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world meteorological organization
New El Niño Warning Compounded by Trump’s Attacks on Climate, Disaster Preparedness
"If and when a hurricane unleashes widespread death and destruction... Democrats should make Trump and his Republican accomplices pay a steep political price for deliberately putting people in harm's way."
Jun 02, 2026
The World Meteorological Organization on Tuesday issued a warning about an El Niño event forming that is expected to "increase the risk of extreme weather over the coming months."
El Niño refers to a climate pattern that features warmer than average temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. WMO said its latest forecast estimates an 80% likelihood of an event occurring this summer, with most of its models suggesting “it will be at least moderate—and possibly strong.”
WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo warned that a strong El Niño this summer "will exacerbate drought and heavy rainfall and increase the risk of heatwaves both on land and in the ocean," and said WMO scientists will be "carefully monitoring conditions in the coming months to inform decision-making by governments, humanitarian agencies, and climate-sensitive sectors."
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said the latest WMO projections must spur global action to address the climate crisis.
"The world must treat it as the urgent climate warning it is," Guterres said. "El Niño conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world. Impacts will hit even harder, travel even farther, and cross borders with devastating speed. The only effective response is climate action equal to the crisis—ending the addiction to fossil fuels, accelerating the shift to renewables, protecting the most vulnerable, and delivering early warning systems for all."
An El Niño event could pose particular problems in the United States, as critics are warning that President Donald Trump's attacks on climate research and federal disaster preparedness are leaving Americans particularly vulnerable to extreme weather.
Revolving Door Project senior researcher Kenny Stancil on Tuesday published an analysis breaking down the ways the Trump administration "has relentlessly undermined disaster readiness and response capacity" by taking a hatchet to key institutions such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Weather Service (NWS).
Among other things, Stancil documented how the Trump administration has ousted "thousands of NOAA workers, including hundreds of NWS employees"; gutted FEMA's staff by "pushing out thousands of rank-and-file workers and dozens of veteran leaders"; and is "thwarting investments in disaster risk reduction, from slashing emissions to pursuing just and sustainable urban development."
Stancil added that while Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has reversed some of the cuts made by former DHS chief Kristi Noem, these "last-minute reversals can't undo" the "severe damage" caused by the initial actions.
"If and when a hurricane unleashes widespread death and destruction (if not in 2026, it could be in 2027 or 2028)," Stancil wrote, "Democrats should make Trump and his Republican accomplices pay a steep political price for deliberately putting people in harm's way."
Stancil's concerns about US preparedness for extreme weather events were echoed by Shana Udvardy, senior climate resilience policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who on Monday published an analysis outlining the current state of FEMA ahead of hurricane season.
Although Udvardy offered some qualified praise for Mullin for undoing some of Noem's worst policy decisions, she said FEMA still faces potentially catastrophic vacancies at key positions.
"Roughly half of FEMA’s leadership, 18 out of 38 of top-level positions, have yet to be filled as of today, at the start of the Atlantic hurricane season," she explained, adding that "it can take six months to a year to recruit and onboard a senior executive and a year to hire full-time staff."
The administration this week also announced plans to dismantle the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a deep-sea monitoring system that can provide crucial storm forecasting data while also tracking the health of coastal habitats.
Chris Robbins, associate director of scientific initiatives at Ocean Conservatory, said on Tuesday that the administration's effort to dismantle the system heading into a projected El Niño event "doesn't make any sense."
"Walking away from a $368 million investment in a state-of-the-art system, a feat of engineering already paid for by the American people, is absolutely myopic," Robbins said. "This system is a vital scientific asset that quietly protects American lives, communities, and the economy through unfettered access to world-class scientific data. Its loss would create an irreparable blind spot for our country in predicting earthquakes, fishery health, storm forecasting, coastal flooding, and more."
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Hottest Year Ever Recorded Set to Arrive by 2030, Warns New UN Report
The lead author of the new report noted that predicted weather patterns could mean the record is shattered as soon as next year.
May 28, 2026
Global temperatures are likely to hit their highest average level ever within the next four years, according to a report published Thursday by the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization.
Overall, WMO's report projects an 86% chance that the world will experience its warmest year ever between 2026 and 2030, with a 91% chance that "the global mean near-surface temperature will temporarily exceed 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average levels for at least one year between 2026 and 2030."
Exceeding temperatures from the pre-industrial average by 1.5°C "risks unleashing ever more severe climate change impacts and extreme weather, and decreases adaptation option," the report notes.
Leon Hermanson, lead author of the report, said there's a good chance that 2027 will break all-time temperature records set in 2024 given that meteorologists are predicting an El Niño weather pattern to develop this summer and continue through the end of this year.
One particularly troubling finding in the report is that "Arctic temperatures over the next five extended northern hemisphere winters (November-March) are predicted to be 2.8°C above average temperatures for 1991-2020, an anomaly more than three and half times that of global mean temperature anomaly over the same period."
These higher Arctic temperatures mean likely further reductions in ice in the Barents Sea, Bering Sea, and Sea of Okhotsk, the report warns.
Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said in a Thursday interview with The Guardian that Europe's current heatwave is a preview of what's to come the longer the global climate crisis goes unaddressed.
"Protecting human lives, businesses and economies from extreme heat and the many other soaring costs of climate change is core business for every nation," said Stiell, "and it starts with kicking the fossil fuel addiction much faster."
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'Every Key Climate Indicator Is Flashing Red' in New UN Report
“Humanity has just endured the 11 hottest years on record," said the secretary-general of the United Nations. "When history repeats itself 11 times, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a call to act."
Mar 23, 2026
The annual State of the Global Climate report by the United Nations' top meteorological agency was released Monday, marking the first time the authors of the report have included the Earth's energy imbalance as a key indicator of the climate emergency.
The World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) inclusion of the imbalance only provides more evidence of what scientists have been warning for decades: The continued extraction of fossil fuels is causing heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane to build up in the atmosphere and is causing planetary heating, which is leading to extreme weather including wildfires, drought, and severe hurricanes and cyclones.
The State of the Global Climate report explains that in a stable climate, incoming solar energy is roughly equal to the amount of energy leaving the Earth.
But with greenhouse gases at their highest level in the atmosphere in at least 800,000 years, that equilibrium has been thrown off, and the energy imbalance—which has increased steadily over the past two decades—is at its highest since the observational record began in 1960.
Instead of leaving the Earth system, energy is increasingly staying in the planet's surface and deep within the oceans.
Ashkay Deoras, a research scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading in the UK, who was not associated with the report, compared the trapped energy to a hot room.
“If you open the window, naturally, you will allow the hot air to escape,” Deoras told The New York Times. “But now what is happening is that, because of all these greenhouse gases, they are just trapping more and more heat. The planet is just not getting a chance to cool down.”
The report emphasized that the higher temperatures humans feel at the Earth's surface—which have been the hottest in history over the past 11 years—represent just 1% of the excess energy that isn't leaving the planet system.
Five percent of the excess heat is stored in continental land masses, while more than 91% is stored in the ocean.
As fossil fuel emissions have increased and built up, the ocean has been absorbing about 18 times the energy used by humans each year for the past two decades, according to the report.
“Scientific advances have improved our understanding of the Earth’s energy imbalance and of the reality facing our planet and our climate right now,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. “Human activities are increasingly disrupting the natural equilibrium and we will live with these consequences for hundreds and thousands of years.”
UN Secretary-General António Guterres emphasized that in addition to the energy imbalance, "every key climate indicator is flashing red" in the new report.
Last year was the second- or third-hottest year on record, depending on the data set, owing to La Niña conditions that temporarily cooled the planet. Earth was about 1.43°C warmer than the pre-industrial average, and 2024—when hotter El Niño conditions were in effect—remains the hottest year with global temperatures averaging 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels.
About 3% of excess energy warms and melts ice, and ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland lost significant mass in 2025, while the average Arctic sea-ice extent last year was the lowest or second-lowest on record.
The loss of Arctic and Antarctic ice is driving the long-term rise in the global mean sea level, with was around 11 centimeters higher at the end of 2025 than it was in January 1993, when satellite records began.
“The State of the Global Climate is in a state of emergency. Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits," said Guterres. “Humanity has just endured the 11 hottest years on record. When history repeats itself 11 times, it is no longer a coincidence. It is a call to act."
The secretary-general added in a video posted on social media that the world must "accelerate a just transition" to renewable energy to protect "climate security, energy security, and national security."
In this age of war our addiction to fossil fuels is destabilizing the climate, global economy & global security.
Now more than ever, we must accelerate a just transition to renewable energy.
Renewables deliver climate security, energy security & national security. pic.twitter.com/TrphJ2Zwa2
— António Guterres (@antonioguterres) March 23, 2026
Saulo noted that the impact of catastrophic planetary heating grew increasingly evident in 2025, with "heatwaves, wildfires, drought, tropical cyclones, storms, and flooding" causing thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in economic losses.
The World Weather Attribution found that a heatwave across the western US last week would have been "virtually impossible" without the climate emergency. Climate researchers also concluded last summer that devastating floods in central Texas were caused by "very exceptional meteorological conditions," and the climate crisis "supercharged" the conditions that led to the extreme rainfall and flooding that killed 1,750 people in South Asia late last year.
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump—whose country is the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases—has taken steps to weaken the world's ability to respond to the climate emergency, withdrawing from dozens of climate- and energy-related international treaties and slashing climate research and emergency response spending.
Trump has also pushed for more fossil fuel emissions—investing in the expensive, pollution-causing coal industry; demanding that the Pentagon obtain energy from coal plants; and mandating oil and gas lease sales.
"The way ahead," said Guterrres, "must be grounded in science, common sense, and the courage to take urgent climate action."
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