The proportion of the UK’s power generation mix made up by fossil fuels has fallen to a record low after renewable energy became the UK’s largest source of electricity, reports the Guardian. It continues: “Government figures showed the UK relied on renewables, such as wind and solar, for 38.9% of its electricity in the third quarter of this year, up from one-third in the same period in 2018.” This means renewables edged out gas-fired power (38.8%) for those three months, says the Press Association. Overall, low-carbon sources of electricity “reached new highs of 57.3% of the mix, despite lower output from nuclear reactors, as a result of strong levels of generation from technology such as wind”, PA adds. The statistics, from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), also reveal that coal generated just 1% of power over the period, says the Independent. Business secretary Andrea Leadsom has tweeted that she is “delighted” with the trends, reports BusinessGreen. Back in October, Carbon Brief estimates – using BEIS Energy Trends data and other sources – suggested that the output from renewables in the third quarter had marginally exceeded that of all fossil fuels. BusinessGreen notes that the confirmed data now show that “the combined generation of coal, oil and gas just outstripped renewables”.

“Net-zero looks set to be embedded deep into the [UK] government’s legislative agenda over the next five years as ministers respond to increasing public pressure to tackle the climate crisis,” says BusinessGreen. Reporting on the policies laid out in the first Queen’s speech of the new Conservative majority government, the outlet says “the Queen reaffirmed the government’s commitment to delivering the UK’s 2050 net-zero target and to co-hosting next year’s UN climate change summit in Glasgow alongside Italy”. The accompanying document to the speech also included a target to “increase our ambition on offshore wind to 40GW [gigawatts] by 2030 and enable new floating turbines”, says another BusinessGreen article. (Carbon Brief has a Q&A on floating offshore windfarms.) The previous target was for 30GW of offshore wind by 2030. Elsewhere in the document, the government confirms it will press ahead with manifesto promises including an £800m investment in carbon capture and storage projects, and a £9.2bn investment in energy efficiency programmes, BusinessGreen adds. However, the government also plans to introduce a new air-traffic management bill that will “modernise” Britain’s airspace to remove barriers that “limit the number of flights the airspace can safely accommodate”, reports the Independent. The government says the bill’s primary purpose is to “maintain the UK’s position as a world-leader in aviation, ensuring that regulations keep pace with new technology to support sustainable growth in a sector which directly provides 230,000 jobs and contributes at least £22bn to the UK economy every year”, the Indy notes.

Meanwhile, the government has also confirmed that environment minister Zac Goldsmith will be offered a place in the House of Lords, allowing him to continue in his role despite losing his Richmond seat in last week’s election, reports a third BusinessGreen article. DeSmog UK and WalesOnline report that Monmouth MP David TC Davies has been made a minister in the Wales Office and an assistant government whip. Davies has “previously claimed that it is ‘not proven’ that CO2 is responsible for what he describes as a ‘relatively small’ amount of global warming since the industrial revolution”, says DeSmog. And, finally, the Times reports that an academic whose research has been championed by Dominic Cummings – chief special adviser to prime minister Boris Johnson – has suggested that the government should use the “great challenge” of climate change to recalibrate the UK’s economy and revitalise the north and Midlands. Speaking to the paper, Richard Jones – professor of physics at Sheffield University – said the government should rethink its approach to nuclear power and potentially back small-scale nuclear reactors to generate electricity.

Australian prime minister Scott Morrison issued a “rare public apology” yesterday and cut short a holiday in Hawaii in response to mounting public anger after two volunteer firefighters were killed battling bushfires sweeping the country’s east coast, reports Reuters. The death of the two firefighters brought the toll since the start of October to eight and prompted a statement from Morrison saying: “I deeply regret any offence caused to any of the many Australians affected by the terrible bushfires by my taking leave with family at this time.“ Reuters adds: “Morrison’s conservative Liberal-National coalition government has been under sustained pressure to defend its climate change policies as it has downplayed links to the unprecedented early arrival and severity of this year’s bushfire season.” A group of protestors at the prime minister’s official residence – including a 10-year-old girl whose family lost their home in the fires – were threatened with arrest yesterday, says the Daily Telegraph. A state of emergency was declared in New South Wales yesterday because of the “catastrophic” conditions, reports another article in the Daily Telegraph. More than 100 fires are burning in the state, with another 70 in the north-eastern state of Queensland, notes the Telegraph. Bushfires are also burning in Western Australia and South Australia. Axios has a series of photos of the conditions. Both the Financial Times and Reuters report on how residents in Sydney in New South Wales are struggling to cope as toxic smoke blankets the city. The Guardian reports that “residents in the New South Wales community of Gloucester have been told there is a risk the river that supplies their drinking water could run dry in the coming weeks – for the first time in recorded history”. And, finally, a piece in Guardian Australia reveals that “2019 is likely to be a ‘standout year’ for the number of bushfires that generate giant thunderstorm clouds known as pyrocumulonimbus, or pyroCBs”.

In his annual end-of-year news conference, Russian president Vladimir Putin has cast doubt on the human-causes of global warming, incorrectly saying “nobody knows the origins of global climate change”, reports Deutsche Welle. Answering questions posed by journalists, Putin said: “We know that in the history of our Earth there have been periods of warming and cooling and it could depend on processes in the universe…A small angle in the axis in the rotation of the Earth or its orbit around the sun could push the planet into serious climate changes.” Despite the statements, Putin acknowledged that the climate is changing and said that Russia needs to maximise efforts to fight it, reports Bloomberg. He warned that warming could threaten Russian Arctic cities and towns built on permafrost and trigger more fires and devastating floods, says the Associated Press. The newswire adds: “He emphasised that Russia has abided by the Paris Agreement intended to slow down global warming. At the same time, he noted that the US and China, which are responsible for a large share of greenhouse gas emissions, aren’t part of the deal.”

An editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald says Scott Morrison “must correct the failure in leadership on climate change policy, which is the real reason this bushfire season will be damaging for him politically in the long run”. The paper accuses Morrison of looking “shifty and out of touch” as he “crept out the back door” to go on holiday. It says: “Whatever brain explosion explains Mr Morrison’s conduct, it is sadly consistent with his broader media strategy which has been to play down the seriousness of the bushfires. That may be a simple misjudgment but many believe he is avoiding the issue deliberately because it raises embarrassing questions about the government’s lack of leadership on climate change.” The article notes that Morrison has “uttered just one sentence on the link between bushfires and climate change in which he said it was ‘one of many factors’”. Instead, the paper argues, “Morrison should have used the bushfires as a chance to explain what he plans to do about this new world where Australia is getting hotter and drier and bushfires start earlier in the year, last longer and spread more widely”. Meanwhile, writing in the Guardian, Geoff Goldrick – deputy captain with the New South Wales Rural Fire Service – lists the “tsunami of extreme events” that mean “2019 may go down in history as year zero of the climate apocalypse”.

In an immersive interactive feature, a team from the Washington Post explore how scientists have – for more than a hundred years – taken records of weather and climate around the world. While this data was originally used for forecasting and helping avert “tragedy and economic loss”, the “troves of data it produced are used today to monitor a new sort of disaster”, the article says, “one that was scarcely foreseeable by 19th-century meteorologists but that now constitutes the single most significant fact about the planet’s environment”. The world “is more than 1C hotter than it was before industrialisation began pumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere”. But “how can that be known?”, the authors ask. “How can it be possible to take Earth’s temperature, not just for this week or this year, but for decades and centuries?” The answer lies in the worldwide network of weather stations and the detailed data records they have produced, the article says: “In recent decades, meteorologists have relied on those records — and thousands more like them — to compare how the world’s climate used to be with how it is now. And as more observations from the past are retrieved from dusty archives worldwide, they point to the possibility of even more precipitous warming.”

Prolonged exposure to ocean acidification could corrode the tooth-like scales called “denticles” on the skin of sharks, a new study suggests. The researchers found that in three “puffadder shysharks” housed in acidified seawater for nine weeks, 25% of denticles on average were damaged, compared to 9% of denticles in a control group of three sharks that had been housed in non-acidic water. Such corrosion could impair the sharks’ skin protection and open-water sharks’ ability to swim, the researchers warn, as denticle surface affects their swimming speed. The study also speculates that similar corrosion may occur in sharks’ teeth.