The El Niño gaining strength in the Pacific is shaping up tobe one of the biggest on record, scientists say. A new review paperin Nature Climate Change suggests we can expect more of the same infuture.

Carbon Brief’s tracker monitoring which countries havesubmitted their pledges to the UN on how far they intend to reducetheir greenhouse gas emissions. We’ve updated it to includeDjibouti’s pledge to reduce emissions by 40% by 2030.

Shell has been granted the final permit it needs in order todrill for potential oil reserves in Arctic. The US Bureau of Safetyand Environmental Enforcement, America’s offshore regulator, gaveits approval for deep drilling in the Chukchi Sea off thenorth-west coast of Alaska. Although Shell has been drilling sinceJuly 30, they hadn’t yet been allowed to drill deep enough to reachoil. Friends of the Earth said the award of the permit “completelycontradicts” President Barack Obama’s commitment to tackle thethreat of climate change, reportsThe Financial Times.

The US government is today expected to propose thefirst-ever federal regulation to cut methane emissions from the oiland gas sector by up to 45% over the next decade from 2012 levels.The US boom in natural gas and oil production has raised concernsabout leaks and venting of methane throughout the productionprocess, says Reuters, and existing standards toprevent leaks have been voluntary. The US Environmental ProtectionAgency forecasts that methane emissions from the oil and gas sectorwill rise by 25% over the next 10 years without being reined in,says Carbon Pulse.

At least 30% of the UK could have the right geology to allowa £12bn nuclear waste burial site, experts say. The government hasbeen on the search for a potential location since a site in Cumbriawas blocked by the county council in 2013. Radioactive WasteManagement (RWM), the government-owned company tasked withdelivering the disposal site, s preparing to launch a publicinformation campaign on the issue in September, saysThe Guardian. A screening process toidentify suitable areas in the UK will complete by 2017.

Glaciers in the Celestial mountains of central Asia havelost 27% of their mass since 1961 and could lose a further half ofwhat remains by 2050, a new study finds. Analysing records of 2000glaciers since 1894, scientists found that from 2001 to 2010,glaciers lost on average 75cm of their thickness per year. This istwice the rate in the 1990s and treble that in the 1980s, theresearchers say. Meltwater from the glaciers supplies the FerganaValley, one of the largest irrigated areas on earth, and provideswater to northern China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan andKyrgyzstan.

Human-caused global warming has triggered a reversal ofnatural ocean cooling that has occurred over the past 1,800 years,says a new study. Reconstructed historical records for the world’soceans show that temperatures have fallen significantly over thepast two millennia – caused by the cooling influence of successivevolcanic eruptions. “Today, the Earth is warming about 20 timesfaster than it cooled during the past 1,800 years. This study trulyhighlights the profound effects we are having on our climatetoday,” says one of the study’s authors.

Climate change could initially benefit rich countries whiledamaging the economies of poor nations, a new modelling studysuggests. Researchers analysed past links between countries’economic output and changes in temperature and rainfall, and thenmade projections based on future global warming. While economicgrowth could increase in Europe, North America and Australia, mostof Africa, India and parts of South Asia will see a drop in growth,the study finds. But rich countries should not treat the findingsas licence to be complacent over greenhouse emissions, the authorwarns.

The anticipation is growing that this year’s newly formed ElNiño will turn out to be very big, but at this point last year,fears of a very strong event proved to be anticlimactic, say theauthors of a new study, writing in The Conversation. It’s easy tosee why this climate phenomenon gets so much attention – its affecton weather has some catastrophic impacts around the world, theresearchers say. And their new study shows we will probablyexperience more super El Niños as the global climatewarms. Carbon Briefalso covered the newresearch.

The Guardian Australia’s Political Editor, Lenore Taylor,likens the government’s “war on environmental vigilantes andsaboteurs” to the slapstick of Laurel and Hardy. When anenvironment group successfully uses 16 year-old nationalenvironmental laws to delay a coal project, the government tries tochange the law to prevent them doing it again, she says. But if ananti-windfarm group can’t find a way to use existing regulations tostop or delay a project, “the Abbott government tries to changelaws to make it easier for them to succeed”.

Scientists have calculated that it would take the equivalentof 5 to 7 times the Mount Pinatubo eruption each year to injectenough sulphur dioxide into the air just to keep globaltemperatures constant through solar radiation management. That’sbecause the effectiveness of the particles in reflecting sunlightdecreases exponentially with the amount injected.

Glaciers in central Asia are thought to have shrunk theirarea by 18% and lost 27% of ice between 1961 and 2012, according tonew research. These values correspond to a total mass loss of 5.4billion tonnes per year, which is about four times higher than thepercentage mass loss of the rest of the world. This is significantas populations in Central Asia are heavily dependent on snow andglacier melt for their water supplies, the authors note.

A new study analyses how the ocean has mediated the responseof global climate to natural and anthropogenic forcings over thepast 2,000 years, a period known as the Common Era (CE). The datafrom 57 different reconstructions suggests that a cluster ofvolcanic eruptions, rather than changes in the sun’s orbit, causedthe ocean to cool between 1 to 1800 CE – a trend that was reversedwhen humans started industrialising 200 or so years ago.