Many publications carry news of a new report published in the Lancet which concludes that pollution kills at least nine million people and costs trillions of dollars every year. The Guardian, which places the story on its frontpage, says the Commission on Pollution and Health’s report is the the most comprehensive global analysis to date, warning the crisis “threatens the continuing survival of human societies”. The paper adds: “Toxic air, water, soils and workplaces are responsible for the diseases that kill one in every six people around the world, the landmark report found, and the true total could be millions higher because the impact of many pollutants are poorly understood. The deaths attributed to pollution are triple those from Aids, malaria and tuberculosis combined…The US and Japan are in the top 10 for deaths from “modern” forms of pollution, ie fossil fuel-related air pollution and chemical pollution.” Associated Press carries the reaction of Ernesto Sanchez-Triana, lead environmental specialist at the World Bank: “The relationship between pollution and poverty is very clear. And controlling pollution would help us address many other problems, from climate change to malnutrition. The linkages can’t be ignored.” The Washington Postreports the views of Gina McCarthy, a former US Environmental Protection Agency administrator: “Climate change is going to exacerbate the very problems that are identified in this article. There will be more contagious and infectious diseases. There will be more lives lost, more injuries, if we don’t identify a path that gets us out of the hole that we’re in.” Reuters also carries the story.

The US Senate has rejected an amendment that sought to block the raising of revenue through drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Washington Post says the move could make it easier for future oil and gas drilling to take place there: “Sen Maria Cantwell, the top Democrat on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, offered an budget amendment that would have removed instructions to the panel to raise an additional $1 billion through federal leasing. It failed 48 to 52 on a largely party-line vote…The vote, which came before the Senate approved Republican’s proposed budget, represented a victory for the GOP and a defeat for environmentalists.” Reutersalso carries the story, saying: “Conservationists and many Democrats treasure the Alaskan reserve, also known as ANWR, as one of the planet’s last paradises. Established by Congress in 1980, it is home to tribes and a habitat for sensitive wildlife including caribou, polar bears and hundreds of species of migratory birds. Republicans, who now control Congress and the White House, have long wanted to open a portion of ANWR called the 1002 area…The U.S. Geological Survey estimates the area on the Prudhoe Bay in Northern Alaska has up to 12 billion barrels of recoverable crude.”

The Irish edition of the Times reports that the views of a searcher at Trinity College Dublin who says that plant proteins should be added to beef burgers and gin to fight climate change and improve diet. “Mike Williams, an assistant botany professor, said that if 20% of meat products contained protein from food such as peas, beans, or lentils, the agriculture industry’s environmental footprint would be significantly lower. He said that the final product would be a hybrid between meat and plant, cutting the ‘unsustainable and costly’ demand for meat around the world.” The Times adds that Dr Williams is working with a team on an EU-funded project to increase the production of legumes in Europe, which has almost stopped since the 1960s. Most are imported into Europe in the form of soybeans from South America and fed to cattle.

Bloomberg reports from the construction site in France of ITER, the world’s largest nuclear fusion test reactor which is costing $24bn. However, with wind-farm developers starting to promise subsidy-free power by 2025 and electricity demand stagnating, Bloomberg asks whether ITER will ever make sense. “I’m dubious,” says Chris Llewellyn Smith, director of energy research at Oxford University who has spoken in favour of the research project. “The cost of wind and solar has come down so rapidly, so the competition has become harder to beat than you could have conceivably imagined a decade ago.” Bloomberg also quotes Paolo Frankl, who heads the renewable power division of the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based institution advising nations on energy: “The concept of the need for baseload generation is fading away…Technically, you could run a system 100 percent on renewables and even 100 percent just wind and solar.”

British Gas, the UK’s largest energy supplier, has won the race to roll out a household smart meter fit for the digital energy boom sparked by renewable energy, batteries and electric vehicles, reports the Telegraph: “After years of delay the next generation smart meter will be rolled out to British Gas customers from next year following a small-scale trial in UK homes over the summer. The major difference between the first and second generation meters, which both enable customers to track and record their energy use, is that the data will be used to harness household solar power, battery packs and electric vehicle charging to create a more efficient energy system…Operators will be able to play the role of National Grid in balancing energy use but at a much smaller, local level to prevent blackouts and make better use of renewable power.”

Seven Portuguese children have hit their initial fundraising target to bring a climate lawsuit through the European Court of Human Rights. A crowdfunding drive on Crowd Justice raised £20,000 in its first month for preliminary legal work. Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), which is coordinating the effort, has set a new “stretch target” of £100,000. GLAN and barristers from London’s Garden Court Chambers acting on behalf of the children plan to argue inadequate climate policies jeopardise their human rights, primarily the right to life. “We will be arguing that the court must base its conclusions as to the extent of the emissions cuts which each state we sue must make on the available climate change science,” said Gerry Liston, legal officer with GLAN. The Scottish Heraldand CNN also cover the story.

A new fund has been launched to help poor countries better understand how geoengineering climate fixes could affect them. The scheme aims to make sure the world’s poor have an informed voice in the debate over one of the most controversial solutions mooted for global warming. Asfawossen Kassaye, a professor of earth sciences at Addis Ababa University, has been involved in Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative (SRMGI) workshops and consultations since 2012. “We don’t know if [solar geoengineering] is good or bad for us,” he told Climate Home. “We really want to investigate.” Andy Parker, project director at SRMGI, which is offering the grants, estimates tens of millions of dollars have been spent on solar geoengineering research in the past decade, in China and a handful of developed countries. The Decimals fund will allow developing country scientists to re-analyse modelling data with their regional interests in mind. Last week, Carbon Brief reported from a geoengineering conference in Berlin.

Sev Kender, who works with both the University of Exeter and the British Geological Survey, says that, for possibly the first time in 7,000 years, a phenomenon known as “upwelling” (the upward flow of warmer ocean water to the surface), is thought to have caused recent ice shelf collapse around Antarctica – and the glacial thinning associated with it: “The ocean surrounding Antarctica is extremely cold, but water over 300m deep, Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW), is about 3⁰C above the melting point of ice. Normally, the very cold water above keeps this away from ice shelves. But in some areas, CDW is spilling onto the shallow Antarctic continental shelf, causing the ice to thin…This coincidence of timing with the onset of industrialisation shows it is possible that human made greenhouse gasses, thought to cause atmospheric warming, are having an impact on the position of the winds, the increase in warm water reaching the surface, and ultimately the melting of more ice in the Antarctic.”

Murray, the editor of BusinessGreen, has sat down and read through the UK government’s Clean Growth Strategy, which was published last week (as reported in detail by Carbon Brief), in great detail: ” It is an ambitious, important, and exciting strategy that has the potential to revolutionise the British economy over the next decade. It is also, as many commentators have noted, badly under-powered in crucial places and guilty of marrying a sense of urgency with a contradictory willingness to defer tough decisions. As one government source put it, ‘it doesn’t solve all the problems, but it is a big step forward’. That feels about right.” The first test will come, though, next month with the budget: “Philip Hammond now has the opportunity to either reinforce or badly dent this crucial new strategy just a matter of weeks after it was published.”

In a feature for the BBC News website, Prof Joanna Haigh from Imperial College London explains why CO2 has played a crucial role in shaping the Earth’s climate and why rising levels now are a problem: “The effects of increasing CO2 are not limited to an increase in air temperature. As the oceans warm they are expanding so producing a rise in sea level, this being exacerbated by the melting of some of the ice present on land near the poles and in glaciers. The warmer atmosphere holds more water vapour resulting in increased occurrences of heavy rainfall and flooding while changes in weather patterns are intensifying droughts in other regions.”

Extreme weather events such as heat waves and floods expected to be a major part of future climate change impacts. These extremes are often related to persistent local weather conditions. Weather persistence is linked to sea surface temperatures, soil-moisture (especially in summer) and large-scale circulation patterns, and these factors may change under past and future climate change. A new study looks at persistence of temperatures for northern hemisphere land. They find that for the mid-latitudes, persistence in summer has increased over the past 60 years. The changes are particularly pronounced for prolonged events, suggesting a lengthening in the duration of heat waves.

Coral reefs preserve the signatures of sea-level fluctuations over Earth’s history, and over the past 20,000 years in particular. A new study uses data from ancient reefs off the coast of Texas, which indicate that rapid sea-level rise events are more common than previously observed during the end of the last ice age. Recognising the nature of past sea-level rises is critical for informing models that predict future sea level rise. They find evidence of several rapid sea-level rise events (over timescales of decades to centuries) during the end of the last ice age that forced the reefs to shrink through time.