New research suggests that rising sea levels – caused by global warming – “significantly increase the threat of giant killer waves”, the Sun reports. The new Science Advances study modelled the impact of tsunamis based on sea level increases, and discovered rising sea levels allowed tsunamis to reach much further inland, significantly increasing the risk of flood. “Our research shows that sea-level rise can significantly increase the tsunami hazard, which means that smaller tsunamis in the future can have the same adverse impacts as big tsunamis would today,” said Robert Weiss, a professor of geosciences at Virginia Tech. The MailOnline‘s coverage of the study notes that “a sea-level rise of a mere 12 inches (30cm) vastly increases the likelihood of the devastating natural disasters”. The MailOnline also report the researchers warning that this could “lead to the death of thousands of people in the most vulnerable parts of the world”. The Daily Express also has the story.

Scientists this month recorded the all-time highest seawater temperature off San Diego since daily measurements began in 1916, the MailOnline reports. The news comes as a new study finds the number of “marine heat waves” roughly doubled between 1982 and 2016. “This trend will only further accelerate with global warming,” said Thomas Frolicher, a climate scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, who led the research. The MailOnline coverage also includes an info box, republished from a Conversation piece earlier this year, titled “What are marine heatwaves and what do we know about them?”. The Guardian, Nature News and Carbon Brief also cover the new study.

A federal judge in Montana has ordered the US State Department to do a full environmental review of a revised route for the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline, Reuters reports. In his ruling, the judge said the State Department was obligated to “analyse new information relevant to the environmental impacts of its decision” to issue a permit for the pipeline last year. The move that could delay the project and prove a setback for the Trump administration, Reuters adds. Meanwhile, a group of young climate advocates who sued the state of Washington to force it to reduce greenhouse gas emissions lost their case on Tuesday, Inside Climate News reports. The judge urged the youth advocates to pursue their cause through other channels, writing that the issues at the heart of the case are political and should be considered by the state’s legislative and executive branches, not settled by its courts.

“This blistering summer, during which we sweltered for weeks on end, reminded many of the great heatwave of 1976,” writes Michael Howard, who served as the leader of the UK’s Conservative Party 2003 to 2005 and held cabinet positions in the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, including as environment secretary. “But there is a significant difference: this year’s heat has not been limited to the United Kingdom.” Howard points to other incidences around the world, such as forest fires in the Arctic Circle, arguing: “It is hard to escape the conclusion that something unusual is disturbing our weather.” Although “we should not rush to assume it is man-made climate change”, he says, “common sense demands that we ask the question”, and “what does that imply for our future?” Howard notes that thirty years ago next month, Thatcher gave a speech to scientists of the Royal Society, where she said there was danger that “we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself”. He adds: “Since 1992, there has been a backlash against the notion that climate is affected in any way by human activity. I believe that the extent of this backlash is often exaggerated: a few prominent commentators in this country are sceptical, but they have not shaken the public consensus… It’s certainly hard to argue with such a mass of evidence.” He concludes that: “This summer has shown that Margaret Thatcher was correct. We are conducting an experiment with the atmosphere and it is a dangerous one. It is only right that we permit the experiment to proceed no further, by eliminating greenhouse gas emissions as soon as we can.”

“Even – or especially – among those who agree human-caused global warming is happening, the footnote has been the understanding that no individual weather event or catastrophe is caused by the overall temperature rise. Until this summer in the Northern Hemisphere,” reads an editorial from California’s daily newspaper the Orange Country Register. “[T]o answer many Californians’ understandable question, climate change is contributing to the unprecedented wildfire seasons we are seeing this year and last. Global warming is without a doubt a culprit in the suddenly year-round fire danger we face throughout our state.” Meanwhile, Buzzfeed News looks at “how a booming population and climate change made California’s wildfires worse than ever”. And in the UK, the Daily Express asks whether climate change is to blame for the California fires. Carbon Brief published a factcheck earlier this month on how global warming has increased US wildfires.

“It has become clear that Project Fear – the scare-mongering campaign carried out by those who want to remain in the EU – is alive and well,” writes Iain Duncan Smith in the Daily Telegraph. Among other “advantages”, he argues that outside the EU, and “unencumbered by EU rules”, the UK could decide how to reform emissions trading, and wider climate change policy. “Abolition of the damaging carbon price floor mechanism would be a good way to start. Such a policy could release more than £1bn in costs, including millions to help domestic users of electricity, tired of seeing their bills rise.” As Carbon Brief set out in a 2016 factcheck, the carbon floor price is a UK policy to top-up its carbon tax. Carbon Brief also covered national carbon price floors in its piece on the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) last year.

Germany is likely to fall short of its goals for reducing harmful CO2 even after spending over €500bn by 2025 to overhaul its energy system, a data-based feature in Bloomberg notes. The feature looks at how the shortfall in Germany is “an ominous signal” for other nations struggling to reach their own targets. “Germany was the first major economy to make a big shift in its energy mix toward low-carbon sources.”

Half a metre or a metre of sea level rise (SLR) would be enough to double or quadruple the risk of tsunami-induced flooding in the coastal city of Macau in the South China Sea, new research says. The authors developed probabilistic tsunami inundation maps for Macau and ran “an extensive Monte Carlo tsunami inundation simulation” under current sea levels as well as 0.5 metre and 1.0 metre of SLR. The findings indicate that “conservative amounts of SLR of 0.5 m (by 2060) and 1 m (by 2100) would dramatically increase the frequency of tsunami-induced flooding incidences by a factor of 1.2 to 2.4 and 1.5 to 4.7, respectively”.

The Zika virus could “expand north and into longer seasons” in the Americas as a result of changing global and regional temperatures, a new study suggests. Previously, the relationship between Zika transmission and temperature has been assumed to be similar to the dengue virus, the researchers say, “potentially limiting our ability to accurately predict the spread of Zika”. Conducting experiments with the Aedes aegypti mosquito and different temperatures, the study finds that Zika transmission was optimal at 29C, and had a thermal range of 22.7C–34.7C.

The average water use per well for hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the US has increased by 770% between 2011 and 2016, a new study says. The researchers assessed water usage and wastes during the transition from a period of rapid growth in fracking to limited production due to low natural gas and oil prices. The water-use intensity – water use per unit of energy produced – “increased ubiquitously in all US shale basins”, the study says, which “implies that future unconventional oil and gas operations will require larger volumes of water for hydraulic fracturing, which will result in larger produced oil and gas wastewater volumes”.