As the UN climate talks continue in Bonn, Germany, this week, emerging nations pressed developed countries on Wednesday to step up cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 to kick-start the Paris climate agreement. The rich were wrongly focused on 2030 goals, they said. “We came here needing to hit the accelerator, not the brakes,” Brazil’s chief negotiator Antonio Marcondes told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference. Climate Home notes that China and India, as part of a developing countries group, requested that a discussion of the promises laid down by rich countries to meet before 2020 should be included in the negotiation agenda. Fiji presidency called for more consultation before deciding early next week. Meanwhile, the . Meanwhile African campaigners have called for the US to be kicked out of crucial international climate talks, reports the Independent. The Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) petition comes into response to US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull his country out of the Paris Agreement. Associated Presscompares the US at the climate talks to an unhappy dinner guest. “The United States has a delegation at international climate talks in Bonn that will be telling other nations what they should do on a treaty that the president wants no part of,” it notes. UK climate minister Claire Perry has confirmed she will be at the talks next week. “Next week, I will be at the COP23 conference in Germany, and it will be abundantly clear there that, if we want to truly make a difference to our climate as well as take advantage of the economic opportunities of our transition to a low carbon economy, it will come down to continued innovation,” she said, as she unveiled £84m in government funding to support robotics technology research and the development of smart energy systems., reports BusinessGreen. A Guardianarticle has gathered pictures of politicians and activists from the talks.

The UK’s biggest energy providers may see more mergers if the competition watchdog authorises SSE and Innogy SE’s plan for a new utility, Bloomberg reports. The £30bn market is still dominated by some of Europe’s biggest utilities, but their combined share of customers has been declining for years, with the latest threat the government’s plan to end what it calls “rip off” standard tariffs that still cover two-thirds of the market. Meanwhile SSE and Npower are facing a backlash over their plans to merge supply businesses, amid fears over the fate of almost 16,000 UK employees and potential disruption for seven million household customers, reports the Times.

There has been no significant reduction in the level of fossil fuel investment by UK local council pensions since the Paris climate deal was agreed two years ago, according to new research compiled by environmental groups 350.org, Platform, Energy Democracy Project and Friends of the Earth. The data shows councils currently have £16.1bn of their workers’ pensions invested in oil, gas and coal companies – 5.5% of their total investments. Environmental campaigners have criticised Scotland’s council pension funds after the research suggested that they had £1.8bn invested in fossil fuels, reports the Times.

Billionaire and UN special envoy on climate change Michael Bloomberg has announced a $50m (£38m) plan to expand a campaign to end coal-burning into Europe and then the rest of the world. The money will support grassroots campaigns, research on the health impacts of coal and legal action against coal plants that are breaking pollution rules. Bloomberg has funded a $164m campaign in the US since 2010, during which time more than half the nation’s coal-fired power plants have been closed.

The Irish government has been forced to intervene to prevent a county council from imposing an almost complete restriction on wind farms. Damien English, Ireland’s minister for local government, ordered Laois county council to amend its development plan after it tried to ban all new wind farms within 1.5km of houses, schools, community centres and public roads.

Live weather data is being recorded again at the top of Ben Nevis after a 113-year gap. Researchers have installed an automatic meteorological station on the UK’s highest peak which digitally collects information on temperatures, wind speeds and rainfall levels. The station replaces a Victorian observatory that was closed more than a century ago, the Times reports. The Sunday Post also has the story.

The UK government has appointed its next chief scientific advisor: Patrick Vallance, president of research and development at the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. Vallance, a clinical pharmacologist who previously led the medical division at University College London, will replace previous advisor Mark Walport in April 2018. Vallance will advise the prime minister and cabinet, as well as lead the Government Office for Science, which promotes the use of scientific evidence in policymaking across government.

Renewables combined with energy storage technologies could generate enough secure power to cover the world’s entire electricity demand by 2050 while proving cheaper than the current fossil-fuel dominated system, a new study says. The study, compiled by German non-profit Energy Watch Group and the Lappeenranta University of Technology in Finland, argues existing renewable electricity technologies can be used to meet the world’s power needs during every hour throughout the year. Energy Live News also has the story.

It is not fair to exclude higher income but climate-vulnerable countries from vital assistance when they are stuck by a cataclysmic disaster, writes Patricia Scotland, the Commonwealth secretary general and former Labour minister, following a trip to islands that bore the brunt of Hurricanes Irma and Maria. “What Hurricanes Irma and Maria demonstrated, with vicious clarity, is that a high-income country could be made destitute in a matter of hours,” she writes. “It’s heartening that, after tireless advocacy from the Commonwealth and other organisations, and leadership by the UK, these rules are going to be reviewed. My worry is that change will not happen quickly enough to meet the mammoth challenges facing the Caribbean and other regions that have been so grievously damaged by a season of climatic upheaval.”

“With Syria’s announcement it will join the Paris Agreement on climate change, the US now stands alone,” writes Owen Gaffney. Until Tuesday, it was one of the final two nations either rejecting or refusing to sign the UN agreement. With pariah state Syria now backing the UN pact to curb global warming, the US stands against the other 195 nations of the world.

Oil, gas and coal production have long been ignored in global climate talks, largely to avoid conflict between fossil fuel producing nations and the rest of the world, write Georgia Piggot and Peter Erickson, staff scientists at the Stockholm Environment Institute. “This silence can’t continue forever. Evidence shows that we need to slow the development of fossil fuel resources to meet the Agreement’s goals. It’s time for world leaders – through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – to admit the problem and work on the solution.”

On Sunday, several thousand people occupied a RW-run opencast coalmine an hour’s drive from the venue of this year’s UN climate talks in Bonn, writes Jonathan Watts from Hambach forest. The protestors surrounded the 10-storey high excavators before being ejected by police. Dozens of others have built treehouse camps in the neighbouring forest in an effort to prevent the lignite mine expanding any further. The mine is one of the biggest single sources of carbon on the continent, and also a “frontline for a growing band of environmental defenders who – believing it is better to break the law than the climate – are engaged in direct action campaigns against the fossil fuel industry” Germany’s emissions have not fallen since 2009, because its increased use of wind and solar power has mostly filled the void left by the decommissioning of nuclear reactors, writes Watts, while locally mined lignite coal remains one of the main sources of energy for the industrial heartland along the Rhine.

The journal Weather has a special issue this month on climate change. The five papers on the topic cover recent UK and global temperature variations, the use of scientific evidence in international climate negotiations, the impacts of different levels of warming, whether Arctic warming influences UK extreme weather, and how “natural” the natural disasters of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria were. The issue is “the result of a decision by the [Royal Meteorological] Society to enhance its activities on climate change whilst maintaining its core interest in weather”, the editors say.

A storm surge today causes fewer deaths than one of the same size in the past, a new study suggests. Compiling data on global storm surge events and loss of life since 1900, the researchers find that more than 8,000 people are killed and 1.5 million people are affected annually by storm surges. There is a consistent decrease in event mortality, the study finds, measured by the fraction of exposed people that are killed – for all regions except southeast Asia. “This indicates that risk reduction efforts have been successful,” the researchers conclude, “but need to be continued with projected climate change, increased rates of sea level rise and urbanisation in coastal zones”.

A two-year study of coral reefs in Bermuda suggests temperature is one of the main drivers of building rates of their corals. Using the findings regarding two massive corals, Porites astreoides and Diploria labyrinthiformis, the researchers then simulated potential future changes under different emissions scenarios. The results suggest that building rates could increase if drastic cuts to global CO2 emissions are made. The findings “highlight the potential benefits of rapid reductions in global anthropogenic CO2 emissions for 21st-century Bermuda coral reefs and the ecosystem services they provide,” the researchers conclude.