California’s biggest wildfire on record is expected to burn for the rest of the month, fire officials said yesterday. The “Mendocino Complex” fire has already engulfed more than 110,000 hectares – almost the size of Los Angeles – and only around a third of it is under control. The new record was set when two separate fires – the Ranch and River fires – combined, says the Financial Times. California is grappling with 18 large fires burning across the state, says the Hill, including the deadly Carr fire, which has claimed seven lives to date. (Vox has a map of the fires.) Forecasters said that the worst was yet to come with temperatures above 38C, gusting winds, tinder-dry conditions and no prospect of rain, reports the Times. The scale, rapid spread and timing of the fires has “dumbfounded experts”, says the Times, which also reports comments to the Los Angeles Times by deputy chief in the California fire service, who said the fire was “extremely fast, extremely aggressive, extremely dangerous. Look how big it got just in a matter of days . . . That doesn’t happen, that just doesn’t happen.” In a comment piece for the Guardian, three US climate scientists explain how the “likelihood of large, fast-moving, and dangerous wildfires will continue to increase in the coming decades” because of human-caused climate change. “It will combine with other demographic and ecological shifts to produce a large increase in the risk of megafires that threaten both human lives and the ecosystems we depend upon,” they write. (Carbon Brief has previously reported on the increasing risk of “megafires” as global temperatures rise.) According to Reuters, President Donald Trump “struck a more conciliatory tone over California’s raging wildfires” yesterday, saying he was in constant contact with officials. Trump previously blamed the blazes on the state’s environmental policies and inaccurately claimed that water that could be used to fight the fires was “foolishly being diverted into the Pacific Ocean.”, the New York Timesreported on Sunday. Scientists responded on Twitter, calling the comments ‘comedically ill-informed’ and ‘unmitigated crap’, reported Think Progress. Pacific Standard follows that up with a piece on “What Trump got wrong about California’s wildfire policies”. Meanwhile, California has also set a new record for the “world’s hottest rain”, reports Newsweek. On 24 July in Imperial, California, it was 48.3C when it rained. And USA Today reports that ocean temperatures set a new record high off San Diego last week. Elsewhere, Reuters reports that a huge fire in Portugal’s southern Algarve region moved south towards popular tourist towns on the coast. In response, the Portuguese government moved to take up operation of the emergency services battling the fire.

California officials plan to keep tightening state vehicle emissions rules despite a Trump administration proposal last week that would strip the state of the ability to set its own limits. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) proposes maintaining strict rules mandating rising fuel efficiency requirements annually through to 2025, while the Trump administration has proposed freezing federal vehicle emissions requirements at 2020 levels through to 2026. In a new report, the CARB argues that revoking the state’s authority to set its own emissions rules would be illegal, reports the Hill. “This is contrary to the facts and the law,” it says. As a first step, California plans to change its rules to declare that the federal government’s current, stricter emission targets are the only ones that comply with state law — and not any future targets that are less strict, reports the New York Times. Carbon Pulse also has the story. In other US news, the Guardianreports that Caribbean states and territories have rounded on the Trump administration for dismantling the US’s response to climate change, warning that greenhouse gas emissions must be sharply cut to avoid hurricanes and sea level rise threatening the future of their islands.

Planting more trees and preserving the ones we have would be a more effective way of combating climate change than using bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), a new study suggests. “If you want to avoid replacing agriculture crops with bioenergy crops, there is only so much land available – that’s why in these scenarios there was some deforestation for bioenergy crops, but we found that didn’t pay off in terms of carbon in the end,” Dr Anna Harper from the University of Exeter, who led the new study, told the Independent. While BECCS is effective in some areas, “protecting or regenerating forests is much more sensible”, the researchers say.

Europe’s prolonged hot, dry weather has caused the most severe problems to the EU vegetable sector in the last 40 years, according to the European Association of Fruit and Vegetable Processors (PROFEL). In a statement, PROFEL says “vegetables have continued to suffer and crop yields have fallen sharply”, with France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, Hungary and Poland particularly affected. Significant reductions in field yields are reported for peas and beans ranging from 20% up to 50%, PROFEL says, while the frozen and canned vegetable sector has seen reduced and irregular deliveries of fresh vegetables to processing factories, leading to increased production costs and fewer products processed.

Satellite imagery reveals that many coal-fired power projects that were halted by the Chinese government have quietly restarted, reports Climate Home News. Analysis by CoalSwarm estimates that around 47 gigawatts of new and restarted coal-fired power construction is visible based on satellite imagery. The coal-fired power plants are either generating power or will soon be operational. If all the plants reach completion they would increase China’s coal-fired power capacity by 4%.

“As most of the northern hemisphere endures a baking summer, it is hard to argue that the world is not hotting up,” writes assistant editor and leader writer Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph. “A succession of hot summers suggests a climate shift, as opposed to a one-off weather event.” “It tends to be those on the political Right who question the man-made global warming thesis nowadays,” says Johnston. “They see it as an attempt to undermine economic growth by the same anti-capitalist campaigners who found a new cause after the fall of the Soviet Union”. However, “there is a good Conservative case to be made for reducing our use of fossil fuels that doesn’t need to be motivated by fears of global warming”, he says. “Whatever our views of the science, surely no one wants to bequeath to future generations a polluted planet that is increasingly difficult to inhabit. While it is crucial that cause and effect are properly established – something most scientists insist has happened – it is equally important to acknowledge that it is actually a good thing to stop burning fossil fuels.” Johnston concludes that “we should see reducing carbon emissions as an invitation to innovate, boost economic growth and leave a cleaner planet to those who will inhabit it long after we have gone”.

A number of comment pieces react to the widely-covered “hothouse Earth” perspectives paper published yesterday. In the Guardian, Simon Lewis – professor global change science at University College London and University of Leeds – writes that “nobody knows” whether today’s civilisation could cope with 3C or 4C of warming. Society still “face[s] the same three choices in response to climate change”, Lewis says, but a lack of action means “we are heading for some mitigation, very little adaptation, and a lot of suffering”. The issue is that “solving climate change is about power, money, and political will”, argues Lewis. However, “thinking about climate change as a practical political problem helps avoid despair because we know that huge political changes have happened in the past and continue to do so”, he says: “The outline of this story is that given the colossal wealth and the scientific knowledge available today, we can solve many of the world’s pressing problems and all live well. Given that our environmental impacts are so long-lasting, the future is the politics we make today”. Striking a somewhat pessimistic tone, BusinessGreen editor James Murray says that the “visible, fever-inducing realities of climate change combined with the stalling of the Paris Agreement’s promise” prompted him to write a piece on “fear and loathing on the climate beat”. “I’m writing about the all-consuming fear that so many of the people who work on environmental issues share, albeit in snatched private conversations or sometimes, more coded still, in the universal language of a sigh, a shaked head, a raised eyebrow, a nervous laugh,” Murray writes. “It makes for difficult and depressing subject matter, but here we are.” Murray hikes through a forest of reasons not to be cheerful (“The data [on global emissions] is – and there is no way to sugar coat this – terrible”; “None of this would be quite so dispiriting if there was any real sense our political leaders had even the faintest grasp of the seriousness of the situation we find ourselves in.”; “And here’s the real kicker. It could get a lot, lot worse.”) and struggles to find any optimism at the other end. “Essays like this are meant to close on an uplifting note, to insist none of what went before is inevitable, that there is still time to avert a climate crisis and the related crises it would trigger,” Murray concludes. “Is such optimism justified? Well, sort of, and yet not quite.” Elsewhere, Akshat Rathi at Quartz looks at how publishing a study climate change during a hot summer is more likely to get people talking, and Krishnan Guru-Murthy at Channel 4 has a piece on whether governments can avert a “hothouse Earth”.

Afforestation and natural regeneration could be a more effective way of limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels than using bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), a study finds. A modelling study looking at how both “negative emissions” options could impact the amount of emissions from the land finds that, while BECCS could be effective at limiting warming to 2C, it would likely not be “effective” at keeping temperatures to 1.5C. This is because using BECCS to limit warming to 1.5C would require large amounts of land – including existing forest – to be converted to bioenergy plantations. This conversion would cause large carbon emissions to occur, which could turn the land to a net source of carbon, the researchers add.