Increase in Extreme Events due to Climate Change

Cheri Porter

September 2026

Extreme weather events in 2026 are linked to climate change

News from the first half of 2026 reads like a dystopian novel. We have seen record-breaking heatwaves in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. These heatwaves triggered wildfires across western Europe and North America causing huge plumes of smoke to cover major populated areas. The biggest wildfires in Indonesia since the 2015 El Niño have blanketed parts of Southeast Asia in acrid smoke while India faces its weakest monsoon in two decades. The glacier collapse in Nepal killed over 600 people as of this writing and thousands more are missing. At least 35,000 more people died during Europe’s four record-breaking, back-to-back heatwaves this summer than would normally be expected, according to incomplete figures from barely half the continent. 

These so-called natural disasters are the type of impacts IPCC climate scientists have been warning us about for decades due to the burning of coal, oil and gas. The record-shattering temperatures – and new record sea surface temperatures as of 22 Aug 2026 – are the grim reality of climate change and the reason why we need to transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energies.

But these extreme weather events cannot be classified as ‘natural’ disasters any more. Extreme weather has become more frequent and destructive due to decades of fossil fuel emissions and it’s time for the world’s governments to hold these oil and gas profiteers to account.

Extreme event attribution allows scientists to determine the impact of human-caused atmospheric warming to individual extreme cold and heat events and large-scale heavy rainfall events. Two recent rapid attribution studies showed the European and North American heatwaves were virtually impossible without climate change, which is caused by the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to the burning of coal, oil and gas and forest destruction.

The rapid attribution study by scientists at World Weather Attribution (WWA) examining the influence of climate change said a similar June heatwave in western Europe would have been around 3.5°C cooler if it had happened 50 years ago. Another WWA study found that the extreme North American heatwave was “much more likely and intense” due to human-induced climate change. The WWA study found the specific impacts driven by persistent, humid heat “would not have happened in a preindustrial climate”.

Amid rising emissions and strong indications the El Niño will continue to develop in coming months and dominate global climate patterns in the August-October period, Berkeley Earth calculated there’s a 69 percent chance that 2026 will become a record hot year. Scientists anticipate that 2027 could even exceed this year's level.

There is no doubt that climate change is driving these extreme events to record-breaking levels and that emissions of greenhouse gases are driving climate change. Moderate reductions in emissions of GHG are no longer a sufficient goal. Due to decades of inaction, despite knowing the consequences, we must now rapidly eliminate (not reduce) fossil fuel use and begin to actively draw carbon out of the atmosphere to make our children's climate survivable.

(Much of the content for this article was taken from this article appearing on the Greenpeace website 26 Aug 2026, and this article from The Guardian, 25 Aug 2026.)