Ditching Hinkley point in favour of less risky schemes could save Britain £1bn a year, according to a new analysis. The report by the Energy And Climate Intelligence Unit, also covered by theFinancial Times and BBC News, says as few as four big offshore wind farms could provide as much electricity as the 3.2 gigawatts expected from Hinkley, with additional gas-fired power and interconnectors with other countries also helping to fill the gap. A commentary by ECIU over onBusinessGreen argues that whatever the decision on Hinkley, it’s not essential for the UK: “Renewables, energy efficiency and demand side response can all negate the need for the £18bn nuclear project.” Responding to the ECIU report, the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, said that the UK needs “a diverse and reliable mix of energy sources including nuclear, renewable energy and gas”. The prime minister is to make a final decision next month on whether to build the power station.

New research in the US has found that biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel are worse for the environment that petrol, absorbing only 37% of the CO2 that is later released into the atmosphere when the plants are burnt. The study is the first to carefully examine the carbon on farmland where biofuels are grown, say the authors, confirming with hard data an issue that has been debated for many years. Biofuels currently make up just under 3% of global energy consumption. The study was also covered in The Hill.

Satellite images are helping scientists study how the water on the Earth’s surface has changed over the past 30 years. The BBC covers a new study in the journal Nature Climate Change, which found that 115,000 sq km of land is now covered in water and 173,000 sq km of water has now become land. The largest changes are occurring in the Tibetan Plateau, where melting glaciers are creating new lakes. Irrigation and dam-building are other reasons for the changes, say the authors. To the scientists surprise, coastlines have gained more land than they had been lost to water, reports the BBC. Dr Fedor Baart from the Deltares Research Institute in the Netherlands said, “We expected that the coast would start to retreat due to sea level rise, but the most surprising thing is that the coasts are growing all over the world.”

Brazil look set to become the world’s first major greenhouse gas emitter to formally approve the Paris Agreement on Monday, according to reports. Climate Observatory, a Brazilian NGO, said the government “has already begun to plan for the early implementation of its climate plan.” Reports yesterday suggested the US and China may be preparing to jointly announce their commitment to the deal on 2 September after meetings between senior officials, says Climate Home. Energy Live News looks at the Bahamas, the latest nation to ratify the climate change deal signed in Paris.

While scientists can now predict the UK’s winter weather with some accuracy, summer efforts are less advanced. A new study helps explain why, and it’s all down to the jet stream – a ribbon of strong westerly winds that blows across the Atlantic 10km high up in the atmosphere. Lead author Richard Hall explains how a jet lying to the north of the British Isles steers any rain-bearing, low-pressure systems northward towards Norway and away from Britain, resulting in the sort of warm dry weather for weeks on end like we experienced in 2013. But when the jet stream lies further to the south, those low-pressure systems tend to hit north-western Europe, bringing wet weather.

The University of East Anglia’s Dr Phil Williamson responds to an article in The Spectator in April by climate-skeptic columnist James Delingpole with a lengthy 10-point breakdown of its factual errors – one for every paragraph of the original article. Delingpole’s argument that ocean acidification is “fatally flawed” and a scare story grossly over-hyped by climate alarmists for political reasons misquotes scientists and ignores the wider literature, says Williamson: “Overall, Delingpole’s arguments are based on exaggeration, false dichotomy, deliberate selectivity and bravado assertion: almost everything that could be factually wrong, is wrong.” Williamson is an expert in terrestrial and marine ecology and has been the science coordinator of the UK Ocean Acidification research programme since 2010.

Whenever an extreme weather event occurs, the extent to which climate change has played a role often arises. A commentary article in Nature Climate Change by a group of leading attribution scientists challenges the oft-repeated line that it is not possible to make a definitive statement about climate change’s contribution to a specific event. The question is not one of causation, but one of how the chances of events similar to that one have been changed. “Scientists can now provide reliable answers to the question of whether anthropogenic climate change has altered the probability of occurrence of classes of individual extreme weather events,” say the authors. Understanding how the overall risks of extreme events are changing means looking at both the impacts of more heat in the climate system and how weather patterns are changing, the scientists say.

Substituting petroleum fuels with biofuels in the US may have led to a net increase in CO2 emissions, a new study says. The use of liquid biofuels in the US transport sector has expanded over the past decade in response to policies such as the Renewable Fuel Standard. Using an accounting method for carbon emissions, the researchers find that gains in CO2 uptake by feedstock, such as corn and soy, only offset around 37% of the emissions when the biofuel is burnt in car engines. The results show that biofuel use falls well short of being carbon neutral, the researchers say.

A warming climate will “very likely” see an increased risk of negative impacts from invasion by non-native plants in gardens in Europe, a new study suggests. Using species distribution models, researchers assessed the potential European ranges of hundreds of non-native plants under different scenarios of climate change. The numbers of these plants that would find a suitable climate in Europe increases by up to 102% because of increasing climate change, the study finds.

The Paris Agreement does not satisfy the provisions of UNFCCC Article 3.3, which calls for a precautionary approach to addressing the adverse effects of climate change, a new paper says. The study considers whether the Agreement constitutes an adequate precautionary response for dealing with climate impacts – including adaptation, loss and damage and finance. The interests of the poorest countries, communities and individuals and the most vulnerable, in particular, are inadequately served by the Paris Agreement, the paper concludes.