Coverage continues of the news that Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has abandoned plans to set a new greenhouse gas emissions reduction target – following a revolt by his MPs. The Financial Times reports that the prime minister’s last-minute turnaround allowed him to “stave off a leadership challenge from disgruntled conservatives within his own party”. The abandoned energy policy – called the National Energy Guarantee – promised to cut Australia’s emissions by 26% from 2005 levels by 2030, the FT reports. Cutting emissions to this degree would be necessary for Australia to meet its obligations under the Paris Agreement. The New York Times reports that the proposed policy “was not wildly ambitious” and that, even if it did go ahead, “agriculture and other industries would still have to do more to meet the nation’s commitments under the [Paris] deal.” The New York Times reports that the decision has left climate and biological scientists in the country feeling “frustrated” and “increasingly worried”. “All it does is reconfirm that they have no interest in doing anything about climate change or the Great Barrier Reef really,” Jon Brodie, a coral reef scientist at James Cook University, told the newspaper. Climate Home News reports that former prime minister Tony Abbott, who played a pivotal role in the rebellion against Turnball, cited Donald Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Agreement in his argument against the energy policy. On Sunday, Abbott tweeted: “Emissions targets that made sense three years ago when all countries were supposed to be in Paris and we didn’t need policy change and wouldn’t face economic dislocation do not make sense now.” The Guardian has produced a three-minute video in response to the news, titled: “Australia’s climate wars: a decade of dithering”. The Hill also has the story.

The Guardian reports that the Trump administration is set to rollback Obama-era climate change rules regulating emissions from coal-fired power plants. The proposed replacement for the rules will “impose looser, state-based regulations” on coal and is likely to “escalate greenhouse gas emissions”, according to the Guardian. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is set to propose that individual states should decide how, or even if, they should cut CO2 emissions, the New York Times reports. However, “experts said it was unlikely that the new rule would reverse the decline of America’s coal industry,” the newspaper says, adding that competition from cheaper natural gas and renewable energy has been the key driver of recent coal plant closures. The Hill also has the story.

The Guardian reports on a review article looking at the influence of rising Arctic temperatures on summer weather in Europe, North America and parts of Asia. The review highlights how rising Arctic temperatures have slowed the jet stream and other global wind systems, which means weather systems are now more likely to get “stuck”. The authors of the article, published in Nature Communications, warned that the changes could drive “very extreme extremes”. For example, the weakening winds could allow abnormally high temperatures to linger for longer time periods – “turning sunny days into heatwaves” or, in the case of prolonged rainfall, “rains into floods”. Reuters reports that the stalling of weather patterns could threaten food production, according to the researchers. The Independent and Scientific American also have the story.

Press Association reports on a study finding that more than a third of fruit and vegetables are discarded before reaching supermarket shelves because they are “wonky” or “unattractive”. The climate change impact of growing the wasted food is equivalent to the carbon emissions of almost 400,000 cars, according to the researchers. BBC News, the Guardian and the i newspaper also have the story.

In the New York Times, opinion columnist Paul Krugman asks why there is so little opposition to President Donald Trump and his vision in the Republican party. “Why did the party’s belief in objective reality collapse so suddenly and completely?” he asks. “The Orwellification of the G.O.P. didn’t start with Trump,” he writes. “Fifteen years have passed since Senator James Inhofe suggested that global warming is ‘the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.'” Since then, “this paranoid fantasy has in effect become the official position of the G.O.P,” he continues. “In short, if you followed the evolution of the G.O.P.’s position on climate change (not that Republicans believe in evolution, either), you shouldn’t be surprised at the party’s intellectual and moral collapse under Trump. For Republicans, ignorance has been strength for a long time.”

In his Planet Oz blog, Graham Readfearn reacts to prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s decision to abandon the National Energy Guarantee, saying: “You can ask all those suffering worsening droughts, wildfires and rising sea levels whether they think things are going to get cheerier as the 1C of warming we’ve already had starts to feed back on to itself with the help of increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.” At the heart of the decision, Readfearn writes, “has been a denial of the science of climate change” by conservative politicians in Australia. He says: “That rejection by some right-wingers of a falsely perceived ‘leftist’ cause of climate change has fed the policy uncertainty. Too many politicians have stood by and allowed that denial to fester.” In a second Guardianopinion article, Erwin Jackson, a senior climate change and energy advisor with the not-for-profit Environment Victoria, writes that the pullback shows “what happens when ideology and idiocy take charge of energy policy”. “A note to our prime minister: you can’t have an energy policy that assumes that climate change does not exist,” Jackson writes. “By dumping the commitment to take emissions targets to the federal parliament the PM is signalling climate change is not real.”

A decline in emissions from land use change boosted the global terrestrial carbon sink between 1998 and 2012, new research shows. The linear trend in the “net carbon sink” was about three times larger during 1998-2012 than in 1980-98, the study says, yet this intensification “cannot be explained by CO2 fertilisation or climate change alone”. Using a “bookkeeping model”, the researchers identify that a drop in land use emissions was the principal cause, which in turn was due to both a decline in deforestation in the tropics and increased afforestation in northern temperate regions.

Locally rare species fared better than more abundant ones in California’s recent drought, a new study suggests. Researchers quantified the responses of 423 species of plants, arthropods, birds, reptiles and mammals to California’s drought of 2012–2015 — the driest period in the past 1,200 years for the region. The results suggest “that droughts indirectly promote the long-term persistence of rare species by stressing dominant species throughout the food web”, the authors conclude.

Court cases in favour of climate change regulation in the US tend to be won when the focus is renewable energy and energy efficiency, but lost on coal-fired power plants, a new study finds. Researchers constructed and analysed a database of all 873 US domestic climate lawsuits between 1990 and 2016, and conducted 78 in-depth interviews with litigants, involved scientists and advocates. The use of climate science and other science affects the outcomes of cases, the study suggests, as does “collaboration in specific types of coalitions”.