There is widespread coverage of the unexpected news – first broken by Axios – that US oil giants Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Occidental Petroleum will now join the Oil & Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), an industry group set up in 2014 to address climate change. Bloomberg says: “The move brings Big Oil’s biggest names into a united front as climate activists and investors ratchet up the pressure on fossil-fuel providers…Major US producers had refused to join [the OGCI when it was first founded]. Thursday’s U-turn puts them at odds with US President Donald Trump…In 2015, the heads of the largest oil companies in Europe broke ranks with their American counterparts, calling on governments to agree on carbon pricing at a climate summit in Paris. Exxon and Chevron are now under new leadership, and have come closer to the views of their European competitors.” The three companies have now pledged $300m toward research into lowering climate-change pollution. The Financial Times says “the move is the latest sign of how pressure from the public and investors is forcing the industry to address the threat of global warming…The new arrivals mean OGCI members provide about 30 per cent of global oil and gas production.” Reutersalso describes the move as a “u-turn”, adding that “Exxon and Chevron differ from their rivals on several topics around climate, and in the past have refused to join a call by the European firms for a global price on carbon”. The Daily Telegraph says: “The decision marks a clear departure from Exxon Mobil’s long-held scepticism over climate change and the dangers of global warming.” Quartzzooms in on an otherwise-unnoticed detail: “It’s a shame…that even as US oil giants join the initiative, India’s Reliance Petroleum has quit the coalition. Reliance supplies a small fraction of the world’s oil (about 1.2m barrels per day in capacity, which is about 1% of global oil production). But its exit means the OGCI no longer has an Indian company among its ranks.” The Hill, BusinessGreen and Climate Home News also carry the story.

There is continuing coverage of the fallout from Hurricane Florence in the US and Typhoon Mangkhut in east Asia. InsideClimate News reports that “faced with Hurricane Florence’s powerful winds and record rainfall, North Carolina’s solar farms held up with only minimal damage while other parts of the electricity system failed, an outcome that solar advocates hope will help to steer the broader energy debate”. North Carolina has more solar power than any state other than California, much of it built in the two years since Hurricane Matthew hit the region. The Guardian has a feature headlined: “Beach rebuilding efforts won’t stave off climate change impacts forever: Supplemental sand may have saved a North Carolina beach from Hurricane Florence, but some say the projects aren’t worth it.” It adds: “Some scientists have begun to argue for a retreat from the shore, after relentless development, but are emphatically shot down, particularly after a disaster. On Wednesday, visiting the storm zone, Donald Trump was upbeat about recovery from the hurricane. But scientists are alarmed.” Vox has an article explaining Hurricane Florence’s “1,000 year rainfall”: “As the climate changes, these extreme events are occurring with increasing frequency…So terms like ‘500-year flood’ or ‘100-year storm’ are better understood as a shorthand for the scale of an event rather than its likelihood.” Meanwhile, Climate Home News reports that the UN has concluded that record evacuations cut Typhoon Mangkhut’s death toll. “We are seeing relatively low mortality because of the success of weather forecasting early-warning systems and better understanding, better public understanding, of disaster risk,” according to Denis McClean, chief of communications for the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.

The Guardian reports a new paper published in the Cryosphere journal which concludes that building walls on the seafloor may “become the next frontier of climate science’ as engineers seek novel ways to hold back the sea level rises predicted to result from global warming”. The newspaper continues: “By erecting barriers of rock and sand, researchers believe they could halt the slide of undersea glaciers as they disintegrate into the deep. It would be a drastic endeavour but could buy some time if climate change takes hold.” Michael Wolovick, a researcher at the department of geosciences at Princeton University, says: “We are imagining very simple structures, simply piles of gravel or sand on the ocean floor.” The Independent also covers the study: “The most effective intervention would ‘go beyond the scale’ of any engineering project humanity has previously attempted. But the scientists warned such a scheme could only compliment efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which they say remains the most effective way of combating climate change and its effects.”

The Economist carries a lengthy feature in its international section examining the links between climate change and tropical storms – and the resulting devastating impacts, particularly in developing countries: “The link with climate change comes from the accumulation in the atmosphere of greenhouse gases produced by the industrial burning of fossil fuels and by deforestation. They create an imbalance in the energy flowing in and out of the planet, driving temperatures up. About 90% of that additional energy ends up stored in the oceans. Researchers who monitor sea temperatures down to 2,000 metres have plotted a steady rise since the 1950s, reaching a record high last year. So far, 2018 is on course to set a new record.”

Reuters has published two features focused on Greenland. In the first, it travels to the Helheim glacier with David Holland, a New York University oceanographer, to record a calvings: “NASA researchers and Holland are focused on Greenland because it currently contributes more to sea level rise than the colder region of Antarctica — and because the research is so much harder in the Antarctic, with its punishing climate, massive scale and logistical challenges.” In the second feature, Reuters photographer Lucas Jackson heads to Greenland with a drone to “document climate change”. The Atlantic also features a gallery of Jackson’s photographs.

In a feature in the “i” newspaper, Tom Bawden speaks to Prof Ed Hawkins who is “on a mission to communicate the effect climate change is already having on our lives in the clearest possible way”. Hawkins, who is already well known for his “viral spiral” charts showing rising global temperatures, has now produced a series of “warming stripes”. The feature says that Hawkins has now “taken the five parts of Britain which have the most comprehensive and longest-running data on temperature and rainfall and turned them into these graphics for i going back to 1883”. In an additional comment, Bawden says the graphics “do a great job illustrating something that is becoming increasingly obvious – that climate change is already here and having a profound effect on our lives and weather”.

Marine Ice Sheet Instability (MISI) is a dynamic feedback that can cause an ice sheet to enter a runaway collapse. Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica, is projected to be the largest individual source of future sea level rise and may have already entered MISI. This study uses a suite ice–ocean simulations to explore whether targeted geoengineering could counter a collapse. Successful interventions occur when the floating ice shelf regrounds on the structure, increasing buttressing and reducing ice flux across the grounding line. The smallest design they consider is comparable in scale to existing civil engineering projects but only has a 30% success rate, while larger designs are more effective. While reducing emissions remains the short-term priority for minimizing the effects of climate change, in the long run humanity may need to develop contingency plans to deal with an ice sheet collapse.