Golf courses washed into the sea and a doubling of the number of rain-affected cricket matches are among the trends picked up in an alarming report on how climate change is disrupting British sport, reports Paul Hayward, chief sports writer at the Daily Telegraph. The report, compiled by the Climate Coalition and Priestley International Centre for Climate, finds 27% of England’s home one-day Cricket internationals since 2000 were played with reduced overs on account of rain. Rainfall cost the England and Wales Cricket Board £1m in emergency grants in 2016 and £1.6m last year, notes the Times TheHerald Scotland reports that climate change is “threatening the very future of golf in its homeland”, courses are being battered by extreme weather. Wetter winters and coastal erosion are placing them under a “very real threat”, the report said. Meanwhile football pitches too waterlogged for play, the Financial Times reports. Local clubs lose five weeks each season on average due to bad weather and waterlogged pitches, while more than a third have lost two to three months of games. BBC Sport also covers the report, warning that Open Championship venues such as St Andrews and Royal Troon could be under water by the end of the century if sea levels rise even slightly as a result of climate change. “Climate change is already impacting our ability to play and watch the sports we love,” said the report. The report was also covered in the MailOnline, the Guardian, Reuters and BusinessGreen.

The University of Edinburgh is dumping all its fossil fuel investments, the Guardian reports. The move makes it the largest UK university endowment fund set to be completely free of all coal, oil and gas holdings. The decision was announced on Monday and followed a long student campaign. The university’s £1bn endowment fund is the third largest in the UK, behind Cambridge and Oxford. Prof Charlie Jeffery, senior vice-principal at the University of Edinburgh, said: “I’m very proud of the university’s decision. Climate change is one of the world’s biggest challenges. Over the past few years, we have thought hard about how to respond to that challenge. This change in our investment strategy is a vital step on that journey.” The story was also covered by CNBC and Holyrood. SOAS University of London has separately announced it will fully divested from fossil fuels within three years, fulfilling a pledge made in March 2015, reports BusinessGreen. Meanwhile 13 US universities have banded together to form a coalition and write a roadmap for university-level action on climate change, Grist reports.

President Donald Trump has targeted a number of Obama-era policies on climate change in his first year, with one notable exception, writes Justin Worland in Time Magazine. The Trump Administration has hesitated to throw out the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, a deal reached in 2016 to phase out a pollutant found in air conditioners that is a factor in climate change. An Administration official declined to say Monday whether Trump would send the Kigali amendment to the Senate for ratification. “The deal enjoys support from an unusual alliance of manufacturers, conservative groups and environmentalists who argue that the deal supports US jobs while also helping address climate change.” Carbon Brief has previously written about why the Kigali amendment matters.

Flares of methane occurring between Norway and the North Pole have likely been happening for the last 8,000 years, according to a new study. The cause for the release of methane in the Arctic region was previously believed to be warming ocean water. But Study author Professor Klaus Wallmann said: “Our investigations show that uplift of the sea floor in this region, caused by the melting of the ice masses since the end of the last ice age, is probably the reason for the dissolution of methane hydrate.” But the scientists warned that problems created by man-made climate change are still present within the region.

The majority of Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2016 came from transport, according to new government figures. Emissions in the sector rose 2%, according to the figures released yesterday from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). Transport now accounts for 26% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, compared to 25% coming from energy supplies. The data shows missions of carbon dioxide fell 6% from 2015 to 2016, with the reductions mostly due to a lower use of coal for electricity, the Times reports. Emissions from homes were up 4% compared to 2015, while emissions from energy supply fell 17%. The performance puts the UK comfortably on track to meet the legally binding second carbon budget period, says BusinessGreen. However, concerns remain as to how the UK will meet its fourth and fifth carbon budgets. In January, the UK’s official climate watchdog, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) responded to the government’s Clean Growth Plan, noting the UK will miss its legally binding climate goals without more ambitious policies. Carbon Brief covered the CCC’s report in-depth.

“Climate myths are often contradictory… but they all seem to share one thing in common: logical fallacies and reasoning errors,” writes environmental scientist Dana Nuccitelli in the Guardian. A new paper published in Environmental Research Letters examining 42 common climate myths found every one demonstrates fallacious reasoning. The new paper published today suggests an more proactive approach to defeating myths and suggests a six-step critical thinking process to evaluate whether climate-related claims are valid. The authors suggest this critical thinking process can be deployed via social media through ‘technocognition,’ and in the classroom. Lead author John Cook said: “Our critical thinking process is a useful tool that scientists, educators, and communicators can employ to identify fallacies in misinformation, which they can use to create inoculating messages that neutralise the myths.” The authors have also made a “video abstract” for the paper where they outline an example of their approach. Peter Ellerton, a co-author of the paper, has also written an article for the Conversation on the research.

“Harassment is no stranger to the reporters, researchers and policymakers who work on climate change, but it is particularly severe for the women in those fields,” writes Jeremy Deaton in a piece published late last week. “[R]esearch into public understanding of climate change reveals an important link between sexism and climate denial — support for the existing social hierarchy… Research shows that men who value hierarchy are more likely to downplay the risks of climate change and more likely to hold sexist views.” Deaton is clear to note that this is not to say that every sexist denies climate change or that every climate denier is sexist. “It is merely to say that men with hierarchical leanings are inclined toward both sexism and climate denial, and this fits with a shameful pattern of men hurling sexist insults at women who work on climate change.”

“It’s official,” writes David Stevenson, Adventurous Investor columnist at the Financial Times. “Last year was the worst ever for financial losses from catastrophic natural events.” With climate change having some impact on extreme weather events, “the message beginning to be recognised by corporations is that climate change is starting to have a direct material cost on their balance sheets”, he writes. “And it is definitely bad news for reinsurers…. At what point must increasing reinsurance rates hit a barrier of sheer affordability? Surely, then, the real cost of climate change will become obvious.” While this is a potentially alarming scenario, investors can play a proactive role by backing renewable energy infrastructure projects, Stevensen argues. “The good news is that the choice of funds in this area has massively increased in the past few years.”

Climate change could damage the nesting success of many grassland bird species, a new study says. Using statistical modelling, researchers estimated how a future increase in temperature and rainfall extremes could affect the breeding success of a dozen grassland bird species from North America. They find that extreme cold and hot temperatures in the spring were associated with lower rates of nesting success. However, populations living in large grassland patches faired better in the simulations than those living in smaller areas. The researchers conclude: “While the exact cause is not clear, large grassland patches, the most common metric of grassland conservation, appears to moderate the consequences of weather on grassland bird demography and could be an effective component of climate change adaptation.”

Those who aren’t concerned about climate change may be showing “selective inattention” to the topic, a new study claims. In an experiment, scientists asked members of the public to identify climate-related and neutral words within a rapid stream of words and images. They report that those who consider themselves to have a high level of “climate concern” also have high visual attention scores for climate related words. However, a person’s political orientation could also play a role, the researchers say.