The UN’s climate change chief Patricia Espinosa has warned that governments are not doing enough to meet their climate change targets. Speaking to Reutersahead of negotiations in Bangkok, Espinosa said that the world is unlikely to meet the goal outlined in the Paris climate agreement of limiting temperature rise to 1.5C: “1.5 is the goal that is needed for many islands and many countries that are particularly vulnerable to avoid catastrophic effects. In many cases it means the survival of those countries. With the pledges we have on the table now we are not on track to achieve those goals”. She suggested that the extreme weather events of this summer, such as the European heatwave, should give fresh impetus to the talks: “It really does make the evidence clear that climate change is having an impact on the daily lives of people.”

The UK’s ministers are “deliberately weakening” the green watchdog that will hold the government to account on the environment after Brexit, the shadow Brexit minister has said. The body that will replace the power of the European commission after Britain leaves the EU will not have any powers relating to climate change, Labour’s Matthew Pennycook warned. He told the Observer: “Our EU membership has been key to delivering and enforcing UK emission reductions. In choosing to exclude climate change from the remit of their environmental watchdog, ministers are deliberately weakening the tools we have to hold them to account. The Brexit process cannot be used as a cover to water down the UK’s leadership on climate change.” Approximately 55% of the UK’s planned emissions reductions are tied to regulations derived from the EU and would have been enforced by the European commission, the Observer reports.

Feeding ocean algae to a dozen dairy cows reduced their methane emissions by more that 30%, a new study has found. Scientists mixed small amounts of the seaweed into the animals’ normal feed. Professor Ermias Kebreab, an animal scientist who led the study, commented: “I was extremely surprised when I saw the results…I wasn’t expecting it to be that dramatic with a small amount of seaweed.” The Independent also has the story. Back in June, Carbon Briefproduced a video exploring how beef farmers can reduce their carbon footprint.

The pension funds of the UK’s local councils have over £9bn invested in companies conducting fracking operations, despite “fierce debate over shale gas exploration”, the Financial Times reports. One third of the British public said they were opposed to fracking in a poll last year, compared to 16% in favour. The council of Lancashire, a region that is a “hotbed” of anti-fracking protests, is among the authorities with a portion of their pension fund exposed to fracking. Elsewhere, a comment piece for the Guardian leads with: “Fracking is back in England – and only the Tories want it”. In it, John Ashton argues that: “The only justification for forcing an industry with no social licence on to a community that finds it repugnant arises when there is an overriding national interest. In the case of fracking, there is no such interest.”

Switching to lab-grown meat could cut the associated greenhouse gas emissions by 78-96%, says a new report from the Adam Smith Institute, a free-market think tank. The figures come from a study published in the Environmental Sciences & Technology Journal. Livestock are responsible for 14.5% of the greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans, according of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Jamie Hollywood, co-author of the report, said that the UK government should encourage such emerging technologies: “Many innovations which have been impeded by inefficient and short-sighted legislation and state procedure could alleviate problems such as starvation, malnourishment and climate change.”

Litigation is proving to be an “increasingly popular” tool in the fight against climate change, for environmentalists who are “seeking new ways to use the law to slow global warming and assign responsibility for the resulting economic damages”. A Q&A in Bloomberg Businessweek examines the topic. “Environmentalists have won major cases against the Netherlands, Colombia and South Africa”, they write, but lawsuits in the US have fared “badly so far”.

With the annual meeting of the World Nuclear Association due this week in London, Nick Butler discusses why the mood at the meeting is likely to be “mixed at best”. While “there is some good news” for the industry, such as the continuation of China’s nuclear construction programme, “there are too many negatives for comfort”, Butler argues. “Nuclear’s share of global electricity production has fallen from 16.5 per cent 20 years ago to barely 10 per cent today…In the US, which produces more nuclear power than any other country, commercial pressures are forcing plants to close”. He suggests that: “The failure of the nuclear industry to reduce costs is a profound weakness. Attempts to transfer the construction costs and the risks to the public sector balance sheet…are unlikely to work when national spending is under heavy constraint.”

A feature in Fox News discusses the environmental effects of wildfires on the western US. “Fire suppression policies allowed fuels to build up in many Western forests, making them more susceptible to major fires”, Brown explains. He continues: “Those influences are magnified as development creeps ever deeper into forests and climate change brings hotter temperatures.” A separate feature in Vox highlights that California has 129 million dead trees, that are a “huge wildfire risk”. Although state officials are “well aware that these trees pose an immense fire hazard”, “controlling them is not as simple as cutting them all down”, Vox explains. “The sheer number of these trees poses an immense logistical challenge.” In the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert gives the political context for the “summer of megafires”. She writes: “against this infernal backdrop… the Trump administration recently unveiled its plan to roll back rules limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants. The fires, according to Donald Trump, had nothing to do with global warming.” Last month Carbon Brief published a factcheck examining how global warming has increased US wildfires.

The “rapidly thinning sea ice” in the Arctic is making way for commercial shipping as well as warships, “as the world’s great powers look north and see untapped wealth and strategic opportunities – or threats”, writes Nick Miller, in an in-depth feature considering the implications of climate change for the region. “Security concerns often mirror economic concerns”, he explains, “as climate change alters the physical landscape, the economic landscape of the Arctic is changing just as fast”.

In an opinion piece for the Daily Telegraph, David Millward reflects on time he spent with Maine’s lobstermen, blue-collar workers who were “part of the demographic targeted by the Trump campaign”. Yet their industry is threatened by climate change, a concept which has been rejected by Donald Trump. Millward explains: “Warming sea waters have seen lobsters migrate north. The same has been happening with cod – which are now in scant supply in Cape Cod. Melting ice caps and changing current patterns are threatening to have a devastating impact on the fishing industry.” He concludes: “there is mounting evidence that the damage which his policies are causing is going to bite rather faster than one might have imagined…That might cause Trump and the Republicans a few problems.”

New research uses two different modelling approaches to assess the impact of 1.5C and 2C of warming on extreme weather in China. Compared with 2C of warming, 1.5C can help reduce about 6% of “summer days” and 11% of “tropical nights” increases, relative to 1986‐2005, the study finds. Five‐day maximum rainfall could increase by approximately 10% and 14% in 1.5C and 2C warmer climates, respectively, the authors say, with the largest increases (17% and 28%, respectively) projected in North China.

A new study investigates “nuclear winter theory” – the concept that smoke from burning cities targeted with nuclear weapons would rise into the upper atmosphere, absorb sunlight and cool the Earth’s surface. The researchers use data on solar irradiance and global surface temperature from US air raids on Japan in the second world war – including the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The data is “consistent with an expected 0.1‐0.2C cooling”, the authors say, however, because of multiple uncertainties in the data, “it is not possible to formally detect a cooling signal from World War II smoke”.