The Guardian has the exclusive that the BBC has apologised for a recent interview with Lord Lawson, the climate sceptic who runs the Global Warming Policy Foundation lobby group. It admitted it had breached its own editorial guidelines for allowing the former Conservative chancellor to incorrectly claim on the BBC Radio 4’s flagship news programme Today that global temperatures have not risen in the past decade. The interview in August was conducted by presenter Justin Webb, who failed to challenge Lawson. The Guardian explains: “The Today programme rejected initial complaints from listeners, arguing that Lawson’s stance was ‘reflected by the current US administration’ and that offering space to ‘dissenting voices’ was an important aspect of impartiality. However, some listeners escalated their complaint and, in a letter seen by the Guardian, the BBC’s executive complaints unit now accepts the interview breached its guidelines on accuracy and impartiality…It is not the first time the Today programme has been censured by the BBC complaints unit for an interview with Lawson. A broadcast in February 2014 was judged to have ‘given undue weight to Lord Lawson’s views, and had conveyed a misleading impression of the scientific evidence on the matter’.” The BBC, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail have all followed up on the Guardian’s story. Carbon Brief covered the story at the time of the interview with a lengthy factcheck pointing out all of Lawson’s falsehoods.

A public consultation into the planned third runway at Heathrow Airport has been reopened to include new evidence. The Department for Transport (DfT) published a series of new reports on the environmental impact of expanding the west London airport. The consultation initially closed in May, but will now be reopened until December. Among the series of new reports are an updated noise analysis and a new air quality plan. The Guardian says the government’s sustainability appraisal expects the plans to have a negative effect on air quality, noise and biodiversity. It also says that the Gatwick second runway scheme would cause less damage than either potential scheme at Heathrow. It adds: “This has left the government with the dilemma of either being framed as anti-business if it does not act to address capacity, or anti-environment if it goes ahead with expansion. This may also undermine efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% on 1990 levels by 2050, as legislated by the Climate Change Act.” The London Evening Standard carries the reaction of Cait Hewitt, deputy director of campaign group the Aviation Environment Federation, who says: “It’s difficult to see how this new information can avoid delaying the process, as MPs and the public will need time to understand how the new forecasts impact emissions, noise and the sustainability appraisal of the project.” The Times also covers the story. Last year, Carbon Brief published analysis showing that aviation’s greenhouse gas emissions could consume around half the 1.5C carbon budget available to the UK in 2050, even if the sector’s emissions growth is constrained.

The Trump administration’s reluctance to confront climate change threatens to create a massive burden on taxpayers, as a lack of planning by federal agencies leaves the government ill-equipped to deal with the fallout from rising temperatures, according to independent congressional investigators. The LA Times says the report released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) presents a “bleak picture in which the economic costs of climate change spiral ever further upward in the coming decades”. CNN highlights that the GAO report says the US government has spent more than $350bn over the past decade in response to extreme weather and fire events. The GAO estimates that the US will incur far higher costs as the years progress if global emission rates don’t go down. The Hill, Associated Press and the Independent are among the others carrying the story, which was first previewed in the New York Times on Monday.

The Washington Post says that the Trump administration “made history Tuesday in proposing that nearly 77m acres in the Gulf of Mexico be made available for companies wanting to purchase federal oil and gas leases — the largest offering ever in the US”. The Interior Department compared the targeted waters to “about the size of New Mexico” and said the first lease sales off Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida are scheduled for March next year. The Post adds that “this part of the Gulf was the scene of arguably the worst environmental disaster in US history”.

Arctic sea ice may be thinning faster than predicted because salty snow on the surface of the ice skews the accuracy of satellite measurements, a new study from the University of Calgary has found. The report from the Canadian university’s Cryosphere Climate Research Group published in the academic journal Geophysical Research Letters found satellite estimates for the thickness of seasonal sea ice have been overestimated by up to 25%. Separately, Reutersreports the findings of a report published by the Natural Resources Defense Council in the US. It found that nearly two-thirds of Americans, mostly in Western states and on the Eastern seaboard, have endured more days of extreme summer heat over the past 10 years than in previous decades.

The UK’s subsidy ban for new onshore wind farms could tack £1bn ($1.3bn) onto power bills over five years by eschewing one of the cheapest forms of clean energy, reports Bloomberg. It says: “Generating power from new onshore wind farms would be £100m a year cheaper than doing so from new nuclear reactors or biomass plants, and at least £30m cheaper than under the latest offshore wind-power contracts, according to research by the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, a London-based non-profit group.” BusinessGreen also carries the story, saying: “The thinktank is now calling for a policy rethink ahead of the findings of the energy costs review headed by Professor Dieter Helm, which is expected shortly. ECIU director Richard Black described the ongoing block on mainland onshore wind farms as ‘perverse’ given the UK’s windy weather and findings suggesting it is the cheapest form of new power generation around. ‘For a government committed to making energy cheaper, this risks not only locking people into higher bills, but also runs contrary to its aim of having the lowest energy costs in Europe.'” EnergyLiveNews also carries the story.

The world will be in deep trouble if it fails to tackle climate change and inequality, IMF managing director Christine Lagarde has warned. “If we don’t address these issues…we will be moving to a dark future” in 50 years, she told a major economic conference in the Saudi capital Riyadh on Tuesday. Lagarde said that “we will be toasted, roasted and grilled” if the world fails to take “critical decisions” on climate change.

Rolling Stone magazine runs an extract from Jeff Goodell’s new book, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World. Goodell visits Lagos in Nigeria: “Lagos is a delta city, built around a lagoon, much like Venice. Like most delta cities, it is flat and low-lying, with the majority of it built on land that is less than five feet above sea level. The city’s infrastructure, such as it is, is poorly designed to deal with flooding and storm surges. Beaches are washing away, the sheet-metal seawalls in the harbor are corroding like rusty tin cans…In the midst of all this, a new city is rising along the waterfront. It’s called Eko Atlantic, and when I visited in 2017, it was still a work in progress – basically a two-square-mile platform of new land that had been built in front of Victoria Island.” In the extract, he describes the new development’s vulnerabilities to rising sea levels.

A feature published by Bloomberg notes that “the world’s biggest oil companies are closing more clean energy deals as pressure to diversify their businesses mounts and growth accelerates among green technologies”. It adds: “Oil majors more than doubled the number of acquisitions, project investments and venture capital stakes, to 44 in 2016 from 21 the year before, according to research published by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. In the last 15 years, they’ve completed 428 transactions and spent $6.2bn building stakes in clean energy companies.” Other findings include that “interest in biofuels is on the decline”, yet “oil majors’ venture capital deals have been shifting toward power storage and digital technologies”.

The New York Times carries a news feature from Italy in which the reporter speaks to olive farmers about the impact of the changing climate which “is turning olive oil into an increasingly risky business — at least in the Mediterranean, the land of its birth”. The article quotes Nancy Harmon Jenkins, author of “Virgin Territory: Exploring the World of Olive Oil”, who says: “I hesitate to say this because I love the Mediterranean and I want people to have Mediterranean olive oil, but I think California is going to be more and more important in the years ahead and places like Australia and New Zealand.” Scientists with the World Weather Attribution program, a group dedicated to the study of extreme weather, concluded last month that the “the chances of seeing a summer as hot as 2017” in southern Europe had increased tenfold since the early 1900s.

Researchers have developed a new dataset of gross primary productivity – a measure of vegetation growth – for the entire globe. Using a combination of satellite and reanalysis data, researchers created the dataset at a 500m spatial scale and a 8-day time-step, covering the years 2000-16. “Accurate estimation of the gross primary production of terrestrial vegetation is vital for understanding the global carbon cycle and predicting future climate change.,” the authors note.

Volcanic eruptions triggered abrupt melting events on ancient ice sheets as the Earth emerged from the last ice age, a new study suggests. From Swedish lake sediments, the researchers identified periods of melt in the massive Fennoscandian ice sheet, which would have covered much of northern Europe. These events coincide with evidence from Greenland ice cores of past explosive and sulfur-rich volcanic activity between 13,000–12,000 years ago. The findings suggest that volcanic eruptions were likely responsible for these melting events by depositing dark ash on the bright ice surface, the researchers say, and imply the deposition of ash on ice surfaces could result in an increase in the contribution of ice sheet melt water to global sea level rise.

Heat stress in the three largest cities of Taiwan will either exceed or approach “danger levels” by the end of this century, a new study says. Researchers projected future “wet-bulb” temperature – a combined measure of temperature and humidity – for the Taiwanese cities of Taipei, Taichung, and Kaohsiung under the SRES A1B emissions scenario. They find that wet-bulb temperatures will be at, or close to, 31C in 50% of the days in July and August by 2075–2099 for all three cities. This would “necessitate adaptation and mitigation”, the researchers say, “and the huge impact of dangerous heat stress on public health merits urgent attention for Taiwan.”