WMO: 2023-2026 the four hottest years on record

The significance here is that the four hottest years on record are now consecutive, which shifts the story from a single spike to a sustained baseline — a detail that matters for anyone pricing long-horizon climate risk, from insurers and agricultural producers to carbon-market participants. The La Niña-to-El Niño swing shows how much year-to-year outcomes ride on short-term cycles layered over the trend. The open question is whether the expected persistence into early 2027 pushes the 2026 annual figure higher, and whether consecutive record years start feeding through to physical-risk assumptions rather than being treated as noise.