Al Gore: 2026 could be a turning point in the fight against climate change

According to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, 2026 could go down in history as a positive turning point in the fight against climate change, but for that to happen, the world would need to seize very quickly the opportunity presented by the spread of renewable energy, since the planet's warming keeps accelerating: this August was the hottest August since records began, and tied with July 2023 for the hottest month ever recorded.

According to data from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, the global average surface temperature reached 16.96 degrees Celsius in August, exceeding the 16.95 degrees recorded in July 2023 by one hundredth of a degree. However, according to Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead at Copernicus, the difference lies right at the edge of measurement uncertainty, so the two months should be considered statistically identical. August was 0.85 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1991–2020 average for the month, and 1.65 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial era. This does not yet mean that the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold set out in the Paris Agreement has been officially and permanently crossed. The international target refers to the rise in global average temperature over several decades, not to a single outlier month, but the succession of records makes it increasingly clear how close we have come to a sustained breach. UN Secretary-General António Guterres no longer considers it likely that this can be fully avoided: at a press conference in September, he stated that the world will exceed the 1.5-degree threshold within the next few years, so the real question is whether the overshoot can be limited to the smallest possible extent and duration.

Even more striking records were set in the United States. According to NOAA data, the meteorological summer of 2026 — the period from June to August — was the hottest across the contiguous 48 states since records began in 1895. The national average summer temperature reached 74.4 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 23.6 degrees Celsius, surpassing the previous record set in 1936 and matched in 2021 by 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit. August itself proved hotter than ever before: the average temperature was 75.6 degrees Fahrenheit, or 24.2 degrees Celsius, exceeding the 20th-century average by 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Global ocean surface temperatures also reached near-record or, according to some measurements, record-high levels, with the exceptionally strong El Niño playing a role. However, the natural climate phenomenon alone does not explain the current temperatures: according to Copernicus experts, El Niño typically raises the global average by only a few tenths of a degree, while the fundamental cause of long-term warming remains the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, and the resulting accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

According to Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, it is increasingly likely that 2026 will ultimately surpass the 2024 record and become the hottest year ever measured, while 2027 will almost certainly exceed both, due to the current El Niño. The records, then, are not random, isolated events but part of a decades-long warming process driven by human activity. Gore, however, does not focus exclusively on the worsening data. In an interview with Scientific American ahead of New York's Climate Week, he said 2026 could become a positive turning point because the development of renewable energy has reached an economic and technological level where the transition can now gain its own momentum. Importantly, Gore was not referring here to a climatic tipping point — such as the irreversible collapse of an ice sheet — but to a social, political and economic shift after which the spread of clean energy could accelerate. According to the former vice president, the price of solar energy has dropped almost miraculously over the past twenty years, while the cost of industrial-scale energy storage has fallen even faster. In 2026, solar power overtook coal for the first time in both the United States and China, while wind farms, battery storage systems and electric vehicles are spreading rapidly worldwide. Gore said humanity already possesses all the technology needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half within a decade; the technical means are there, but political decisions continue to lag behind.

The shift is also visible in the financial data. At the time of the 2015 Paris Agreement, about 65 percent of the world's energy investments still went to fossil fuels, and only 35 percent to renewable sources. According to Gore, that ratio has now reversed: 55 percent of investment now flows into renewable energy, and overall, twice as much money is being invested in clean technologies as in the fossil fuel sector. At the same time, the former vice president warned that progress remains far too slow, while governments around the world continue to support the extraction and use of fossil fuels with enormous sums. Estimates of the exact size of these subsidies vary considerably, but there is little serious dispute that states continue to keep alive, with trillions of dollars, an energy system whose consequences are being paid for at ever greater cost in the form of heatwaves, droughts, floods, wildfires and crop failures.

Guterres struck a far more pessimistic tone. According to the outgoing UN Secretary-General, the situation is "deteriorating dramatically," and dependence on fossil energy is not only a climate risk but also an economic and security one, since the price of oil and natural gas is directly tied to wars and geopolitical crises. He called on companies building data centers to switch to clean energy by 2030, and criticized plans to meet artificial intelligence's growing electricity demand with new gas-fired power plants. Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, pointed to the simplest correlation behind the records: as long as the world keeps burning fossil fuels, the global average temperature will keep rising, and today's still-extraordinary heat records will become increasingly ordinary.

Ugar