva saw an opportunity – she took her epidemiological skills and produced evidence-based analysis for the policymaking sphere. The result? New policy.

“Right now, we have three or four laws that have been passed,” she said. One law explicitly requires that specific requirements be met to protect people’s health from climate change, now being woven into national and regional climate action plans.

This isn’t just advocacy – it’s systemic change.

Inspiring nurses – all in a days work

When asked how she inspires other nurses to share her passion, Palmeiro-Silva was humble.

“For me, inspiring other people is not something that I consciously do,” she said. “I do it through dialogue and sharing of experiences.”

She notes that nursing education in Chile is heavily focused on clinical practice. By helping nurses understand how the problems they see during their shifts – younger patients, chronic diseases, respiratory distress – are linked to upstream factors like governance, policy, and the environment, she expands their perspective.

She’s spoken to nurses in Turkey, the United Kingdom, Latin America, and the United States, and she’s seeing the movement grow. “They see me as a thought leader who started in the ICU who is now pushing for policy change on a global level.”

Lessons from a global perspective

Having worked extensively outside the United States, Palmeiro-Silva offered a powerful lesson for any health professional doing climate work here.

“What happens in one country could be totally different from another,” she cautioned. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn. She advocates for “learning from comparison; not competition.”

Her advice? Keep the big picture in mind. Climate change and health is a large, complicated problem, but it can be solved by various levels and individuals taking action inside their locus of control. “From the country level to the hospital to the nurse in the halls. Every action, no matter how little, matters.”

What’s next?

Palmeiro-Silva shows no signs of slowing down. She’s currently tracking heat measures and their impact on workers’ health, and she’s about to start a new project in Latin America examining the connection between temperature and cognitive performance in children, funded by Wellcome Trust.

Soon, she will begin a new role as a scientific advisor with Lancet Countdown Latin America, advising on how to track the intersection of climate change and population health, from heat mortality to heat action plans and public engagement.

“There is a need to be super active in this sphere and exit our comfort zone to go for the change that needs to happen,” she said.

Join us in celebrating Palmeiro-Silva

When asked what or who gives her inspiration, Palmeiro-Silva simply said, “Every single person that I talk to. I am super open to learning from everybody – EVERYBODY.”

That openness, combined with rigorous science and a nurse’s heart, is exactly why Palmeiro-Silva is the 2026 Charlotte Brody Award winner.

Please join us in congratulating Palmeiro-Silva. And let her story remind us: whether you work in an ICU, policy office, or community clinic, you have a role to play in protecting environmental health.

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The Charlotte Brody Award is presented annually by Health Care Without Harm and the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments to honor nurses who demonstrate outstanding leadership in environmental health.

The post 2026 Charlotte Brody Award Winner: Yasna Palmeiro-Silva appeared first on ANHE.

Flying forwards while looking back Teresa Myers Wed, 05/13/2026 - 2:23 pm

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink

Back in December I provided some initial projections of where both 2026 and 2027 global mean surface temperatures might end up.

A lot has happened since then. We’ve gotten the first three months of data in for 20261 (and have a good sense of where April 2026 will end up in reanalysis data – see our Climate Dashboard for daily updates).

More importantly, models are converging on a doozy of an El Niño event developing in the latter part of 2026, with the latest multi-model median projection of a peak anomaly of 2.7C in the ENSO3.4 region of the tropical Pacific. While the prediction remains uncertain (we remain within the “spring predictability barrier” when its historically hard to predict ENSO2 development), this would put the 2026/2027 roughly on par with the “super” El Niño the world experienced in 2015/2016.

I’ve updated the models I use for both my 2026 and 2027 projections. I’ll go into the gory methodological details shortly, but the headline numbers are in the figure below: the estimate for 2026 has risen from 1.41C (with a range of 1.27C to 1.55C) to 1.46C (1.36C to 1.59C). The 2027 estimate has similarly increased from 1.57C (1.3C to 1.76C) to 1.61C (1.4C to 1.93C).

 

So what changed? Before the start of the year I was using a pretty simple regression model. It estimate what the annual temperature anomaly would be based on the prior year’s anomaly, the last month of the prior year, the predicted ENSO state over the next three months, as well as a year count (and year count squared) to reflect linear and non-linear aspects of the trend since 1970.

I’ve updated this to use the equation below, which includes the year count, prior year’s temperature anomaly, the anomaly over the year to date for 2026 (currently Jan-Mar), the latest month, the observed ENSO state over the year to date, and the forecasted ENSO state over the remainder of the year.3 The uncertainty in the 2026 prediction also accounts for the uncertainty in the ENSO forecast using a Monte Carlo sampling approach.4

Similarly, the original 2027 calculation was pretty ad hoc; I just took the 2026 estimate and added the current warming trend (0.026C per year) that we calculated in our Forster et al 2025 paper. I then added a range of possible boosts from El Niño ranging from 0C (no El Niño develops) to 0.2C (very strong El Niño), roughly encompassing the range we’ve seen across past events.

Now I’ve converted it into a proper regression model. It calculates the expected year-over-year change in temperatures based on the year count (reflecting the trend) and the ENSO forecast for the latter part of the year (September-December, reflecting the period over which the currently developing El Niño will likely peak).5 This is then added to the 2026 estimates, with their uncertainty (and the uncertainty in future ENSO forecast) propagated through using the same Monte Carlo approach. This actually slightly increases the error bars from the original 2027 estimate, reflecting the uncertainty in both the 2026 estimate and the El Niño forecast.

One way to test how well this approach works is to see how well it predicts year-over-year temperature changes during past strong El Nino events (e.g. with a peak >2C and a Sept-Dec average of >1.5C), as shown in the figure below:

In general the model does pretty well; it slightly underestimates the year-over-year increase in 1973, 1983, and 1998, gets 2016 pretty spot on, and slightly overestimates the increase between 2023 and 2024. This is, of course, contingent on where 2026 annual temperatures end up, so a warmer 2026 in this model would result in a warmer 2027.

We can also look at how well the model “hindcasts” past years by applying the 2026 prediction model to past years using the same year-to-date and temperature and ENSO values:

Overall the development of a strong El Niño event in 2026 (and its effects on 2027 temperatures) have bumped my predictions up a bit from where they were at the start of the year.

But 2026 remains more likely than not to end up as the second warmest year on record (~56% chance), but has a non-trial chance of being the warmest year (~26%) with a somewhat larger change (34%) of being above 1.5C.

2027, by contrast, is likely (~85% chance) to be the warmest year on record and has a 88% chance to be above 1.5C. My updated estimate central estimate (1.61C) remains a bit lower than Hansen’s (1.7C),6 but its consistent with the size of the year-over-year bumps we’ve seen in past strong El Niño events.

Update:A new set of ENSO runs came in this afternoon from CanSIPS, which previously set the lower bound on the ENSO forecast for 2026. The new update has notably higher estimates; these don’t change the central estimate (as the median across all ENSO model remains unchanged), but it reduces the lower end of the uncertainties in the error bars. I’ve updated the figures and text accordingly. 1 Here I’m using the average of NASA’s GISTEMP, NOAA’s GlobalTemp, Berkeley Earth, Hadley/UAE’s HadCRUT5, and Copernicus/ECMWF’s ERA5 as they are updated monthly and reasonably reflect the diversity across GMST datasets. 2 ENSO refers to El Niño Southern Oscillation, a term that encompasses both El Niño and La Niña conditions in the ENSO3.4 region of the tropical Pacific. 3 I also tested it with year count squared but the difference was minor – the prior year and year-to-date already captures a lot of the information about acceleration. 4 This involves calculating a probability distribution of future ENSO development across all the ensemble members of all the models with runs through the end of the year, and randomly sampling 1000 times from that distribution to see how it affects the results. 5 I also tried a variant using the peak El Niño forecast, but that was slightly less predictive. 6 And his team’s new estimate, just published today, that 2026 is on track to be the warmest year on record.