Fracking at operations at a site in Lancashire have been terminated after a 0.4 magnitude tremor, reports the Guardian. Cuadrilla, the firm carrying out the fracking, said that it had paused work as a precaution, although the seismic event was within the limit allowed by the UK government. The company said in a statement on Tuesday: “This is an extremely low level of seismicity, far below what could possibly be felt at the surface but classed as an amber event as part of the traffic light system in place for monitoring operational activity”. However, a spokeswoman for Frack Free Lancashire told ITV News that the tremor was a “worrying sign”. The shut down comes just a week after the process was restarted in the UK for the first time since it was banned in 2011. In related news, the Independent reports that fracking chemicals have been found in shellfish living downstream of fracking waste disposal sites. The researchers say that the discovery demonstrates the long-lasting effects fracking can have on surrounding environments.

Over the past five years, sea urchins have overrun and consumed California’s kelp forests, with “devastating consequences” for the region’s seafood catches, the Times reports. A sequences of events that scientists have linked climate change have wiped out over 90% of northern Californian kelp. The crisis originates in part from the arrival of a large mass of warm water in 2014, explains Gretchen Hofmann, a professor of marine ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The warm water restricted the flow of nutrients from deeper in the ocean and the forests began to die, while purple urchins were equipped to thrive, with their population exploding 60-fold. The news was originally reported in the New York Times, who ran the story on the frontpage of yesterday’s edition, leading with: “California’s Underwater Forests Are Being Eaten by the ‘Cockroaches of the Ocean’”. They also published a behind-the-scenes perspective on the story.

The EU spent more than €424 million ($486 million) over the past decade trying to establish carbon-capture technology, the European Court of Auditors said in a report yesterday, according to Quartz. The EU considers the technology crucial to meeting its climate goals, Quartz writes, and it remains the only working technology that can be used to eliminate emissions from certain sources, such as the cement industry. However, four out of the six CCS projects funded by the EU “ended after the grant agreement was terminated, and one project ended without being completed”, and “the only completed project did not represent a commercial size CCS demonstration project”, the report concludes. The auditors say that the EU underestimated the hurdles in commercialising a nascent climate technology.

EU countries have a “strong commercial reason” to maintain gas and electricity trade across the English Channel following Brexit, the UK’s energy and clean growth minister Claire Perry said yesterday. If the UK leaves without a withdrawal deal on 29 March, imports and exports of power and gas will cease to be governed by EU trading rules, Climate Home explains, noting that: “while energy is highly unlikely to stop flowing, it could make trade slower and more expensive”. Claire Perry told a House of Lords’ subcommittee: “The French like it because they are exporting their nuclear power to us, and they don’t have anywhere else to send it – they send it to Germany, but no one’s allowed to know that…There is a strong commercial reason to keep these flows.” The UK shares power links with France, the Netherlands, Ireland and Northern Ireland, with more planned.

Offshore wind energy capacity is expected to grow twenty-fold in the Asia-Pacific region over the next decade, according to a new report from Wood Mackenzie, picked up by the Financial Times. It is expected to reach 43GW by 2027, with China responsible for much fo the predicted growth. However, the report also suggested that solar energy demand would dip 18% in 2018, amid declining installations in China, India and Japan. Rishab Shrestha, an analyst at the consultancy, commented: “Traditionally the leader of the pack in Asia-Pacific, China’s solar installations are expected to fall 30% this year as it is adopting various policy instruments which will reduce subsidies.”

A new study published to Proceedings of the Royal Society B has found that two global warming periods in Earth’s history drove mass extinction events, wiping out significant amounts of ocean life and destroying reef ecosystems. The Late Triassic and Early Toarcian extinctions are both linked to massive volcanism and the resulting climate changes. It was previously thought that they simply intensified extinction rates that were already underway, but the new research suggests that extinction patterns changed dramatically each time due to rising ocean temperatures, acidification, and oxygen-starved waters, the Mail Online reports.

The ride-hailing app Uber is to charge its customers in London an extra 15p per mile to help its drivers purchase electric cars, the Guardian reports. Under the company’s new scheme, each driver will in effect have their own savings account towards the purchase of an electrical vehicle. Uber is aiming to have its London fleet fully electric by 2025. The UK government has just slashed its grants for electric vehicles from £4,500 to £3,500 and abolished support for new hybrids, the Guardian notes.

FT columnist Martin Wolf speaks out against the “collective yawn” which he says has been the widespread response to the latest IPCC report: “One line of argument against action is that we do not know how costly climate change will prove to be. But this argument evidently cuts both ways. The scale of the uncertainty is an argument for action, not inaction…Let us not fool ourselves: we are risking a world of runaway — and unmanageable — climate chaos. We could do far better than that.”

“Saudi Arabia spent the last three decades throwing sand in the global gears of containing climate change”, writes Jean Chemnick, a journalist who covers international climate policy for E&E News. Its tactics continued at climate change conferences this year, now with “the help of the United States”. She writes: “The synchronicities between the Trump administration and the desert kingdom aren’t hard to find. Both are determined to expand fossil fuels worldwide, despite mounting warnings by scientists that the window for climate action is shrinking.” So when it comes to climate action, the Saudi strategy is to “delay by any means possible”. Farhana Yamin, CEO of the nonprofit Track 0, tells Chemnick why: “The Saudis and other oil-dependent countries benefit hugely from every year of delay in the UN because it is a year of unimpeded revenue…So delaying climate action by five years, 10 years, for them is a big financial win.”

Sophie Mbugua, an environmental journalist based in Nairobi, investigates why “fewer than one in ten” contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report on 1.5C were African, when the continent is home to one in six of the world’s people. She highlights that there is “a lot of uncertainty around African findings”, and that this problem “starts with patchy raw data”, and is “compounded by a lack of resources to get African research published in the peer-reviewed journals the IPCC relies on to make its assessments”. The piece concludes that: “developing and funding a critical mass of climate scientists in Africa is key” to improving representation.

“Rising global temperatures are altering climatic zones around the planet, with consequences for food and water security, local economies, and public health”, begins a feature in Yale Environment 360. The piece summarises some of the “distinct features” on a map “that have shifted in the face of climate change”. For example, the boundaries of the tropics are expanding at a rate of “30 miles per decade”, while the Sahara desert, whose edges are defined by rainfall, have “crept both northward and southward, making the entire region about 10% larger”. Over in the Americas, a region from South Dakota to Texas known as “Tornado Alley”, which is “infamous for destructive storms”, has shifted 500 miles east in 30 years – although scientists don’t know exactly why the shift has happened.

Climate change could make heatwaves longer, wider and more intense within decades in China, research shows. Using climate models, the researchers show that heatwaves that occurred once in every five years in 2013 could occur once in every two years under 1.5C of global warming and almost every year under 2C of warming. “Additionally, the increase in the frequency of the extreme events is larger for rarer extremes,” the researchers say.