Envoys from US, EU, Russia and South Africa reject a “bold claim” from the Mail on Sunday that one piece of research in June 2015 shaped the flagship UN climate agreement and “duped” world leaders into “investing billions”. “No single paper had a significant role in shaping the outcome of the conference”, said Norway’s climate and environment minister Vidar Helgesen, while an EU negotiator said that they “did not recall any discussion” of the NOAA paper during talks. “Before we negotiated a single word in Paris, 188 countries had put forward pledges for the meeting,” said Andrew Light, a senior member of the US State Department’s negotiating team in 2015. He continued: “You’re gonna tell me what got all of them to go through those discussions was based on one NOAA study?” There are signs that Republican US lawmakers will use the story to bolster their calls for NOAA to be defunded and the US to pull out of its international climate commitments, Climate Home notes. Ars Technica takes a look at the supposed “whistleblower” and speaks to Thomas Peterson, a co-author of the original paper, who provides extra clarifying context to the claims. The article also criticises the Republican politician trying to exploit the claims: “Rather than engage with the science behind this paper, Rep. Lamar Smith has, without any evidence, accused the NOAA scientists of doctoring their results to exaggerate recent warming”, Ars Technica writes. ClimateFeedback has published the views of various scientists who say the “sensational” claims are “unsupported”. The editor-in-chief of Science, the journal which published the original study, has emailed responses to both Roz Pidcock, Carbon Brief’s science editor, and Andy Revkin pointing out that the claims have already been investigated by NOAA are are “without substantial merit”. Elsewhere other publications such as EnergyDesk continued to report on “glaring gaps” in the Mail on Sunday’s piece, such as that their graph failed to account for the agencies’ different baselines. Carbon Brief published a factcheck of the article by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather on Sunday. Other publications to cover the claims include Desmog UK, the Hill, Grist and Bad Astronomy. Judith Curry, the retired climate sceptic scientist and blogger who first promoted the claims, has posted a response to the many rebuttals saying that “we can look forward to more revelations”.

Extreme weather linked to climate change has caused nearly £3.5bn worth of damage at 57 cricket clubs, warns a report by the Climate Coalition. Rain stopping play was a worsening problem, the report found, with downpours causing a significant loss of fixtures. Sowerby Bridge in Yorkshire and Appleby Eden in Cumbria, that were hit by the storms in December 2015, have yet to return to their grounds, while Corbridge Cricket Club in Northumberland had to have its clubhouse demolished due to flooding. The BBC, BusinessGreen, Press Association and the Guardian also cover the story.

Almost 450 former employees of the US Environmental Protection Agency have urged Congress to reject Trump’s nominee to lead the agency, Scott Pruitt, while current employees sent the same message during a rally in Chicago. “Mr Pruitt’s record raises serious questions about whose interests he has served to date and whether he agrees with the longstanding tenets of U.S. environmental law”, the former employees argued in a letter. They were also concerned about his views on the federal government’s role in environmental regulation and his opinion on the science behind climate change, the Hill reports. Senate Democrats have also questioned Pruitt’s qualifications, having twice boycotted the committee vote to advance his nomination. Inside Climate News and Climate Progress also have the story.

Climate change is already wrecking some of Britain’s most significant historic and natural sites, with erosion eating away at the chalk cliffs of England’s south coast, and flooding damaging Wordsworth’s garden in Cumbria, a new report has found. Warmer temperatures are seeing salmon vanishing from famous rivers and birds no longer visiting important wetlands. “Climate change often seems like a distant existential threat [but] this report shows it is already impacting upon some of our most treasured and special places around the UK”, said Professor Piers Forster of Leeds University.

As climate change makes hot days more common the US grid could be unable to meet peak energy demands by the end of the century, researchers warned yesterday. The report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences also found that the cost to upgrade the electrical grid so it could cope may be on the order of $180 billion. “Some areas, particularly in the southern United States, will experience substantial increases in the ‘peakiness’ of electricity demand, whereas others, such as the Northwest, may actually see decreases in average and peak loads as a result of climate change”, the researchers said.

Beijing plans to ramp up its fight against smog by cutting coal use a further 30% across the capital, according the official Xinhua news agency. Beijing’s mayor said that “extraordinary” measures would slash coal use in the city to less than seven million tonnes, building on a trend that has seen coal use fall sharply from around 22 million tonnes in 2013. This will require the shuttering of some coal plants, BusinessGreen reports, and the city authorities also said that they would take 300,000 older vehicles off the road. The announcement is a fresh blow to the coal industry, which has already seen China’s slowing economy, coupled with investment in renewables and energy efficiency, causing China’s coal demand to peak far earlier than anticipated. While last week analysis by Carbon Tracker and the Grantham Institute found the fossil fuels could peak by 2020, Carbon Brief reports. Scientific American also has the story.

Motorists are shunning diesel-fuelled cars in favour of cars that are more eco-friendly, according to new industry figures. Sales of diesel cars were down 4.3% in January, compared to the same month last year, while sales of electric cars and other alternatively-fuelled vehicles jumped by 19.9%, gaining a 4.2% market share. BusinessGreen and Energy Live News also carry the story.

The Guardian’s energy correspondent Adam Vaughan pays a visit to the National Grid’s chief control centre in Berkshire to find out how it keeps gloomy forecasts of blackouts at bay. Sources of the UK’s power are changing fast as we switch to renewables, and the grid says that the switch does not make its job harder – just different. Nick Easton, one of the grid’s power system managers, says that the answer to the challenge of balancing supply and demand is to persuade big industrial and commercial energy users to shift their power consumption to times of the day when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.

US president Donald Trump has been setting about dismantling Obama’s climate initiatives while Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull suggests building new coal-fired power stations. These attacks on climate action are the latest in a “toxic, partisan political war that has engulfed US and Australian climate policy over several decades”, argue climate change academics Michael Mann and Christopher Wright. “Sound policy has been held hostage by the same vested interests of a large and powerful fossil fuel sector and a traditional vision that jobs and economic growth can only come from the “extractivism” that has defined 19th and 20th century economics”, they say, concluding that: “We must shift away from a culture of politically motivated climate change denialism to an acceptance of the truly existential threat now facing humanity”.

Dismayed by the Trump administration’s apparent disdain for evidence on climate change and other issues, many scientists “are now undergoing a political awakening, contemplating what their role should be for at least the next few years”, the New York Times writes, in a feature exploring the political conversations happening in the US scientific community. A committee that tries to get more scientists and engineers to run for office has seen a surge of interest, while other researchers have organised demonstrations, and hundreds have participated in ‘data rescue’ events to archive environmental data from government websites. “The idea that [scientists] should be above the fray has been slowly unraveling as researchers realise that their own aloofness may largely be to blame for public disregard for the evidence on issues like climate change or vaccine safety. And in the era of Trump, some say it could finally come completely apart”, the New York Times says.

Current energy grids in the United States may not be able to cope with future peak electricity demand as a result of growing number of very hot days, a new study says. Using regional electricity use data and daily temperatures, researchers modelled the impact of climate change on electricity consumption in the US. Some regions like the southern United States could experience an increased number of spikes in electricity use as demand for cooling increases, the researchers find.

A new study provides further evidence that many tree species are limited in their capacity to track climate warming. Researchers tracked shifts in the northern limits of 16 temperate tree species in Quebec, Canada, between 1970–1978 and 2000–2012. They find that the pace of northward shift was, on average, less than half the speed required to keep pace with climate change.

A new study assesses how the views of policymakers involved in climate change negotiations are affected when presented with climate data. Researchers ran tests with 217 policymakers at the Paris climate talks in 2015 (half of whom were negotiators); they showed participants different statistical summaries of global temperature projections. They found that policymakers tended to stick closely to their prior beliefs, but were more persuaded by plots that showed individual climate models rather than just the ensemble range.