One story has dominated the UK media over the holiday period: the flooding that is afflicting large parts of the north and west of the country. The government and the Environment Agency have both come under criticism for, respectively, a lack of funding and planning, and a misdirected sense of priorities. Yesterday, the BBC reported David Cameron, under pressure following days of criticism, announced an extra £40m to bolster flood defences in Yorkshire. The Times says it “has been derided as too little too late. The government pledge is in addition to £50m already promised to help the wider region, but Labour said it was a “short-term fix” and “sticking plaster”. “The government has been woefully complacent about the flood risk, ignoring warnings from its own experts,” Kerry McCarthy, Labour’s Environment, Food and Rural Affairs spokeswoman, said in a statement reported by Reuters. Days earlier, Lisa Nandy, Labour’s shadow climate minister, speaking to the Independent, said climate change and flooding should be treated as a national security threat. The Economist highlighted the anger felt in the north, as expressed in the local press and on social media. The Observer splashed yesterday with the revelation found in leaked documents submitted to ministers in November showing “how Tory cuts are wrecking UK flood defences”. David Shukman, the BBC’s science editor, commented that the floods had “unleashed unprecedented criticism”, noting that “officials say we have entered an era of ‘unknown extremes’ of weather and they want a ‘complete rethink’ of how flooding is handled.” A separate BBC Newsanalysis article asked, “What have we done to make the flooding worse?” Later this week, ministers and Environment Agency officials are expected to face questions in the Commons, reports theTelegraph: “Environment Agency bosses are braced for a grilling from MPs over their handling of the floods crisis, after it was claimed that chief executive Sir James Bevan was personally involved in drafting a statement masking Sir Philip Dilley’s holiday in Barbados.” Meanwhile, New Scientisthas asked Hannah Cloke, a flood expert at the University of Reading, how the UK might better protect itself: “We could raise houses and infrastructure such as electricity substations and transport links on stilts, so they’re above the floodplain,” says Cloke. “It would be like living in Waterworld.”

On New Year’s Eve, the Met Office published provisional data showing that – as the BBC reported it – “long-standing weather records have been smashed by a stormy, yet warm December”. It added: “Scotland, Wales and the north-west of England all had the wettest December in more than a century. A UK mean temperature of 8C (46F) broke records too and would have felt more like a day in April or May.” The Met Office website has published all the details. The Economist wrote about the UK’s “barmy weather”. However, other parts of the world have also experienced some extraordinary weather. For example, the Telegraph said that North Pole temperatures had briefly spiked “above freezing”. In the US, “record flooding” had hit the Midwest and threatened the South, reported Scientific American. And the BBC reported that “Nasa has warned that the effects of the current El Nino weather phenomenon could be as bad as those of 1998, the strongest on record”.

There has been much media debate and analysis about whether the UK’s extreme weather throughout December can in any way be attributed to climate change. This was stoked further by remarks made by various politicians. In a prominent article that set the media’s tone, the Daily Mailreported on 28 December: “Ministers were accused yesterday of trying to use climate change as an ‘excuse’ for the failure to protect dozens of communities from the floods. David Cameron admitted that flood defences had not been sufficient, but suggested that the greater frequency of ‘extreme weather events’ was to blame. And Liz Truss, the environment secretary, said the floods had been so severe because the rainfall had been ‘unprecedented’. Last night Labour MP Simon Danczuk, whose Rochdale constituency has been badly affected by the floods, accused ministers of trying to ‘hide behind’ the issue of climate change – when the real problem was spending cuts.” Such remarks led to a flood of articles examining the links between climate change and the extreme weather. Buzzfeed reported that a “group of top scientists has said that there is a direct link”. It quoted Prof Myles Allan, a climatic physicist from the University of Oxford: “The weather has changed, and we have changed it.” Steve Connor, the Independent’s science editor, explained “why the recent devastating floods will become the new normal”. Clive Cookson, the Financial Times’sscience editor, reported that “man-made warming blamed for exceptional weather conditions”. TheGuardian said that the UK floods and extreme global weather were “linked to El Niño and climate change”. The Manchester Evening News spoke to Prof Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research who said the extreme events will “increase in frequency and severity” if we don’t “curb our use of fossil fuels”. The Met Office posted a blog by Prof Dame Julia Slingo, its chief scientist, who said: “From basic physical understanding of weather systems it is entirely plausible that climate change has exacerbated what has been a period of very wet and stormy weather arising from natural variability.” New Scientist spoke to Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University, who has previously shown that the rapid warming in the Arctic is making the jet stream more wavy. “It’s safe to say we’re in uncharted territory,” she said. TheWashington Post reported that “record flooding in the UK is just the latest symptom of both El Nino and climate change”. Justin Gillis in the New York Times looked at the “climate chaos, across the map”. He also quoted Prof Myles Allen: “As scientists, it’s a little humbling that we’ve kind of been saying this for 20 years now, and it’s not until people notice daffodils coming out in December that they start to say, ‘Maybe they’re right’.” Time magazine looked at “Why We’ll Keep Having Weird Weather in 2016”. Meanwhile, the Daily Express chose to ignore climate scientists and instead seek the views of Benny Peiser, a UK-based climate sceptic lobbyist and former sports science lecturer, who said: “This is nothing to do with climate change, it is simply an excuse.”

Britain’s biggest carbon polluters stand to lose billions of pounds from tough new climate targets and must come clean with their shareholders about the financial crisis that lies ahead, the country’s biggest pension funds have warned. The Paris deal has huge implications for pensioners, who have billions of pounds invested in “carbon-intensive” companies. “Business as usual is not an option for very carbon-intensive companies,” said Stephanie Maier, the head of responsible strategy and research at Aviva, the insurance giant that manages £267bn of investments.

An £11bn project to install more than 50 million smart electricity and gas meters in homes is a “ghastly mess” that will not work, according to a leading figure in the energy sector. Alex Henney has written to Amber Rudd, the energy secretary, warning that the rollout, due to start this year, is a disaster in the making. Mr Henney, a former director of London Electricity, wrote: “At worst the system will not work, as per the NHS patient records system; at best it will suffer from extensive errors and glitches and will be regarded as an expensive waste of money. The only beneficiaries will be the meter manufacturers.” The Times has also published an accompanying editorial on smart meters.

Dong Energy, the biggest operator of offshore windfarms in Britain, has said it plans to spend a further £6bn in the UK by 2020, convinced that the government is serious about supporting wind power. Vattenfall, another significant UK windfarm operator, says it too is “optimistic” about 2016 and is hoping to proceed with a turbine testing site off Scotland this summer. The statements of intent are, according to the Guardian, a “major boost” to Amber Rudd, the secretary of state for energy and climate change.

The Telegraph was typical of a number of right-leaning papers which used the floods to attack foreign aid spending on climate change projects abroad. In an editorial, it said: “Most leading politicians in Britain now accept that global warming is happening and that we need to adapt to a changing climate. Whether they are correct in this analysis is no longer relevant, since policy is being set around the world as though the argument over the causes has been settled…It does not follow that exceptionally heavy rain is caused by climate change, even though it might be…British ministers believe there is a connection…If it is now accepted that Britain is being affected directly by climate change, why should British taxpayers continue to pay for flood defences abroad when the money is needed here?” Similarly, Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express said “absurd foreign aid needs to be spent at home on flood-hit Britons”.

Many columnists and commentators focused on the flooding. Damian Carrington, the Guardian’s environment editor, led the way saying that “Cameron’s new review [into the flooding must] deliver a comprehensive and fully funded strategy to combat the UK’s most serious threat from global warming”. In the Telegraph, Gaia Vince wrote that “after this deluge, we must face a new reality”. George Monbiot in the Guardian said that “this flood was not only foretold – it was publicly subsidised”. The Independent ran a number of comment pieces ranging from Ellie Mae O’Hagan’s personal account of being trapped in her home through to Geoffrey Lean’s story of the Yorkshire town that had successfully “worked with nature to stay dry”. The Independent also ran a comment piece by Ben Chu with the headline: “The floods have revealed the imbecility of Osborne’s economic strategy.” Meanwhile, the climate sceptic columnists also had their moment. In the Times today, Matt Ridley’s weekly column has the headline: “Don’t blame climate change for these floods.” And the Sun earlier commissioned a column by “climate change sceptic” James Delingpole in which he blamed the flooding not on climate change but on the “Brussels bureaucrats who, driven by lunatic green ideology, have made illegal the measures that might have prevented flooding”.

A number of newspapers devoted their editorials to the question of government cuts to the budget for flood defences. The Independent said: “If nothing else, these floods remind us that there is so much more to be done here and abroad to protect the planet’s fragile stability, and to plan for the climate change that may already be irreversible.” The Guardian’s editorial said: “Climate change and inadequate preparation – a government that does far less than what it would take – ensure that the floods will become a painfully regular future of British life.” The Observer’s editorial also hit out at the budget cuts: “The water pouring into defenceless homes and businesses symbolises the disastrous effects of George Osborne’s economic ideology.” The Sun’s editorial said the focus should not be on climate change, but on increased dredging of rivers.

The Lex column in the FT says that the “Paris agreement adds but another heavy nail into King Coal’s already well-hammered coffin”. It adds: “The other nails have come as much from technology as the hostile regulatory climate; what has really hurt Peabody and its peers has been proximity to cheap US shale gas, which is also a cleaner fuel. As well as a tightening regulatory noose, coal will remain vulnerable to nearly every technological advance in energy. Cheaper solar panels, improved energy storage and efficiency, smarter grids: all undermine the case for burning it.”

Combining the rewetting of drained peatlands with growing biomass – a practice known as paludiculture – has been proposed as a way to restore the carbon-storing properties of peatlands without sacrificing agricultural land. Researchers have worked out the annual carbon flux from rewetted and harvested soils would be 0.03 kg per square metre, compared to 0.68 kg per square metre for drained soils – an indication that paludiculture could work if managed correctly.

A team of researchers say that while there are extensive programmes worldwide to monitor changes in carbon dioxide – the “control knob” for surface temperatures – there is still a need for accurate characterisation of long term changes in water vapour, the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. A long term balloon-based measurement programme covering the entire globe and lasting hundreds of years is required, they argue.

A new study suggests a need to exercise caution when interpreting the drivers of differences in the distribution of tree species across the world. Changes observed worldwide recently may have less to do with climate change and more to do with the different environmental requirements of tree life stages, say the authors of the Carpathian mountain study, from saplings through to adulthood.