Some 200 gigawatts (GW) of new coal capacity is under construction in China despite the country’s efforts to tackle overcapacity in the sector, according to Greenpeace findings covered by Reuters. The environmental NGO says more than 1 trillion yuan ($150bn) could be “wasted” on a coal capacity surplus that could reach 400GW within five years. An economic slowdown and intensive investment in clean energy is exacerbating the coal glut, explains the Financial Times. Greenpeace sets out its findings on EnergyDesk. Meanwhile a China Dialogue expert roundtable discusses data suggesting China’s coal consumption is falling faster and its oil consumption rising more slowly than expected.

Every national leader in the world accepts climate science, according to a report by US environmental NGO the Sierra Club looking at the 195 countries recognised by the US State Department. If Donald Trump were elected president he would be out of step even with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, says the Guardian. The Sierra Club study is also covered by the Associated Press, Grist, the Hill, Climate Home and Climate Progress. MeanwhileGrist says Trump’s shortlist for vice presidential running mate “looks like him [and] sounds like him on climate”. The Republican policy platform describes coal as “clean” energy, reports Climate Progress. A conservative energy institute has backed Trump, saying he would unlock fossil fuels and unleash economic growth, reports the Hill. Separately, the Hill reports that Republican senators have voted down plans to spend federal dollars on an international climate change programme. Bernie Sanders has endorsed Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, saying she can lead the fight against climate change, according to Grist. Ahead of the US election, Americans’ views on climate is “sloshing more than surging”, says Andy Revkin in his Dot Earth blog.

India could meet its carbon reduction goals early says the country’s outgoing climate minister Prakash Javadekar, according to Climate Home, though he says that coal will “still be a mainstay”. Javadekar also says the Paris Agreement on climate change would not have been possible without India’s efforts to reach consensus.

The world will have to implement negative emissions technologies to remove 15 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year by 2100 if it is to avoid 2C of warming, according to new research covered by Climate Central. Simply cutting emissions will not be enough, the study finds, nor will reaching net zero emissions. Carbon Brief ran a series of explainers and articles on negative emissions earlier this year.

The Japanese nuclear industry remains in limbo after a court ruling upheld an order to keep two reactors closed, reports Reuters. Kansai Electric, which runs the Takahama power plant, must go to a higher court if it wants to bring the reactors back online. Only two out of Japan’s 42 operable reactors are running, Reuters says.

With David Cameron due to hand over the reins to Theresa May later today, BusinessGreen’s James Murray looks back at the prime minister’s green record. Murray concludes that despite overseeing “a period of real success for the green economy”, Cameron “ultimately…never used his bully pulpit to repeatedly make the case for the green economy he apparently believed in”. His promise to lead the “greenest government ever” was delivered on the steps of the Department of Energy and Climate Change, notes a Guardian editorial also looking back at David Cameron’s political legacy.

In contrast to the late Holocene, anthropogenic emissions of methane were substantially smaller in the early Holocene, making it more appropriate to study natural controls of the gas in the atmosphere. A study of methane variability from Siple Dome in Antarctica covering 11.6 to 7.7 thousand years before 1950 AD reveals each minimum in the record corresponds to cooling in Greenland. The authors hypothesise that this, in turn, forced the Intertropical Convergence Zone to migrate southward, reducing rainfall in northern tropical wetlands, altering the ratio of high latitude to tropical methane sources.

A new study investigating the role of individual pollutants in agriculture and food security finds that while anthropogenic emissions have decreased global agricultural yields by 9.5%, roughly 93% stems from non-CO2 emissions, including methane and halocarbons. Furthermore, the study projects that by the end of the century, strong CO2 mitigation could improve agricultural yields by ~3% while strong methane and hydrofluorocarbon mitigation could improve yields by ~16% and ~5%, respectively.

A new review examines the progress made in the last ten years towards better understanding the basic interaction of clouds and aerosols, and the impact on the climate. The authors identify where obstacles to progress still exist and where future research efforts should focus. The biggest of these include a lack of concurrent measurements of cloud dynamics, microphysics, and aerosols and the large variability within climate models.