Just a day after the President of Chile said his country could no longer hold this year’s main UN climate summit – and a month before the talks were due to begin – Spain has offered to host the event in Madrid, reports BBC News. On Wednesday, Chilean president Sebastián Piñera pulled Chile out of hosting COP25, saying his government needed “to prioritise re-establishing public order” after serious anti-government protests. Then, yesterday afternoon, the Spanish government said their acting prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, had offered to help Piñera “in any way that might be needed – including hosting the summit in Madrid”, reports the Guardian. In a statement, it added: “Spain believe that multilateral climate action is a priority for both the UN and the EU, and one which demands the highest commitment from all of us,“ notes the Guardian. Under this arrangement, Chile would continue to hold the rotating presidency of the climate talks, says the New York Times. UN Climate Change executive secretary Patricia Espinosa said she was hopeful the COP bureau – which is comprised of top climate diplomats from various countries and will make the final decision – could meet in Bonn in Germany and consider the solution “as soon as possible”, reports Climate Home News. Espinosa added: “It is encouraging to see countries working together in the spirit of multilateralism to address climate change, the biggest challenge facing this and future generations.” A source in the Spanish government tells Reuters that the arrangement “is nearly done, we have every chance of getting it”. A formal decision on hosting the summit in Madrid will be taken on Monday, the source says. Chile’s decision not to host the talks “prompted tears and frustration from a group of school-strike activists sailing across the Atlantic to attend the talks”, reports the Guardian. BusinessGreen also has the story.

A new report from the European Environment Agency (EEA) says the European Union (EU) is nearly on track to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, reports Reuters. The EU is currently on track to deliver a 30% reduction by 2030, the EEA says, but “significant increase in efforts (is) needed over the next decade” for the 40% target. The EEA adds that 10 out of 28 member states were on track to meet their short-term 2020 goals, and only three – Portugal, Sweden and Greece – were on track for the longer-term 2030 goals. Overall, the EU achieved a 2% cut in greenhouse gases last year, says BusinessGreen, bringing total reductions since 1990 to 23.2%. It adds: “The agency also warned slow progress on energy efficiency, decarbonising transport fuels, and upping the bloc’s share of renewable energy were also combining to put the 2030 target at risk.” Elsewhere, Reuters also reports that “emissions regulated by Europe’s carbon market fell by 4% in 2018”, according to the European Commission, “as renewable power generation increased”.

In an “exclusive”, the Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump administration is backing away from a plan to freeze targets for improving the fuel efficiency of vehicles until 2025. The paper says that, according to “people familiar with the process”, the administration “is now considering requiring a 1.5% annual increase in fleetwide fuel efficiency, using an industry measure that takes both gas mileage and emissions reductions into account”. The target “moves the number closer to the Obama-era rules calling for 5% gains”, the journal adds, but “still provides auto makers with significant relief”. The 1.5% target would be lower than the state of California’s planned increase of around 3.7%, says New York Times reporter Brad Plumer. Earlier this week, other major automakers announced they would side with the Trump administration in a related suit challenging changes to federal fuel economy standards, notes the Hill. A piece in the Washington Post says the decision “has fractured an industry that has long prided itself for speaking with a single voice in Washington”.

The UK’s countryside will be transformed by policies to combat climate change, the government’s former chief environment scientist says. Speaking to BBC News, Prof Sir Ian Boyd said climate policies will alter the landscape more than most people expect, with many more trees and hedges, but far fewer grazing animals as people eat less red meat. Boyd said: “What I see is a farming system that’s very inefficient and in need of very significant transformation…If we want to move towards net-zero in the UK, changing our approach to red meat consumption is an essential part of that.” The farmers’ union, the NFU, has rejected his analysis and forecast that there may be more grazing animals, not fewer, notes BBC News.

Coal-mining in Australia by the nation’s six biggest coal producers ultimately results in more greenhouse gas emissions each year than the country’s entire economy, reports the Guardian. Researchers from the University of New South Wales calculated the total emissions from the coal and gas produced by Australia’s top carbon companies, from extraction to the resources being burned for energy, mostly overseas. The Guardian adds that the researchers “found the top six coal producers – BHP Billiton, Glencore, Yancoal, Peabody, Anglo American and Whitehaven – were in 2018 linked to 551m tonnes of CO2 released into the atmosphere. Total emissions from all activity within Australia were 534m tonnes”.

Meanwhile, in the US, the New York Times reports that the Trump administration is expected to roll back an Obama-era regulation that was to limit the leaching of dangerous heavy metals like arsenic, lead and mercury from the ash produced by coal-fired power plants. According to two people familiar with the plans, new Environmental Protection Agency rules expected in November “will move to weaken the 2015 regulation by relaxing some of the requirements on power generators and also exempting a significant number of power plants from even those weakened requirements”, the NY Times says.

More than 9,000 barrels of oil have spilled from the Keystone pipeline in North Dakota, reports Reuters. The cause of the rupture has not yet been disclosed, Reuters notes, but “the initial estimate makes it one of the biggest onshore crude spills in the past decade and the largest for Keystone”. Axios adds: “The leak affected 22,500 square feet of land, including some wetlands. State authorities said the leak has been contained and that no sources of drinking water were contaminated.” This week’s leak was Keystone’s “second big one in two years”, says the Washington Post, adding that “many smaller spills have plagued the pipeline since it opened in 2010 to carry oil from Alberta to Texas”. The incident occurred along a part of the existing Keystone pipeline system, not the 1,179-mile addition known as the Keystone XL pipeline, says the Hill. The New York Times adds: “Keystone XL has been the subject of environmental protests for years. President Barack Obama denied it a permit in 2015, but just days after taking office President Trump cleared a path for its operator, TC Energy, formerly known as TransCanada, to proceed.” InsideClimate News also has the story.

Elsewhere, Reuters also reports on the “mystery oil slicks still moving down Brazil’s coast”. A “thick sludge of crude oil that has washed up along 2,500km of northeastern beaches for the last two months”, the article says. Yesterday, the Brazilian Navy sent more ships to try to prevent the pollution of unique coral reefs of the Abrolhos Archipelago marine park, Reuters adds.

The cover story of the international edition of the Economist, which is headlined “To the last drop”, looks at “Saudi Arabia’s strategy to survive the end of oil”. In a leader article, the Economist says the “oil industry may decline, but it won’t go quietly”. It notes: “Many oil firms still say that production will creep up over the next decade, to slightly above today’s level of 95m barrels per day (b/d), and then plateau. But output will need to drop to 45m-70m b/d by 2050 if the world is to stop temperatures rising more than 1.5-2C above their pre-industrial level.” Common sense suggests that “the highest-cost and dirtiest oil firms will tend to go out of business first”, says the Economist. “If so, an industry that has become gargantuan over 160 years will shrink to a core of producers that fulfil the world’s residual demand at the lowest financial and environmental cost.” This fits with the strategy and pitch to investors from the Saudi Arabian state oil company Aramco, says the article. “The firm spends just $3 to lift a barrel from beneath the desert, less than almost anyone else. The emissions from extracting Saudi oil are rock-bottom, too. Saudi Arabia has promised investors they will get steady dividends whatever the weather. Implicit in the kingdom’s approach is that, if and when oil demand falters, Aramco will be the producer of last resort.”

A Washington Post editorial comments on a new study, published earlier this week, which suggests that three times as many people are at risk from rising seas than previously thought. The study finds that “eight Asian nations — China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Japan — account for some 70% of the people living on at-risk land”, says the Post. The paper adds: “Millions already live behind protective dikes, levees and other flood-control systems; millions more will have to do so in the future — or surrender their cities. As the problem worsens, countries will probably be forced to do some of both.” And the US is not immune from these risks, the Post says: “The choices the US makes now will determine how safe the world is for generations to come. And, for the moment, the US is failing these future generations.”

“Central bankers, who oversee this world of uncertainty, cannot stick their heads in the sand” over climate change, says a Financial Times editorial. According to the FT, there are two schools of thought on how central banks can be green. “The first encourages policymakers to consider the financial risks thrown up by a warming planet,” the FT says, which could involve avoiding buying bonds in “brown” environmentally unfriendly assets. “The second, more radical, option advocated by environmentalists is for central banks to finance directly the transition to a low-carbon economy,” the FT continues, which could mean “buying corporate bonds directly from renewable energy companies”. The second option would “go beyond penalising brown assets for their climate-associated risks and mean subsidising green assets”. Discussing the ongoing debate around how the European Central Bank should respond to climate change, the FT says “without direction from democratically elected governments, central banks should limit themselves to screening out brown assets from bond purchases”. It concludes: “Tackling climate change will inevitably be controversial. Politicians, not technocrats, must find a solution.”

Writing in the New York Times, the climate scientist Prof Katharine Hayhoe ponders why “surveys in the US consistently show white evangelicals and white Catholics at the bottom of those Americans concerned about the changing climate?”. Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian, continues: “It turns out, it’s not where we go to church (or don’t) that determines our opinion on climate. It’s not even our religious affiliation…It’s because of the alliance between conservative theology and conservative politics that has been deliberately engineered and fostered over decades of increasingly divisive politics on issues of race, abortion and now climate change, to the point where the best predictor of whether we agree with the science is simply where we fall on the political spectrum.” In conversations with people who disagree on climate change, Hayhoe says she doesn’t “typically begin with science”. Instead, she “begin[s] by talking about what we share most. For some, this could be the well-being of our community; for others, our children; and for fellow Christians, it’s often our faith”. She concludes: “By beginning with what we share and then connecting the dots between that value and a changing climate, it becomes clear how caring about this planet and every living thing on it is not somehow antithetical to who we are as Christians, but rather central to it.”

Robust estimates of uncertainties are important to understand changes in surface temperatures. This study provides an estimate of the uncertainties in NOAA’s GlobalTemp version 5 product, which consists of sea surface temperatures from the Extended Reconstructed SST version 5 (ERSSTv5) and land surface air temperature (LSAT) from the Global Historical Climatology Network monthly version 4 (GHCNm v4). A 1000-member ensemble of surface temperature estimates is provided, and uncertainties are calculated both based on the adjustments made to temperature records and the approach used in constructing global average estimates. The resulting uncertainties are comparable to those estimated by other groups, such as Berkeley Earth and Hadley/UEA.

While numerous scientific datasets of the Arctic boreal zone confirm that this region is rapidly changing, the current observations is insufficient to understand many of the complex interactions between different components including the cryosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. A process‐based understanding is necessary for the development of mitigation and adaptation response strategies and the prediction of future change. This study reviews the strengths and limitations of the current observations from satellites, which have the unique advantage of spatial coverage as compared to observations collected from near‐surface instruments. They make recommendations for improving satellite observations and recommend an interdisciplinary approach to develop a comprehensive Arctic boreal zone observing network.