Electricity in Britain was coal-free for more than two full days, reports the Times, adding this was a first since the Victorian era. Windfarms and gas generated the majority of supplies during the period, the Times says, with wind accounting for a third of the total on Tuesday. The previous record 40-hour coal-free stretch was set last October, says Bloomberg. The news is also covered by the Press Association, the Daily Mail, City AM, the Hill and the Independent. The UK – with a 2025 pledge – is one of 10 EU countries planning to phase out coal by 2030, according to power station Drax, formerly the UK’s largest coal plant. Another seven EU states are already coal-free while 11 have no phaseout date, it says, citing campaign group Europe Beyond Coal. Carbon Brief is tracking the UK’s phaseout, with seven coal plants yet to announce closure dates. Separately, international bank HSBC has announced it will no longer finance coal power stations in any countries, the Financial Times reports.

The US senate has confirmed Jim Bridenstine to lead the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Hill reports, in a party-lines vote. Democrats opposed his nomination, it says, arguing that “doubting climate change science…ought to disqualify him”. NASA is one of the leading federal agencies responsible for studying climate change, the Hill notes. In his confirmation hearing, Bridenstine agreed that humans are the driving force behind climate change, reports Vox, adding: “but he would not agree with the assertion that human activity is the primary cause”. At the hearing, Bridenstine “walked back” his previous comments downplaying climate change, says PBS. The New York Times also covers the news.

Policymakers should be worrying about the long-run prospects of lower income countries in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, writes Arvind Subramanian, chief economic adviser to the government of India, in the Financial Times. These “late convergers” face three challenges to catching up with their richer counterparts, he says: climate change, automation and the backlash against globalisation. For example, climate change threatens to keep agriculture “vulnerable and locked in low productivity” in countries like India, Subramanian says, potentially depressing yields by 20-30%.

Most African countries do not emit much CO2, says an article in the Economist, “yet there are some notable exceptions”. It points to South Africa, where CO2 emissions are higher than Britain, despite having 10m fewer people and an economy one-eighth the size. “Like nearly all of its power plants, many of its vehicles depend on coal, which is used to make the country’s petrol.” It adds: “Other countries are following South Africa’s lead and embracing coal, the filthiest fuel. A dozen of them are building or planning new coal-fired power plants totalling 40GW [gigawatts], according to Coalswarm, a watchdog…Yet it is not all gloom…Many of Africa’s proposed coal plants, including the one planned for Lamu, may never get built.” It concludes: “Adaptation will remain Africa’s chief climate concern for the foreseeable future. But it is no longer the only one.”

“Predicting the effects of increasing CO2 levels on plant growth may actually be more complicated than anyone had expected,” writes Stuart Thompson for the Conversation, describing new research published in the journal Science. This explores how “C3” and “C4” plants perform under higher CO2 concentrations, finding that their relative performance confounded expectations over long time periods, compared to what had been expected from short-term studies. Thompson writes that the results “may hint that, as CO2 in the atmosphere increases, C4 tropical grasslands could perhaps absorb more carbon than expected, and forests, which are predominantly C3, might absorb less. But the exact picture is likely to depend on local conditions.” He adds: “What this means for food production may be more straightforward and less comforting than at first glance…Solutions that seem to be too good to be true generally are – and, for the moment, that still seems to be the case for the idea that CO2-enhanced crop yields will feed the world.”

Meeting the obligations of the Paris Agreement while making a more equitable contribution to global efforts would require net-zero energy-related CO2 emissions in the UK by 2045, say researchers at the UCL Energy Institute, responding to news – covered this week by Carbon Brief – that the government will seek official advice on Paris and UK targets. The team reprise the findings of their 2017 research, covered at the time by Carbon Brief, which showed the UK energy system would need to be zero carbon between 2045 and 2070 under a 2C target. They add: “Pursuing an even more ambitious 1.5C target (which we did not consider in our 2017 paper) would mean leaving the UK with a 30% lower carbon budget than our most stringent…case. Meeting this target would require truly heroic assumptions that may be difficult to envisage.”

Earth’s most severe climate changes occurred during global-scale snowball-Earth glaciations, which profoundly altered Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere. Extreme rates of sea-level rise are a fundamental prediction of the snowball Earth hypothesis, but supporting geologic evidence is lacking. A new study analyses wave ripples and tidal laminae in Australia to show that water depths of 9–16m remained nearly constant for 100yrs during 27 meters of sediment accumulation. This accumulation rate indicates an extraordinarily rapid rate of sea-level rise, of around 20 meters per century. Their results substantiate a fundamental prediction of snowball Earth models of rapid deglaciation during the early transition to a super-greenhouse climate.

Theory predicts and evidence shows that plant species that use the C4 photosynthetic pathway (called C4 species) are less responsive to elevated carbon dioxide than species that use only the C3 pathway (C3 species). However, a new paper in Science documents a reversal from this expected C3-C4 contrast. Over the first 12 years of a 20-year free-air CO2 enrichment experiment they found that biomass was markedly enhanced in C3 but not C4 plots, as expected. During the subsequent 8 years, however, the pattern reversed. These findings challenge the current C3-C4 CO2 paradigm and show that even the best-supported short-term drivers of plant response to global change might not predict long-term results.