France and the United Nations have warned the US President-elect Donald Trump, who made a campaign pledge to cancel the Paris climate deal, about the risks of quitting the agreement. A historic shift from fossil fuels is “unstoppable”, said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, as market forces were driving the world economy towards cleaner energies. “My sense is that as a very successful businessman, I believe he understands market forces are already in this issue”, Ban Ki-moon remarked. French President Francois Hollande, addressing nearly 200 nations at the latest climate summit in Morocco, said that inaction would be “disastrous for future generations and it would be dangerous for peace”. “The United States, the largest economic power in the world, the second largest greenhouse gas emitter, must respect the commitments it has undertaken”, Hollande continued, called the agreement “irreversible”. China has also urged Trump not to back out of the deal, Grist reports. Diplomats at the conference are worried that Trump could “cripple a decade of climate diplomacy”, the New York Times writes. BusinessGreen, Climate Home, the Guardian and Time Magazine also have the story.

The UK is likely to formally approve its participation in the UN’s flagship climate pact this week, Climate Home reports. Under UK law international treaties are subject to 21 days of what’s called ‘negative procedure’, when lawmakers can question or object to its provisions – a period that expires this week.

China has called more than 1,500 government officials to account for recent major environmental problems across three provinces, Reuters reports. In the past year the environment ministry has punished numerous factories and polluting industries, as it steps up its efforts to crackdown on pollution, in response to growing public anger over damaging smog levels and environmental degradation.

The US Interior Department yesterday finlaised rules designed to prevent methane leaks from oil and gas production on federal and tribal lands, in one of the Obama administration’s last efforts aimed at fighting climate change, Reuters reports. “We are proving that we can cut harmful methane emissions that contribute to climate change, while putting in place standards that make good economic sense for the nation”, said Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. The incoming Trump administration has promised to cut what it calls superfluous restrictions on energy production. The Republican party has vowed to halt the rule, the Hill reports.

Current government pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions are inadequate, warns the International Energy Agency, and the Paris climate deal risks failure unless countries come forward with more ambitious plans to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. “Government policies will determine where we go from here”, said Fatih Birol, the head of the world’s energy watchdog. Birol also urged caution on assuming too much in the wake of the US elections: “Governments come and go around the world…We may well see a change in US policy and, given the size of the US economy, these changes may have global implications. If there are such changes, we will include them in our analysis. But for now, it would be premature to speculate on what these policies might be.”

Herbivorous tropical fish have destroyed kelp forests in northern New South Wales, an Australian study has found. The deforestation coincided with an 0.6C temperature rise and a threefold increase in the number of tropical fish in the region, demonstrating that “even small increases in ocean temperature can lead to kelp deforestation”. And this is not the first piece of troubling news for kelp: one forest was wiped out off the southwestern coast of Australia by extremely warm temperatures in 2011, the Washington Post reports. Adriana Vergés, who used underwater cameras to study the kelp, said: “I think what’s interesting is this realization that the greatest impacts of climate change may not be the direct effects of warming on one species, but it’s more the effects of warming on the way species interact with each other…The effect of warming on how fish eat the kelp. And it’s kind of the same with coral reef systems.” The Guardian also have a video on the story.

The impact of hydroelectric dams on climate change has been underestimated, researchers warn, as rotting vegetation creates 25% more methane than previously thought, according to a study published in BioScience. This represents 1.3% of total annual human-caused global emissions, the Guardian reports. When considered over a 100-year timescale, the “dams produce more methane than rice plantations and biomass burning”.

Donald Trump’s short-list of contenders to head the US Environmental Protection Agency includes two current energy industry lobbyists who held leading roles there under former Republican President George W Bush, Reuters reports. These choices “dovetail with Trump’s vow to slash US environmental regulation and resist regulatory efforts to combat global climate change”, a stance also taken by George Bush. Candidates include Mike Catanzaro, a lobbyist for CGCN who was an associate deputy administrator at the EPA from 2005 to 2007, and Jeff Holmstead, an energy industry attorney at Bracewell law firm who was assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation from 2001 to 2005, Reuters writes. Elsewhere, New Scientist takes a look at Trump’s potential climate sceptic appointments.

A petition calling for fossil fuel lobbyists to be excluded from the UN climate change negotiations signed by more than 500,000 people has been received by the US delegation, despite initially saying that it could not formally receive it. It supports an initiative by countries including Ecuador and Venezuela for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to create a policy that would screen non-state participants of meetings for conflicts of interests, such as fossil companies, whose net worth can eclipse some developing nations, and who have funded climate change denial. The move was blocked by a number of rich nations, including the US, UK, EU and Australia, the Guardian reports. The Guardian also features a cartoon on the subject.

Trump made campaign promises to gut environmental regulations and get rid of the EPA, but the process is not so simple and he would face public pushback, writes Georgina Guston, in a feature looking into the political and legal feasibility of his remarks. “Dismantling the EPA, as Trump has threatened, is far more difficult than simply shooing it away”, she notes.

US President-elect Donald Trump’s views on climate change “amount to a declaration of war on young people like me”, writes Geoff Dembicki in the New York Times, “But millennials have a stronger position in this fight than it may first appear.” Many of the fossil fuel industry’s skilled workers are reaching retirement, and millennials have no interest in replacing them, he notes: “If millennials continue to reject careers in oil and gas, swell the ranks of the divestment movement and do everything we can to keep fossil fuels in the ground, Mr. Trump’s plan to repudiate the Paris agreement and expand drilling in the United States will become unfeasible.”

The failure to bring up the subject of climate change during the presidential debates is “the equivalent of getting an exclusive interview with Churchill and Roosevelt in 1942 and not asking them about the war”, argues Oliver Milman in the Guardian. Climate change was also missing in broader coverage of the election. This was a failure by the media, he writes, and “it’s now their responsibility to get Americans talking about it”.

With countries now having ratified the UNFCCC Paris Agreement and enacted the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) should be explicitly considered in upcoming climate assessments, says a new paper. Climate-chemistry models suggest HFCs could contribute 0.19C to warming by the mid-21st century, but more than 90% of the impacts can be avoided if emissions stop by 2030, say the authors.

Scientists have reconstructed temperatures during the exceptionally hot summer in 1540 from historical documentary evidence, concluding with medium confidence that the maximum temperature reached that year exceeded the average summer temperature from 1966-2015. There’s a 40-70% chance summer temperatures in 1540 were higher even than the record-breaking year of 2003, which saw a heatwave across Europe. Such events will happen more frequently and intensely as the climate warms, the paper concludes.