The ongoing “super El Niño” is likely to peak at the end of 2026 and push average global temperatures to record levels next year.
That is according to Carbon Brief’s latest “state of the climate” update, which analyses El Niño forecasts from more than a dozen climate models, as well as six global temperature datasets.
Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor, described this year’s El Niño as “simply staggering” when answering questions from CB+ members during a CB Connect “ask me anything” session.
El Niño is a naturally occurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere and temporarily boosts global temperatures.
This year’s El Niño event – which has been underway since June – has already broken a number of records and reshaped the world’s weather, fuelling fires in Indonesia and “super typhoons” in the west Pacific.
The strength of an El Niño is tracked using the “Niño3.4 anomaly”, which is a measure of how much warmer sea surface temperatures are than average in a section of the central Pacific.
Analysis of more than 600 forecasts from 14 different climate models by Hausfather for Carbon Brief’s “state of the climate” update shows how models project this year’s El Niño will peak with an anomaly of around 4C. This would be more than a degree above the previous record in 2015-16.
Niño3.4 region sea surface temperature peak anomaly projected from 656 runs of 14 different dynamical El Niño models. Y-axis denotes the share of model runs in each 0.2C “bin”.
Writing on CB Connect on 5 November, Hausfather wrote:
“This El Niño event is developing so quickly and is reaching sea surface temperatures so warm that it’s simply staggering. We haven’t seen anything like this in the historical record and it may end up being the strongest El Niño event in the past millennium.”
This year’s El Niño has already chalked up a number of milestones.
On 18 September, the daily anomaly in the Niño3.4 region broke the satellite-era record set in 2015 when it reached 3.11C.
Meanwhile, September as a whole recorded the highest monthly Niño3.4 region temperature anomaly – 2.84C – since sea surface temperature records began in the mid-1800s.
Hausfather wrote on CB Connect that this year’s El Niño had been “running well above any prior El Niño event since June, at times by a full degree [Celsius]”.
Carbon Brief’s “state of the climate” analysis indicates that El Niño is set to continue to intensify into December, with 10 out of 14 models expecting temperatures in the Niño3.4 region to peak in the final month of this year. The remainder anticipate a November peak.
Average of 656 forecasts across 14 dynamical models. The lighter shaded area reflects the period when only seven models are available.
While human emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible for almost all of long-term global warming, temperatures in specific years are strongly influenced by El Niño events.
The “state of the climate” analysis explains that this year’s El Niño event will have its largest effect on global temperatures in 2027. This is because global temperatures typically lag warming in the tropical Pacific by around three months.
Carbon Brief projects that the 2027 average global temperature will reach around 1.74C above pre-industrial levels. It calculates a 96% chance that next year will be the warmest on record.
This projection is based on the historical relationship between year-on-year temperature changes and El Niño conditions the preceding autumn. It also factors in uncertainty around how global temperatures will develop across the remainder of 2026.
UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham says ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him. He says that he’s delayed the go-ahead for Jackdaw and Rosebank North Sea oil and gas extraction until after the Holborn and St. Pancras by-election – don’t want democracy interfering with Capitalism.Donald Trump urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Two years ago – One year into Israel’s war on Gaza – The Listening Post investigated the inner workings of Western media’s reporting on the genocide.
Based on interviews with more than a dozen insiders, it lifts the curtain on the inner workings of agenda-setting outlets like CNN, the BBC and The New York Times.
The results of votes in the US, Brazil, Israel and Serbia will have impacts that spread far beyond their borders. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
From the US to Brazil, Israel and Serbia, the far right have been delivered a number of mammoth blows
In the wake of the US midterm elections, the sheer size of the electoral opposition to Donald Trump is still sinking in. It will take weeks if not months for a full analysis of the results to emerge but they are already having a global impact, with US tech companies losing $3.2trn in value since the vote on Tuesday.
Remember, though, the political focus barely two weeks ago was not just about the US midterms but how they related to three more elections across three continents, in Serbia, Brazil and Israel. In each case, there was uncertainty over the outcome but a recognition that it could have an impact stretching way beyond its borders.
Two of the elections came on the same day, 25 October, in Serbia and Brazil, and the third was in Israel just two days later. The first two were general elections in which the populations as a whole could cast ballots, but in Israel voting was restricted to seven million Jews and the two million Palestinians residing in Israel, with five million Palestinians living under Israeli control in Gaza and the West Bank excluded.
In Serbia, the Serbian Progressive Party (SBS) had been in power for 14 years and was dominant across much of society, including the media and economy, and with plenty of influence across the legal system. Its increasingly autocratic leader, Aleksandar Vucic, had long allowed persistent favouritism and a high level of corruption coupled with organised crime, and in the past two years a substantial community of student activists had demonstrated repeatedly against the SBS and Vucic, giving rise to an opposition Student List of candidates when it came to the election.
While the students had no clear leader, by the time of the election they were reportedly neck and neck in the polls with the government. When the election came, the Student List romped home, winning 53% of the votes, to the SBS’s 39%.
What comes next is uncertain as the List’s newly elected parliamentarians seek to establish a stable if inexperienced government. Critics fear that a combination of years of corruption coupled with the power of organised crime will ultimately dominate but that is by no means certain; many thousands of students, supported by hundreds of thousands of others, see the future very differently.
As the political environment in Serbia evolves, one thing remains certain, it has seen mass protest transform itself into a potential government. That will be watched uncomfortably by quite a few Western states, not least France, with its continuing country-wide street protests, and the UK, where over 4,000 pro-Palestine supporters have been arrested in recent years.
Mass action also applies to Brazil, where the progressive incumbent, Luiz Ignàcio Lula da Silva, failed to lead at the first round of the election, initially having fought a lacklustre campaign. The favourite to win the run-off was his right-wing opponent Flàvio Bolsonaro, a key Trump ally and the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, now imprisoned for his role in an attempted coup after losing the 2022 election.
The prospect of defeat led to a country-wide campaign of mass rallies by Lula’s supporters, with huge crowds gathering in cities right across the country. That was paralleled by far greater use of social media, an element that had not previously been prominent in Lula’s previous approach to campaigning.
Since the return to democracy in Brazil over 40 years ago, no candidate losing the first stage of a presidential election had reversed the result in stage two, yet Lula’s renewed campaign did just this, turning a two million voting deficit in the first round into a substantial lead in the second three weeks later, having gathered around 10 million extra votes.
Much of the change was due to internal politics, but it is at the global level that the result is of note. During his recent four-year term, Lula had made much of the need to slow the rate of destruction of the rainforest, which makes up one of the most significant global sinks of carbon. If Bolsonaro had won that would have been reversed, which would have been music to the ears of Trump and his supporters, as well as to climate change deniers across the world.
As to Israel, there are two main outcomes. First, Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud-led coalition lost its majority, but Gadi Eisenkot’s Change bloc also fell short. Second, Palestinian Arabs allowed to vote did so in much greater numbers than usual, with a turnout of just under 80%, largely because of a determination to prevent Netanyahu contriving to cling on to power.
Overall, Arab-led parties won 19 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, including 11 for members of the Joint List alliance – enough to hold the balance of power. Ten days after the election, the Joint List announced it would support Eisenkot as prime minister, following in the footsteps of the other Arab group, Ra’am. Israeli president Isaac Herzog is now thought likely to invite Eisenkot to form a government.
The election itself, though, displayed thoroughly uncomfortable attitudes among Jewish Israelis during the campaign. Politics concentrated substantially on domestic issues, including the demands for accountability over the 7 October Hamas attack, with little attention given to the terrible war waged in Gaza by the Netanyahu-led government and the repeated violence perpetrated by Jewish settlers across the occupied West Bank. It was as if over 80,000 Palestinians killed or missing were best ignored.
Not all Jewish Israelis took this position, but a majority appeared to. This, coupled with Netanyahu’s decades of experience in the Israeli government and his capacity for personal survival, suggested that any sustained political stability based on trust would be difficult to achieve. What remained though, was the transformation among Palestinian Israelis and their determination to vote and put Netanyahu out of office.
The fourth of the elections, the United States mid-sessionals for both houses of congress, was the one that sprung by far the greatest surprise. That the Republicans lost was not unexpected, it was the massive size of the loss that counted.
Given Trump’s past behaviour, if a modest shift in votes had given the Democrats the House but not in the Senate, Trump and his team would have carried on if somewhat tarnished. That was not to be. The extent of the failure was so great that it undermined the entire Trump machine and with it the vast numbers of supportive officials brought on to the Federal payroll in the past two years.
That has three implications. One is at the international level, where Trump will no longer maintain his status and influence. There is a risk of hitting out where he thinks he can, but the extent of the failure in these elections means a minimal risk of Trump trying to cry foul in 2028. Times have changed and it won’t wash.
The second is that the last two years have been hugely profitable for the Trump camp but not just for them. Wealthy elites across the entire country have made millions if not billions and will be singularly unhappy at the great gravy train being derailed. Work will already be underway in the Heritage Foundation, the think tank that authored the Project 2025 blueprint for the second Trump administration, and other right-wing think-tanks to adjust to a different era.
Finally, on some key domestic issues with global implications, Trump’s abject failure is very good news. Of all the disastrous policies of the Trump years, it is climate denial and the curbing of the renewables revolution that have been the most dangerous. Within a day of the election result, though, the financial press was reporting a surge in the value of renewable energy outfits, not just in the US but across the world.
Trump is still in the White House and his supporters will still be in the system, but their power is already ebbing away. Taking a global view, the combination of Lula’s re-election in Brazil and Trump’s failure leading to a re-energised environmental movement give the world a rare day of good news.
dizzy: The reference to “… 4,000 pro-Palestine supporters have been arrested in recent years.” does not make clear that this is the number of Palestine Action supporters arrested as terrorists for holding protest signs.
More than 4,000 arrests have been made for supporting Palestine Action since the ban came into effect, Defend Our Juries said, representing the vast majority of terror arrests since last July.
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Climate science denier Donald Trump confirms that he knows nothing about democracy and that more liquid gold is being secured according to his policy of global privateering.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.Keir “I support Zionism without Qualification” Starmer supporting genocide. He berates Palestine Action for upholding international law and prevent his – Labour and Israel’s – Gaza genocide. Starmer says that that they’ve got a genocide to achieve, forced marches like the Nazis did, hospitals to bomb into obliteration, journalists, healthcare workers and starving people queuing for food to mass-murder and that they have to murder all Gazans for Zionism.
32-year-old new mother Sophia Liguori left her AI research engineer role at Google DeepMind in protest of the firm’s products being used for AI warfare and surveillance. Image: Supplied
Sofia Liguori tells openDemocracy about Project Nimbus and resignation that led to Google U-turn on silencing ex-staff
The day Google DeepMind research engineer Sofia Liguori returned to work following the birth of her first child was the day her activism began.
The 32-year-old was part of the London-based frontier AI lab’s sustainability-focused Impact Accelerator team, tasked with identifying new ways the technology can be used for good. These range “from pathogen detection and crop resilience to medical countermeasure acceleration”, according to a LinkedIn post advertising new roles in the team.
Liguori’s own project focused on how AI could optimise electricity power flow to allow the national grid to use less energy and reduce overall carbon emissions. She told openDemocracy she now refers to her work as “building the nice face of the devil”.
“I felt so hypocritical that we were just talking about all these good things and not even mentioning Project Nimbus”, she said, speaking to openDemocracy from her home in south London, a Palestinian Keffiyeh scarf draped on the wall behind her.
Project Nimbus is a $1.2bn deal that Google and Amazon Web Services signed with Israel to build data centres in the country and provide public entities with cloud-based data storage in 2021. The contract stipulated that neither company could shut down their services in Israel or deny them to particular government entities.
Google has said its work with Israel is “not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services”, as a spokesperson told Time magazine this year. Yet training materials leaked to The Intercept in 2022 revealed the full suite of Google Cloud AI tools are available to Israeli state departments, including the Ministry of Defence, for face detection, object tracking and “sentiment analysis”.
The ministry could have used these tools to identify and surveil Palestinians across the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, including since 7 October 2023, according to reporting in the New York Times and the Centre for Constitutional Rights. Israeli military officials have said they have killed 70,000 people in Gaza since the Hamas attack on October 7 2023 that killed approximately 1,200 Israelis.
As she sat at home with her new baby, Liguori said she “watched a live-streamed genocide for a year, knowing that my company was complicit”. She added: “If we accepted this modus operandi, we were basically legitimising what has been tested in Gaza to become the standard.”
Returning to work in August last year, she said she implored her colleagues: “If our aim is AI for good, trying to stop genocide is one of the ultimate goods we can do, right?”
Ultimately, having been unable to convince executives to end Google’s role in Israeli military actions, Liguori left the company this year. In recent weeks, she has acted as a whistleblower, speaking out despite being subject to the strict lifetime non-disparagement agreement signed by Google employees.
Liguroi had always been prepared to be fired for her activism, but, she said, the real risk of “being sued by Google is different”. The tech giant’s parent company, Alphabet, is consistently ranked as the third or fourth most valuable globally, with a reported market worth of around $3.5trn.
This week, she was delivered some good news: a Google executive told the company’s UK staff that it will not enforce the NDA’s clause against workers who criticise the company after leaving. Speaking to openDemocracy after the news was announced, Liguori details what it took to get Google to back down.
The final straw
Liguori, whose background is in theoretical physics and reinforcement learning for video games, told openDemocracy she never set out to work with frontier AI models and knew “nothing” about Project Nimbus when she joined Google DeepMind in May 2023.
After becoming increasingly aware of the project’s impact in Gaza while on maternity leave, Liguori sent her immediate colleagues a letter urging them to take action shortly after she returned to work in August last year.
“This team is full of mothers,” she wrote. “I am not going to describe how it feels to become a mother for the first time while watching snipers targeting children, children dying of starvation, and all the rest of the horrors. What’s happening is lacerating my heart, really.”
The letter, which openDemocracy has seen, continues: “How can we do AI for good, and not even talk about Project Nimbus? How can we do AI for good in a company that is officially recognised and listed [as] complicit in the ongoing genocide in Palestine?”
Liguori also asked to discuss Nimbus in a team meeting. When her request was denied by a senior manager, she began sharing links to news articles about the project in internal channels. If they contained the word “genocide”, she said, they were deleted for “violating internal policies” prohibiting “aggressive language”.
Two months after her return to work, documents were leaked to Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call revealing that Google and Amazon had agreed to use a secret code to “effectively sidestep legal obligations” and tip off the Israeli government if they were ever ordered to share Israeli data shared on their cloud services with law enforcement authorities any where in the world.
Then, in late April 2026, it was announced that Google had signed a contract with the US Department of War that would allow the Pentagon to use Google’s AI for “any lawful government purpose”, including mission planning and weapons targeting.
That was the day Liguori decided enough was enough. The petition she and over 600 colleagues had sent to CEO Sundar Pichai opposing the partnership had fallen on deaf ears.
“I really believe there is a value of infighting from the inside,” she said, “I tried to stay and do activism and raise awareness”, but the mental toll was becoming too great. “I reached a level of disgust with my company that was just incompatible with me continuing to stay there.”
Liguori used a combination of sick and holiday leave to cease undertaking work for Google, officially resigning on 20 October.
“I no longer believe that our technology will have a net positive impact on society. I think there’s a fantasy world where AI can help decarbonise grids, cut waste, protect ecosystems, and benefit humanity,” she wrote in her publicly posted resignation letter.
“But it’s not this world, and it’s not this type of general-purpose AI we are racing to develop.”
The growing revolt inside Google DeepMind
Google hasn’t always been so resistant to employee dissent.
Shortly after, the company published its AI Principles, a set of internal guidelines that prohibited the use of its technology for AI weapons or for human rights abuses.
But weeks after Donald Trump’s second term began in January last year, the Silicon Valley-based company appeared to have a change of heart, with the AI principles updated to remove references to weapons or surveillance.
“We believe democracies should lead in AI development, guided by core values like freedom, equality, and respect for human rights,” Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis and research labs senior vice president James Manyika wrote in a blog post announcing the updated policy.
Soon after, Google announced that Gemini would be used for both classified and unclassified purposes at the AI factory of Lockheed Martin, a US weapons company that primarily builds military aircraft, missiles, satellites, and defence technology for the US armed forces.
Then, in June of this year, a partnership between Google and US military contractor Palantir was expanded to integrate Palantir platforms across Google Cloud and Google Cloud Marketplace.
“You never know then how your technology will be used in Palantir’s systems,” Liguori told openDemocracy. “Workers need to know what the technology they are building on will contribute, and we want the right to abstain on ethical grounds”.
Since then, a number of UK Googlers have left the company on ethical grounds, but were gagged from speaking about the firm by strict NDAs. Feeling strongly that the public needed to know about Google’s dealings with Israel, Liguori said she decided to breach her own NDA to publish her resignation letter, knowing that Google could retaliate.
But this week Google told its staff in the UK that it will not take legal action against those who criticise the company or its AI products after leaving. “We’ve always encouraged an open dialogue about safety and responsibility,” a Google spokesperson told The Washington Post. “Recently, we’ve updated our terms for new hires, which included removing the post-termination aspect of non-disparagement clauses.”
Liguori sees the move as a win that “happened because of collective action”. After an employee’s attempts to raise concerns about the clause through internal channels did not lead to any change, DeepMind members of the United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW) coordinated with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign group and whistleblowing non-profit Psst to pressure Google from multiple directions, Liguori told openDemocracy.
It’s only because of this support network that Liguori says she was able to “find the courage to take the risk” of a public resignation.
The concession comes as the Employment Rights Act 2025 comes into effect in the UK, allowing unions to enter workplaces across the country to speak to workers in person about joining a union. At Google and Google DeepMind, the new law will likely support UTAW and Unite’s drive for formal recognition.
For Liguori, who joked that she had considered “disappearing in the Italian countryside”, the news that she won’t face legal action for her activism has come as a “big relief”. She added: “… it’s also a sign that our collective effort had an effect, and that it’s worth challenging the rules.”
Google has not responded to openDemocracy’s request for comment at time of publication.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Benjamin Moser spoke to Declassified about his new book ‘Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History’. Moser, who has been lauded for his previous works, had just one review in the British press at the time of recording, and said no bookshop in London would host his book launch. ‘I knew writing this book would dynamite my career,’ he told us.
Declassified editor Phil Miller spoke to Moser about the history of Zionism, which he describes as ‘almost comically racist’, and one is that inextricably linked to Britain and its empire.
