El Niño is back with a vengeance – and fears of ‘Godzilla’ strength may be the least of our worries. Guardian  Ajit Niranjan 21 June 2026   UN’s World Food Programme and agriculture agency issue joint appeal for funds to avert global hunger crisis before it happens. Adugna Woyessa was a little boy the first time drought tore his country apart. As harvests failed in rain-starved regions of Ethiopia in the early 1970s, and his school turned a classroom into a grain store for farmers to send aid, he had no idea that scientists were beginning to connect the force parching its fields with cyclical shifts in trade winds that had long supercharged violent weather from South America to Australia. The now notorious El Niño – Spanish for “little boy” – was named by fishers in the Pacific in the 1800s, but it was not until the 1970s that scientists understood its global nature and began to piece together the historical impact of the natural weather pattern characterised by hot years and brutal extremes.

The 1972-73 El Niño warmed Peruvian waters to levels that collapsed the world’s largest anchovy fishery – prompting scientists to conduct the first forecast of its state the following year – and brought harsh drought to south Asia, the Sahel and parts of east Africa ahead of an oil crisis that deepened global hunger. In Ethiopia, protests against the emperor’s handling of the famine helped a military coup that ushered in a communist dictatorship. “El Niño is one of the most challenging climate phenomena,” said Woyessa, who grew up to become an epidemiologist at the Ethiopian Public Health Institute and has studied its effects on malaria epidemics. “Nutrition is everything for your capacity to withstand the challenges of its negative impacts on human health.”All too often, though, nutrition is what El Niño takes away from those who most need it. Woyessa was in high school when a stronger El Niño hit a decade later in 1982-83, forcing some of his classmates to travel 150km to help with harvests on state farms. By his first year of university, further crop failures and civil war had escalated widespread hunger into an even more ruinous famine, which drew global attention through the Live Aid concert. Woyessa and his fellow students took turns helping people in shelters near their college. “We had two breads in the morning, and we were supposed to share our breakfast.” Scientists are quick to caution that climatic shifts are only one factor among many when a society collapses, but at the extreme end of the spectrum, El Niño can spell apocalyptic suffering. In the worst El Niño years in the 19th century, the death toll from famines in India, China and Brazil stretched into the tens of millions. There is some evidence to suggest it set the scene for the French Revolution in the 18th century with erratic weather that ruined harvests, and it helped the Spanish conquer the Inca empire in the 16th century with rains that nourished the desert vegetation that sustained their march. Looser theories suggest it brought down ancient civilisations from Egypt to China.

This year, El Niño is back – and scientists fear it will resemble a young man more than a little boy. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US said El Niño conditions had formed in the Pacific last week and carried a 63% chance of being “very strong” by the peak near the end of the year. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology followed on Tuesday, warning it would worsen the extreme heat and wildfires that engulf the country each year. Some scientists have informally dubbed it a “super” or “Godzilla” El Niño based on the expected size of the temperature anomaly, which will push global heat higher at a time when extreme weather events such as Europe’s recent heatwaves and slew of storms are pushing the boundaries of what societies can handle. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) used more measured language when it warned us to prepare for its return earlier this month, arguing a wide spread in model results made it too early to call its strength......read on- and the deadly European heat waves have now come to pass!   https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/21/el-nino-fears-godzilla-strength-hunger-famine

The American epoch of oil is collapsing. What comes next could be ugly. Guardian  Jonathan Watts 17 May 2026 Farewell,” the flag-waving Chinese children chanted to Donald Trump as he strolled along the red carpet back to Air Force One at the end of his summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing. The US leader claimed he was leaving with a cluster of “fantastic” trade deals to sell US oil, jets and soybeans to China. That has not been confirmed by his smiling host, but one thing was crystal clear from the two days of meetings: the global balance of power is shifting, from the declining petrostate in the west to the rising electrostate in the east.

Trump flew home to chaos – war with Iran, surging gas prices, spectacular unpopularity, friction with former allies and a 20th-century policy of “energy dominance” that seeks to turn back the clock, use tariffs and military threats to open markets, and enrich his supporters in the fossil fuel industry. The long dominant superpower increasingly appears a malignant force as it pushes the world towards ever greater turbulence. Xi, meanwhile, presides over a country that has invested more than any other in renewable energy, which has helped to buffer its economy from the gas price shocks caused by the conflict in the Middle East, while opening up huge new export markets for solar panels, wind turbines, smart grids and electric vehicles. While the Chinese president’s Communist party still faces criticism for its suppression of dissent, its soft power deficit no longer seems so great when its main global rival is killing protesters at home and bombing schoolchildren overseas.

Future historians may well see the Iran war as the moment the US unwittingly ceded leadership to China..... Why is this happening now? Tempting as it is to blame these global shifts on a single malignant narcissist in the White House, a more useful – and maybe even hopeful – analysis needs to take into account the tectonic changes that are shaking not just the foundations of politics, but the very nature of human power, as the world shifts from molecules to electrons.History has proven that when the dominant form of energy changes, there is often a shift in the global pecking order. We are now in the midst of one such transition as the epoch of petrol, predominantly produced in the United States, Russia and Gulf states, starts to give way to an era of renewables, overwhelmingly manufactured in China. But the outcome remains contested, and the process could be ugly. The new energy order is winning the economic and technological battle – wind turbines and solar panels were already producing record-cheap electricity even before the Iran war pushed up the costs of gas and oil-fired power plants. But the old petro-interests still have political, military and financial might on their side, and they are using that to try to turn back the energy clock. As a result, democracies across the planet are now threatened by what might be called fossil fuel fascism – an extremist political movement that breaks laws, spreads lies and threatens violence in an increasingly desperate attempt to maintain markets for oil, gas and coal that would otherwise be replaced by cheaper renewables.

Of course, there are multiple other, overlapping reasons for the war against Iran: its nuclear program, Trump’s need for a distraction from the Epstein files, and his willingness to adopt positions favourable to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to name a few.

But the wider context is that the Earth is becoming a more hostile environment for humanity. This is driving up tensions, exposing economic limits that have been ignored for centuries and redefining geopolitical realities. Who is actually winning? In the short term, the biggest windfall from the Iran conflict has gone to companies, executives and shareholders in the US petroleum industry – a major source of campaign funding for Trump – that was struggling with low prices and a production glut at the start of the year, but is now enjoying a spectacular revenue surge while rival suppliers in the Gulf are choked by threats in the strait of Hormuz. Along with Russian and Saudi Arabian petro-companies, US energy suppliers look set to cash in for months to come, even as consumers pay more at the pumps. At the same time, the war is forcing countries across the world to explore ways to increase their energy independence. In the next few years, that will happen by increasing domestic production of oil, gas and coal. By one reckoning, this has increased the likely 2030 output of fossil fuels by a fifth – an alarming setback for global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and a victory for the petroleum industry and the far-right political groups it funds. But that will not be the final reckoning of this war, which has reinforced the argument for both renewable energy and a concurrent shift in geopolitical alignments. With major oil and gas producers now led by ever more erratic and menacing authoritarian leaders, other countries are looking for alternative ways to generate power. Electric cars, for example, have never been more in demand.

The prime beneficiary is China, which suddenly appears a relative oasis of pragmatic, internationally minded diplomacy and energy independence. Beijing’s bet on renewable power and EVs over the past two decades is paying enormous dividends. Not only has this made it less reliant on fuel imports, it now has a wind, solar and battery export industry that looks set to dominate global markets for many decades to come. Future historians may well see the Iran war as the moment the US unwittingly ceded leadership to China. If so, it would not be the first time that a change in the world’s energy matrix led to a reordering of the political hierarchy of nations. When humankind taps new power supplies, new empires rise and old ones fall. Realignments tend to be violent.

How empires fall.....One of the cornerstones of geostrategic thinking since the start of the Industrial Revolution, 250 years ago, is that the country that controls energy supply controls the world. For most of the past century, that has centered on oil.“Oil has meant mastery through the years,” wrote Daniel Yergin in his Pulitzer prize-winning book about the decisive role of energy in world politics, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. Yergin argues oil was a primary reason why Germany invaded the Soviet Union during the second world war, and motivated Japan to attack the US at Pearl Harbor. It was why the US launched Desert Storm to thwart Iraqi’s seizure of Kuwait, which would have given Saddam Hussein control over the planet’s most abundant oil supplies. It explained former US president Barack Obama’s comment that energy was “priority number one” for his administration. Earlier this year, it was a primary justification by Trump and other US officials for invading Venezuela, which has the world’s biggest untapped reserves, and it is now a key factor in the war on Iran, which has the fourth highest supply.

We have entered the age of clean energy. Those who lead this transition will lead the global economy of the future- António Guterres. Not for nothing has the old joke been revived that the “US is a very fortunate country because everywhere it goes to bring freedom it finds oil.”.....But what is different today is the realisation that oil – once considered “black gold” – and other fossil fuels are now a toxic threat to the stability of the climate and the political world order. Now that cheaper, cleaner alternatives are available, the demand for these industrial fuels has to be artificially inflated, propped up by political lobbying, hefty subsidies, disinformation campaigns and military force. The most spectacular example of an energy transition completely upturning the world order was in the mid-19th century, when the coal-powered gunships of the Royal Navy shredded the fragile coastal defences of southern China to impose a market for the British empire’s most lucrative and unethical commodity: opium. Up to that point, Beijing had been the capital of the world’s biggest economy for most of the previous 2,000 years but its historic advantage in manpower and culture was being lost to fossil-fuelled engines and the spirit-sapping drug trade. The Daoguang Emperor was so deeply in denial about the changes reshaping the world that his actions stirred rebellion among his own people. His forces were crushed by the superior firepower of an industrialised adversary, ushering in an era of western dominance that became known in China as the “century of humiliation”......read on- a deeply insightful essay   https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/17/america-china-energy-oil-renewables

L’Antiga Esquerra......The University of Barcelona: Neo-Romanesque Landmark is a quiet, residential neighbourhood, anchored along the Gran Via by the neo-Romanesque building of the University of Barcelona. Designed by architect Elies Rogent, the university’s historic building has become a landmark institution in the fields of science, technology, and innovation. Construction began in 1863, three years after the launch of the Cerdà Plan and the ceremonial laying of the first stone of the Eixample district. The building reflects the geometric character of L’Antiga Esquerra de l’Eixample, with its structured blocks and interior courtyards filled with greenery. The historic building of the University of Barcelona officially opened in 1871, more than two decades before its full completion. Around that time, numerous plant species were transplanted from the city’s old botanical garden to the new university gardens, where many of them still thrive today. The two existing ponds were added during a renovation in the 1930s, led by architect Josep Domènech.     https://www.tatacheers.com/travel/barcelona-beyond-gaudi-exploring-the-left-eixample/