Energy secretary could recommend new North Sea drilling next week, as ministers also consider approval for Rosebank oilfield
Ministers are poised to approve a controversial new gasfield in the North Sea this month, according to government sources, and are considering approving a major oilfield later this year.
Miatta Fahnbulleh, the energy secretary, will give her recommendation to approve the Jackdaw field off the coast of Aberdeen as soon as next week, according to people close to the decision, and the formal approval could follow a week after.
The United Nations has made the grim prediction that our planet now sits in the “danger zone” of extreme weather. That’s based on data suggesting the current El Niño will break all previous records.
El Niño is a naturally occurring weather phenomenon that drives variations in temperature and winds across the Pacific Ocean and influences weather around the globe.
So what’s behind this potentially record-breaking El Niño? And how might it affect weather across the globe?
An exceptional El Niño
Scientists track El Niño activity using temperature data from the tropical Pacific Ocean near the equator. Historically, this involved measuring how high or low temperatures were across this region.
However, scientists and weather organisations – including Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology – now use a relative index. Instead of simply measuring temperatures, this relative index accounts for any background warming due to climate change. This makes it much easier for scientists to identify how intense an El Niño is in a warming climate.
The current El Niño stands out for two main reasons.
Extra early
El Niño typically peaks in the period between November and January, but this one is already unusually warm this early in the season and is yet to peak during summer.
Extra hot
Recent data shows the relative index for August were 2.3°C above average, stronger compared to other El Niño years. In Australia, El Niño years tend to coincide with hotter and drier conditions. However, every El Niño is different and can lead to different impacts. However, this El Niño will lead to record breaking global temperatures in 2027.
Bleached coral on the Great Barrier Reef outside Cairns. El Nino leads to warmer ocean temperatures that can trigger bleaching.Brett Munroe Garner/Getty
How is it affecting the world’s weather?
This historic El Niño is already altering weather around the globe.
We see its most direct and severe impacts in countries surrounding the Pacific Ocean. Indonesia, for example, just this month was battling massive wildfires. Scientists understand the current El Nino is a major driver of these increasingly fierce blazes.
El Niño is also reshaping how and where cyclones form. Satellite pictures reveal there are currently four active tropical cyclones in the Pacific, from near Japan to as far away as Hawaii. This is extremely unusual. El Niño typically boosts cyclone activity in the eastern and central Pacific by carrying warmer water to those regions. Usually we only see one or two such cyclones.
In Australia, we are slightly more removed from the effects of El Niño. However, we can expect to feel its presence more strongly as we head into spring.
The Bureau of Meteorology’s seasonal forecast suggests Australia has so far had a textbook response to El Niño. Temperatures are rising – up to an unseasonable 37°C this week in parts of northern Australia – and conditions are getting drier. Much of eastern and central Australia can expect an unusually dry spring and summer, potentially heightening bushfire risk.
However, a record-breaking El Niño will not necesssarily trigger catastrophic bushfires in Australia. Consider three of the last strong El Niño we’ve experienced. In 1982, a robust El Niño coincided with drought-like conditions. In contrast, during the El Niño years of 1997–98 and 2015–16, some parts of Australia received drenching rain while other regions barely registered any moisture.
What may lie ahead
The intensifying El Niño will likely exacerbate the consequences of climate change.
As El Niño strengthens, countries around the world will be forced to grapple with increasingly extreme weather. Tragically, the most disadvantaged will be the hardest hit, with nearly 50 million people in vulnerable communities likely to be pushed into acute hunger. Farmers across the globe face more unpredictable weather, from crop-destroying floods in South America to severe drought in parts of Africa.
To protect the world’s people and ecosystems, governments must invest in robust research. We urgently need more modelling capability to identify which regions will be worst affected by the strengthening El Niño. This is particularly true for Australia, where a lack of understanding of how climate change on top of a strong El Niño will affect local conditions.
This record-shattering El Niño is already compounding the destructive effects of climate change. But it may be just the catalyst we need to finally abandon fossil fuels and curb our world-warming emissions.
Mandy Freund receives funding from ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century. She is affiliated with the University of Melbourne.
Electric vehicle sales in Australia exceeded petrol cars for the first time last month as a transformation driven by high fuel prices and government policy encouraging clean car uptake accelerated.
More than 27,000 EVs were sold in August, a new record for a single month and representing 24.9% of new cars sold. The climate-friendly technology surpassed both petrol vehicles (nearly 26,000 sold) and diesel cars (23,600).
The world is set to miss the 1.5°C global warming target, and plans are underway for UN climate talks in the Pacific and Turkey.
Climate mitigation – reducing or preventing greenhouse emissions – was once treated as the only legitimate response to global warming. In comparison, climate adaptation – trying to adjust to global warming – was seen as a form of defeatism, or worse, hubris.
But that taboo has long since lifted: our collective failure to prevent climate change means adaptation is now an essential part of climate policy.
Similarly, attitudes to actively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere have undergone an evolution. While there are reasons to doubt whether carbon removal can work at scale, Australia’s “net zero emissions” plans rely on these interventions.
Now, the taboo surrounding another controversial form of climate intervention – solar radiation modification
(SRM) – appears to be lifting.
What is solar radiation modification?
SRM refers to large-scale technological interventions that reflect a small amount of sunlight back into space, thereby lowering global temperatures. Increasingly called the more benign term “climate stabilisation”, the proposed methods include space mirrors – satellites equipped with large reflective surfaces – and cloud brightening, where microscopic particles are sprayed into clouds to make them more reflective.
The most commonly discussed SRM technique is stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) – the release of particles into the upper atmosphere to recreate the cooling effects observed following volcanic eruptions.
SRM is so controversial it’s sometimes called the “Voldemort of climate policy”. While it could reduce global temperatures, it does not limit carbon emissions, and the ecological effects of deployment are uncertain.
Some critics are worried a potential techno-fix will deter mitigation efforts. Others point out the risks of “termination shock”: once implemented, ending SRM would cause abrupt temperature rise. Scientific research suggests the strong warming experienced since 2023 is likely a case of inadvertent termination shock. When new fuel regulations reduced sulphur dioxide emissions from international shipping, the rapid warming that followed revealed this pollution had, incidentally, been cooling the planet.
At present, SRM inhabits an international and domestic policy vacuum. Many scholars advocate for a ban on both research and deployment, saying these technologies “play God” with nature. We argue a ban on research is no longer tenable.
Why challenge the taboo?
The case for taking SRM seriously does not usually rest on enthusiasm for the technologies, but on global warming’s grim reality. We are approaching planetary tipping points such as significant polar sea ice retreat, the death of the Amazon rainforest and widespread coral reef loss. SRM advocates say it should be viewed as a complement, not an alternative, to mitigation: a means of limiting the extent and duration of temperature overshoot while decarbonisation continues.
Government appetite for this approach is limited and patchy. When the UN Environment Assembly discussed a Swiss proposal for SRM research in 2024, countries could not agree even on whether and how to regulate research in this area. Countries such as Japan and Saudi Arabia pushed for ongoing research, while vulnerable Pacific and African countries argued against any language that risked endorsing the practice.
Nowhere is the politics of SRM more volatile than the United States. One group of Republicans reject the climate change “hoax” but is so convinced SRM is already happening that many Republican states have criminalised it. Some think tanks advocate SRM as a way to defend “American Weather Sovereignty”. NASA has an exploratory program investigating space-based reflective dust clouds. For now, the Trump administration has not chosen a side, but it’s easy to imagine a future administration unilaterally blocking, or implementing, SRM.
If we don’t challenge the SRM taboo, self-interested actors are poised to fill the policy vacuum. Elon Musk has recently spoken out in favour of SRM, while ventures such as the US-Israeli startup Stardust are pursuing research without public oversight.
What is Australia’s position?
Australia has no policy on SRM research or deployment, but federal government funds have supported related research into local interventions, including the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP). This trialled the world’s most respected marine cloud brightening research over the Great Barrier Reef.
Existing environmental and climate law might regulate risks posed by small-scale research, but does not consider the larger risks of eventual deployment. With the exception of some ad hoc efforts, SRM research is not subject to any dedicated ethics framework.
The planetary scale of SRM impacts means we urgently need research to consider the geographic distribution of benefits and harms from any deployment, and the security implications of unilateral deployment by any state or private actor.
What should Australia do?
As a trusted middle power, Australia is well positioned to help lead discussions on the future of SRM. At a minimum, Australia should assess the potential impacts of various options on Australia’s climate, agricultural production and natural environment, and develop a public position on research.
Waiting until a foreign government or well-resourced private actor forces the issue would leave Australia reacting to decisions made elsewhere. Instead, we should prepare for the surprises a fast-moving, under-governed field is likely to produce.
As temperature overshoot becomes an inevitability, SRM is emerging as a new element of international climate policy whether we like it or not. We do not argue anyone should deploy SRM, but that we should break the taboo and enable responsible scientific research and public deliberation.
Jan McDonald receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is a member of the Oversight Committee of the ARIA Exploring Climate Cooling Program
Jonathan Symons is an ordinary member of WePlanet Australia.
Manon Simon receives funding from ARC DP210102296.
Matt McDonald has received funding from the Australian Research Council and the UK's Economic and Social Research Council.
Rachel Neef is a Research Fellow funded under an Australian Research Council grant.
