The news that Shell will suspend drilling in the Chukchi Sea has been welcomed by environmentalists. “The people of Seattle stood up to oppose the use of our city as a base for expanded Arctic drilling,” said the mayor of Seattle in a statement. “With today’s announcement, it is time to move forward.” Publicly Shell has blamed high operating costs, disappointing exploratory results and strict regulations, but company sources also accept that Arctic oil polarised debate in a way that damaged the firm, says the The Guardian. Questions of psychology and morale are now crucial: if Shell is bailing out other companies might get cold feet as well, writes the New York Times, speaking to economists in Alaska. Shell’s original position on the Arctic was important, writes Kamal Ahmed for the BBC, and given that it will cost Shell £2.6bn to execute the withdrawal, Monday’s announcement comes as a surprise. According to the Financial Times the pullout will fuel the ‘stranded assets’ debate – the argument made by some campaigners that those who invest in new exploration could end up being unable to use what they find, as governments crack down on fossil fuel pollution. The decision comes just 10 weeks before nearly 200 countries are due to strike a global climate change accord in Paris. The Telegraph, Grist and Reuters also carried the story.

En route to Washington DC, Francis sought to play down the notion that he was a leftwing pope. During his historic six-day trip, however, the pope’s words – accompanied by powerful symbolic gestures – are likely to have boosted liberal Catholics and disappointed conservatives. Religion correspondent Harriet Sherwood recaps pope’s stance on climate change and other key themes.

An influential climate change group led by Prince Charles, whose members include Coca-Cola Enterprises, Johnson & Johnson and Kingfisher, has called on governments to end fossil fuel subsidies, ahead of the UN climate summit taking place in Paris in December. he world’s richest countries and fastest-emerging economies subsidised fossil fuels by between $160bn and $200bn in the four years through to 2014, the OECD reported earlier this month.

It’s not just diesel. A new investigation showing higher-than-expected carbon dioxide emissions from petrol-powered as well as diesel-powered cars is raising pressure on EU governments to examine whether a broader range of vehicles was also equipped with the cheating software that Volkswagen admitted to installing in its diesel vehicles, says Politico. It now appears that the real-world carbon dioxide emissions performance of new cars, including those that use petrol, is significantly poorer than in highly artificial laboratory settings. The widening probe has the potential to cause serious trouble for the bloc’s emissions reduction targets.

The UK’s £5.8bn ($8.8bn) pledge to help poor nations cope with climate change falls short of the country’s fair share of the burden, campaigners have said. Analysis suggests France and Germany will be giving about twice as much in 2020 – and other aid budgets may lose out so the UK can pay its climate debt. France has said it will boost its climate finance donations to €5 billion per year from 2020. The rich world has promised to contribute $100bn each year by 2020 to help developing countries cope with climate change. “The UK is playing its part”, said the energy and climate change secretary Amber Rudd. The Financial Times also has the story.

Rising water temperatures off the coast of Antarctica, brought about by global climate change, could be pitting the delicate marine ecosystem against an unexpected threat: an invasion of shell-crushing crabs. The study published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that conditions are ripe for an invasion of king crabs on the continental shelf off the western Antarctic peninsula. For millions of years they’ve been unable to venture too close to the Antarctic land mass because conditions there are too cold for them.

A new study looking back over 1,000 years finds the flooding risk along the New York and New Jersey coasts increased greatly after industrialisation, and major storms that once might have occurred every 500 years could soon happen every 25 years or so. “As sea level rise accelerates into the future, we are going to have more frequent flooding”, said Benjamin Horton, one of the lead researchers.The research has been released a month before the third anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, which devastated the coasts of New York and New Jersey. The Washington Post and Carbon Brief also have the story.

British climate campaigns need a dose of diversity – the absence of people of colour on panels is impossible to ignore, writes Suzanne Dhaliwal of the UK Tar Sands Network. Elsewhere the international climate movement is a dynamic, multicultural, multi-class and intergenerational force. When UK green NGOs “wake up to what it means to work in solidarity and side by side with communities”, they will be welcome to join this vibrant movement, she says.

The FT congratulates China on its “co-operative stance” on climate change: “China is demonstrating leadership at a time when the climate agenda has lacked champions willing to take political risks. Beijing’s initiative adds momentum to the discussions ahead of the international climate conference in Paris at the end of the year. Its engagement should help to avoid a re-run of the fiasco that overtook the last climate meeting in Copenhagen in 2009.”

Clean energy or wildlife? The picture is complicated over turbines and seabirds, says Natural History writer Patrick Barkham. It is a shock to learn that up to 12 times more gannets could be killed by wind turbines than current figures suggest because GPS devices show that their average altitude puts them on a collision course with turbines. But this threat to our biggest native seabird shouldn’t mean a resort to more destructive technology – the government’s eagerness to frack, for instance, could imperil the biggest mainland colony of gannets at Bempton Cliffs, East Yorkshire. We could just use less of it, he writes.

Emphasising the social benefits of acting in an environmentally-friendly way can motivate people to take action on climate change, regardless of their existing beliefs, suggests a new study. Using survey data for over 6,000 people in 24 countries, the researchers found that economic development and a more benevolent community were as strong a motivator for action as believing climate change is important. The findings contrast with other studies that suggest action is prevented by ideology or relies on personal experience of climate change, the researchers say.

Despite uncertainty in the exact location of future rainfall shifts, climate models consistently project that large rainfall changes will occur for a considerable proportion of tropical land over this century, a new study says. The area of semi-arid land affected by large changes under a high emissions scenario is likely to be greater than during even the most extreme regional wet or dry periods of the twentieth century, such as the Sahel drought of the late 1960s to 1990s, the researchers say. Their results suggest substantial rainfall changes will occur by mid-century – earlier than previously expected – and then intensify in line with global temperature rise.

The tropical Pacific Ocean could experience more extreme high and low sea levels by the end of the century, a new study finds. Using climate models, the researchers show that El-Niño-related wind changes could cause faster year-to-year sea level extremes by 2100. For coastal communities, more frequent high sea levels could increase the risk of flooding, while prolonged drops in sea level leave shallow reefs exposed to air, a known stress on coral growth, the researchers say.