The ban on the sale of new conventional diesel and petrol cars from 2040 “lacks sufficient ambition” and should be brought forward, a new report from MPs says. The joint report from four Commons committees warns that “there is insufficient urgency in current policies to accelerate vehicle fleet renewal”. The 2040 date is “too distant to produce a step-change in industry and local government planning” the report argues “and falls far behind similar commitments from other countries”. “The government’s latest plan does not present an effective response to the scale of the air quality catastrophe in the UK,” Neil Parish, chairman of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, told Reuters. The report urges the Treasury to take greater account of the costs of air pollution when setting tax and spend policy, notes the BBC. Meanwhile, Reuters also reports that Volkswagen has said that EU requirements on curbing emissions and other climate-related demands could hit VW’s profitability between 2018 and 2020.

A new study of a stretch of the North Atlantic have found new evidence that fresh water, likely melted from Greenland or Arctic sea ice, may already be altering a key process that helps drives the global circulation of the oceans. In chilly waters on either side of Greenland, the ocean circulation “overturns,” as surface waters traveling northward become colder and more dense and eventually sink, traveling back southward toward Antarctica at extreme depths. But the Nature Climate Change paper finds that following particularly warm summers in the remote Irminger Sea, this convection tended to be more impaired in winter. “Until now, models have predicted something for the future…but it was something that seemed very distant,” lead author Marilena Oltmanns told the Post. “But now we saw with these observations that there is actually freshwater and that it is already affecting convection, and it delays convection quite a lot in some years,” she said. Ars Technica and the New Scientist also cover the research.

One of the UK’s largest power storage projects is moving ahead on a former municipal depot site in Swindon after receiving planning approval. Public Power Solutions (PPS), a wholly-owned company of Swindon Borough Council, secured consent for the project, which will have capacity of 50MW – the largest that a power project approved by local authorities can be. PPS said that with planning approval confirmed it was now in discussions with developers seeking front of the meter battery storage opportunities to take on the funding and construction of the project, reports BusinessGreen. The project is designed to have a 30-year lifespan and will offer a long term land rental income for the council, notes Energy Live News.

A “red team-blue team” climate science debate championed by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Scott Pruitt might be replaced by an alternative plan, says E&E News. Despite reports that the idea had been killed off by the White House, Pruitt told Bloomberg yesterday that “it’s very important that I think the American people have a transparent, objective discussion about this issue”, adding that “the vehicle by which we achieve that is something yet to be determined”. When White House aides put the brakes on Pruitt’s plan, they also suggested an alternative, according to someone in the meeting. Plan B is to “Take public comments on petitions asking EPA to revisit the Obama administration’s endangerment finding, the agency’s underlying authority to regulate greenhouse gases in cars, power plants and other sources,” says E&E News. That would allow EPA to determine “where the arguments are supporting and rejecting the science,” said the person at the meeting.

Turbines in two of the UK’s offshore wind farms are in need of repairs after they started eroding within a few years of being installed. Owners of the 175-turbine London Array wind farm off Kent and the 108-turbine West of Duddon Sands wind farm off Cumbria have applied to the Marine Management Organisation for permission to carry out “performance upgrades”. Both use a type of turbine made by Siemens Gamesa, which which says the leading edge of the blades is wearing much faster than expected on some of the machines. The company identified the problem in 2014 and all machines installed since have had extra protection. Meanwhile, the Times also reports that scientists in China have developed a solar panel that can also generate electricity from rain.

Reaction continues to President Trump’s decision to sack Rex Tillerson as US Secretary of State. Axois energy reporter Ben Geman looks at what the ramifications could be for US policy on climate change. Tillerson leaving means the “disappearance of the more moderate voices” in the White House, yet he was also on the “losing end of the fight to keep President Trump from saying he would withdraw from the Paris accord”. A point also made by Michael H. Fuchs, the former deputy assistant secretary of state for east Asian and Pacific affairs, writing in the Guardian. Writing in the New York Times, Paul Pillar, who served 28 years at the CIA before becoming a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, notes that Tillerson’s replacement-in-waiting, Mike Pompeo, has described the Paris Agreement as a “costly burden”. This “is another echo of Mr. Trump’s inclinations and an indication that as secretary of state he will oppose any renewed steps toward keeping the planet habitable”, Pillar says. Reuters rounds up quotes from US environmental groups on the switch from Tillerson to Pompeo. “We’ve gone from Exxon’s CEO to the Koch Brothers’ most loyal lapdog,” said May Boeve, executive director for climate activist group 350.org. “In this position, [Pompeo] could prove to be dangerous to our national security and the safety of our planet,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. Another Reuters report looks at how US officials “remain active participants in international efforts to both research and fight climate change” despite the scepticism of many in the Trump administration.

In a feature article, New York Times correspondent Nicholas Casey and Times photographer Josh Haner travelled 2,200 miles off the coast of Chile to see how rising sea levels are eroding Easter Island’s coasts. “Many of the moai statues and nearly all of the ahu, the platforms that in many cases also serve as tombs for the dead, ring the island,” the reporters say, putting them at risk from coastal erosion. “You feel an impotency in this, to not be able to protect the bones of your own ancestors,” says Camilo Rapu, the head of Ma’u Henua, the indigenous organisation that controls the national park that covers most of the island, and its archaeological sites. “It hurts immensely.”

“Weather patterns that generate extreme warm Arctic days are now occurring in combination with a warming climate, which makes extremes more likely and more severe,” writes Prof Cecilia Bitz, professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, in the New York Times. The warming and loss of sea ice “is posing major threats to coastal communities and wildlife in the Arctic,” she says. “The extremely warm Arctic days occurred at about the same time as an atmospheric pattern known as sudden stratospheric warming (SSW)”, Bitz notes, which triggered the “Beast from the East” that swept across Europe. “We don’t know yet whether the SSW pattern drove warming in the Arctic this year and whether climate change influenced this weather pattern,” says Bitz, but “more research is needed to understand events this winter because the conditions were so unusual”. Coincidentally, the Daily Express also covers recent wintry conditions in Europe, reporting on a blog from climate sceptic Paul Homewood. He argues that “there is certainly no justification in playing the global warming card” in connection with the recent cold and snowy weather in the UK. Carbon Brief published a detailed explainer on the record temperatures in the Arctic, the Beast from the East and the potential links to a changing climate.

Deutsche Welle carries an interview with Dr Friederike Otto, the deputy director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, on how scientists can reduce their own carbon footprints. One of the key areas Otto picks out is how energy intensive it is to run large supercomputers for climate modelling. “We need a lot of them to understand the uncertainties,” she says, “but there could be a greater effort to make the most of the simulations that have already been done, instead of making new ones all the time”. To lead by example, research institutions could also do more by encouraging studies that use these existing simulations, she says: “To really make a difference, I don’t think that research is the most important source of carbon to tackle. But of course we need zero carbon emissions so it would be a good sign”.

A shutdown of ocean convection in the subpolar North Atlantic, triggered by enhanced melting over Greenland, is a potential transition point into a fundamentally different climate regime. A new study finds that warm and fresh summers, characterized by increased sea surface temperatures, freshwater concentrations and melting, are accompanied by reduced heat and buoyancy losses in winter, which entail a longer persistence of the freshwater near the surface and contribute to delaying convection. By shortening the time span for the convective freshwater export, the identified seasonal dynamics introduce a potentially critical threshold that is crossed when substantial amounts of freshwater from one summer are carried over into the next and accumulate. They estimate that in the winter 2010–2011, after the warmest and freshest Irminger Sea summer on our record, ~40% of the surface freshwater was retained.

Coral reefs feed millions of people worldwide, provide coastal protection and generate billions of dollars annually in tourism revenue. Ocean acidification poses a chronic threat to coral reefs by lowering the concentration of carbonate ions required to maintain the carbonate reef. Reduced calcification, coupled with increased bioerosion and dissolution, may drive reefs into a state of net loss this century. A new study uses an in situ carbon dioxide enrichment experiment to quantify the net calcification response of a coral reef flat to acidification. They present an estimate of community-scale calcification sensitivity to ocean acidification that is the first to be based on a controlled experiment in the natural environment. The estimate provides evidence that near-future reductions in the aragonite saturation state will compromise the ecosystem function of coral reefs.