The leaders of Paris, Mexico City, Madrid and Athens have said they will stop the use of all diesel-powered cars and trucks by the middle of the next decade, in a bid to improve air quality. Announcing the commitment at a biennial meeting in Mexico, the city leaders said they will give incentives for alternative vehicle use and promote walking and cycling. The BBC’s environment analyst, Roger Harrabin, says the diesel ban is “hugely significant” and that it’s just a matter of time before other city mayors follow suit. The ironic twist, he adds, is that governments originally promoted diesel vehicles but with manufacturers misleading over air quality standards, the electric and hydrogen vehicles that will come in their place are “perfect for climate policy, if the power comes from renewables”.

The United States House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology has sparked a backlash from climate scientists after tweeting a link yesterday to a story on right-wing news outlet Breitbart, claiming that 2016’s rise in global temperatures was down to El Niño rather than human activity. The piece by climate-skeptic writer James Delingpole aggregates an earlier article from the Daily Mail, explains Grist. But as blogger Tamino points out, the data cited by the Daily Mail has been cherrypicked multiple times over to show fluctuations in temperature rather than the overall warming trend. Climate Progress called the tweets “an embarrassment to science” while former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders took to Twitter to mock the House Science Committee for sharing the article, reports The Hill.

Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has pledged a A$1.3 billion fund to improve the water quality and wellbeing of the Great Barrier Reef, to prevent the World Heritage Site being placed on the United Nation’s “in danger” list. The progress report is intended to reassure UNESCO that the risks to the reef are being well managed but it paints a grim picture of the scale of protecting the 1,400-mile-long reef and may severely understate the costs of doing so, says The New York Times. Calling the report “shoddy”, Queensland’s first Greens Senator, Larissa Waters, writes in The Guardian that the government is “risking a fail on their reef homework by underfunding their Reef Plan, delaying water quality targets, spruiking new coal and ignoring global warming after the worst coral bleaching the reef has ever seen.”

Daughter of the next president, Ivanka Trump, has signalled that she may want to make fighting climate change one of her signature issues, reported Politico yesterday. Trump is exploring ways to use her new spotlight and position to advocate for the fight against global warming but her climate position would be at odds with that of the president-elect, who repeatedly has called climate change a “hoax” and pledged to undo all of President Obama’s global warming policies, says The Hill.

EU countries are on track to meet their 2020 targets for renewable energy and emissions cuts but could fall short of ambitious longer-term goals, the European Environment Agency said on Thursday. While 2020 targets on energy and climate are “well within reach”, EEA executive director Hans Bruyninckx called certain trends, in particular for transport, “alarming”. Meeting the 2030 target for renewable energy would “require additional efforts because regulatory changes affect investors’ confidence in renewables, while market barriers persist,” the agency said.

American businesses including major airlines, banks, energy, tech and pharmaceutical companies are pushing back against the president-elect’s attempts to dismiss climate change concerns, reports The Guardian. At the first Companies vs Climate Change conference in Fort Lauderdale yesterday urged corporate America to step up efforts to help guide policy. Jeffrey Perlman, founder of New York-based Bright Power, said: ““We have an incoming administration not willing to even admit that climate change is a thing [but] they won’t be able to dismantle a lot of the great energy policies in the states that are being more progressive.”

The world-famous scientist laments the current populist “rejection of the elites” in the US and UK: “For me, the really concerning aspect of this is that now, more than at any time in our history, our species needs to work together. We face awesome environmental challenges: climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans.”

The Guardian looks at whether the world is finally on the cusp of delivering “clean, safe, limitless energy for the modern world” through nuclear fusion. It’s been a long time coming, says Carrington, but the EU, China, Russia, US, India, Japan and South Korea are all now betting billions on the £14.3bn Iter project in France to reverse decades of stumbling blocks and achieve a critical breakthrough. He says, “Fusion is in danger of following its atomic cousin, conventional fission nuclear power, in over-promising – “electricity too cheap to meter” – and under-delivering.” In the Mail Online, two fusion experts explain how a “mini sun” could lead to unlimited energy.

Television, as one of the most influential ways that people make sense of change in the world, could be a route for climate change themes to be engagingly presented to new audiences. But TV coverage as a whole of this “vital but tricksy topic still feels like a ‘5 out of 10’ performance”, says Smith. Seemingly designed to be ignored since it lacks obvious human angles and clear storylines, successful climate change tv will require that producers take risks, putting budget and broadcast slots aside for long shot projects and new concepts. Smith says, “If I to report back again in five years time I hope that I will find that this tough but vital topic has also inspired some of the best innovations in television.”

Tornadoes in the US have the biggest impact where they occur in sequences in close succession – known as “outbreaks”. A new study finds that the magnitude and frequency of tornado outbreaks has increased between 1965 and 2015 – with the number of tornadoes in the most extreme outbreaks roughly doubling. This increase does not correspond with factors that are associated with climate change, the researchers say, but instead are likely to be a result of natural fluctuations such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. More evidence is needed to pinpoint the underlying cause of the increase, the researchers say, to help predict whether this trend will continue in the future.

Over 98% of Nigeria’s land surface has got drier over the second half of the 21st century, a new study says. Researchers calculated several different drought indices for 1951-2014, and find that around three-quarters of Nigeria generally loses more moisture through evaporation that it gains in rainfall. Between 40 and 50% of the land area is seeing a “persistent shift towards aridity,” the paper says. The findings could help policymakers to develop appropriate adaptation strategies for the most vulnerable areas, the researchers conclude.