New satellite data shows that the Greenland ice sheet lost a record amount of ice in 2019, reports the Guardian, “equivalent to a million tonnes per minute across the year”. The ice sheet lost 532bn tonnes of ice last year, the paper says, which is double the annual average since 2003. “[2019 was] really shocking and depressing in terms of the numbers,” lead author Ingo Sasgen tells the paper: “But it’s also not very surprising, because we had other strong melt years in 2010 and 2012, and I expect we will see more and more.” High pressure systems that became “blocked” over Greenland last summer were the immediate cause of the huge losses, reports BBC News, “but the authors say ongoing emissions of carbon are pushing Greenland into an era of more extreme melting”. The blocking pattern occurred when “disturbances in the jet stream saw high pressure systems become stuck over Greenland, resulting in enhanced melting”, the outlet says (For more on blocking weather patterns, see Carbon Brief’s explainer.) The New York Times notes that the region was “roasted” by the ensuing heatwave, with “nearly half” of the year’s ice losses coming in July. Prof Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading – who wasn’t involved in the study – tells the Times: “To put this 2019 Greenland melt rate into context, 532 [billion tonnes] in one year is equivalent to around six Olympic-sized swimming pools every single second of the year.” BBC News adds that the ice lost in 2019 is “the equivalent of adding 1.5mm to global mean sea levels, approximately 40% of the average rise in one year”. The Hill and Reuters also cover the study, while the Guardian has a series of photos of Greenland’s melting ice. (A Carbon Brief guest post from last year has more details on how the Greenland ice sheet fared in 2019.)

In an “exclusive”, Axios reports that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden “is unlikely to pursue a carbon tax if he wins in November, according to several people familiar with his campaign’s thinking”. Biden’s campaign had said last year it supported a price on carbon emissions, the outlet says, but the shift “reflects the Democratic Party’s overall movement away from a carbon price and a new focus on economic recovery and equality, say people following the presidential nominee’s positions”. At the same time, there is continued reaction to the news – reported earlier this week – that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has dropped a call for the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies from its platform. The Hill reports that the US environmental group the Sierra Club has criticised the move, publishing a letter demanding “that the DNC immediately reinstate the language”. The letter adds: “Instead of reassuring the American people that the Democratic Party is committed to putting public health over corporate polluters, the DNC has quietly endorsed [President] Trump’s recklessness.“ The “mysterious decision to dial back the party platform’s language on the climate crisis has deflated morale”, says the Guardian. In response, the Biden campaign is emphasising that he still “really, really doesn’t like subsidies for fossil fuels”, says Axios. Biden policy director Stef Feldman tweeted that the Democratic candidate “continues to be committed to ending US fossil fuel subsidies [and] then rallying the rest of the world to do the same – as was outlined in his climate plan last year”. While “it’s not clear why the language got dropped”, the outlet adds, “it’s not really consequential in terms of future policy. Nonbinding party platforms aren’t especially influential”. Elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal reports that “[i]nvestors betting that Joe Biden will win the presidential election are buying up clean-energy stocks, sending the share prices of some companies to all-time highs”.

Meanwhile, Biden formally accepted his nomination to run for president on the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In his speech, Biden warned that “this is a life-changing election…This will determine what America is going to look for a long time”, reports the New York Times. It adds: “The candidate singled out four historic crises: the pandemic, the economy, the struggle for racial justice, and climate change.” By “merely identifying these as critical priorities, [Biden] distinguishes himself from a Republican Party in the grips of wide-ranging reality-denial”, says a Washington Post editorial, which explains why it sees Biden’s selection as “actually a bold choice”. Biden also “spoke directly to young people, who have been slow to warm to his candidacy”, the Post says: “He noted their protests for racial justice and civil rights, their advocacy of gun control and their desire to see the nation deal with the crisis of climate change.” Biden said: “I hear their voices and if you listen, you can hear them, too.” The New York Times has a full transcript of the speech, which mentions “climate change” three times. Another piece by the paper says “Biden and the Democrats spent the week prosecuting arguments against [Trump] on Covid-19, unemployment, health care, child care, climate change, foreign policy and his fundamental fitness for the presidency – attacks that only presaged a fall campaign that, even when it features Mr. Biden, will be aimed entirely at drawing contrasts with Mr. Trump”. In the UK, a Times editorial says that “Biden’s prospects look promising”, pointing towards the backing he received from Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who was runner-up in the primaries. The result is that Biden’s manifesto – “even if stripped of some of the radical left’s most cherished projects – including medicare for all and the Green New Deal” – is “still one that Mr Sanders could assert would make Mr Biden ‘the most progressive president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’”, says the paper.

In a Reuters “exclusive”, the newswire reports that some members of the OPEC+ group of oil-producing nations would need to slash output by an extra 2.31m barrels per day (bpd) to make up for their recent oversupply. An internal OPEC+ report seen by Reuters shows that the surplus seen between May and July ought to be compensated for in August and September. The newswire adds: “Data shows among OPEC members, Iraq and Nigeria were the least compliant and even the United Arab Emirates, which made additional voluntary cuts in June, overproduced by around 50,000 bpd over the May-July period. Among non-OPEC participants, Russia and Kazakhstan overproduced by 280,000 bpd and 190,000 bpd, respectively.” Oil prices dipped yesterday, says Reuters, before rising again this morning. One trader told the newswire that OPEC “calling out” Iraq and Nigeria for not complying has been “very good for supporting prices”. Official data for Saudi Arabia shows crude exports from the world’s largest oil exporter declined in June “to the lowest on record”, Reuters says. Meanwhile, Reuters also reports that president Donald Trump said yesterday that US companies were involved in many prospects in Iraq’s oil business, as Iraqi prime minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi declared his country open for American business and investment.

In other oil news, Reuters reports that workers in Mauritius have started to scuttle the Japanese-owned bulk carrier that ran aground off its shores and spilled oil over its coastline. The government said the ship’s sinking would be done in a way that would avoid further pollution or interfere with maritime routes, the outlet adds. Meanwhile, Reuters also reports that “an oil tanker carrying 3,000 tonnes of gasoline collided with a cargo ship near Shanghai on Thursday, leaving 14 people missing”. Elsewhere, the Guardian reports that major Australian insurer Suncorp will end any financing or insuring of the oil and gas industry by 2025, adding to the group’s existing ban on support for new thermal coal projects. And Reuters reports that oil and gas investment in Norway, western Europe’s top producer, will rise more this year and decline less in 2021 than predicted a few months ago, following recent tax cuts for the sector. The Financial Times reports that the oil and gas exploration company Premier Oil is “seeking to raise $530m from shareholders as part of a $2.9bn refinancing that the North Sea group hopes will end concerns over its finances”. An FT comment piece by Lombard editor Kate Burgess says despite the “twinkle of light in the dark tunnel”, Premier Oil and the entire sector “must come up with a plan to withstand the inexorable shift from extracting fossil fuels from land or sea to greener sources of energy”. However, “most lack the wherewithal to make the change themselves”, she says, concluding: “Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is just a train hurtling down the tracks towards you.”

There is continued coverage of the heatwave and wildfires hitting California, with Reuters reporting that tens of thousands of residents have been evacuated “as lightning-sparked firestorms raged through dry brush, grass and chaparral around San Francisco Bay”. It continues: “With firefighting resources strained to their limits by the heaviest spate of incendiary lightning strikes to rake California in more than a decade, officials scrambled to bring in reinforcements sought since Wednesday from out of state. An estimated 11,000 lightning strikes, mostly in northern and central California, ignited more than 370 individual fires this week, spawning nearly two dozen major conflagrations that threatened thousands of homes and prompted mass evacuations.” At the same time, President Trump “took aim at California officials…accusing leaders of improperly managing flammable debris in state forests leading to fires”, reports the Hill. During a speech in Pennsylvania, the president blamed the wildfires on “years” of poor forest management in California. “And I see again, the forest fires are starting,” Trump said. “They’re starting again in California. And I said, you’ve got to clean your floors. You’ve got to clean your floors.” He added: “I’ve been telling them this now for three years, but they don’t want to listen.” Scientific American reports on how the state has been “using controlled flames to restore ecosystems that evolved to burn in frequent, mostly low-intensity blazes” in an effort to “pivot away from a century of suppressing fire at all costs”. The fires come as California “has been enduring a record-breaking heatwave that has prompted rolling blackouts because of high electricity demands for air conditioning and other uses”, says the Washington Post. Reuters market analyst John Kemp says the blackouts, even if brief and rare events, “signal the grid is under stress and that the reserve margins needed for reliable operation are no longer adequate”. A piece in InsideClimate News looks at possible solutions to avoiding blackouts.

Elsewhere in California, an editorial in the Los Angeles Times warns that “Scientists have repeatedly warned that climate change, development and other environmental stressors are so dangerous to the survival of California’s Joshua trees that one of the main iterations of the plant could be nearly wiped out by the end of the century. It’s possible that Joshua Tree National Park could eventually have no Joshua trees.”

The site of a Scottish nuclear power facility should be available for other uses in 313 years’ time, reports BBC News. It continues: “Dounreay, near Thurso, was the UK site for the development of fast reactor research from 1955 to 1994. The facility on the north Caithness coast is in the process of being closed down, demolished and cleaned up. However, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority said it would be 2333 before the 148-acre site is safe for reuse.” A process of demolition of buildings and waste removal is already underway at the site, says the Independent, “which has previously been used to store dangerous radioactive material”. Elsewhere in Scotland, BBC News reports that council planning officers have recommended that proposals to extract peat from a site in Dumfries and Galloway should be rejected because of its impact on climate change. The officers say plans by Everris to remove peat from Lochwood Moss were incompatible with government targets on carbon emissions, the outlet reports. The site has been used for peat extraction since the late 1980s, BBC News says, and Everris – which provides peat to grow salad and fruit products – wants to continue to extract from the site until 2030. The company argue that there was no “inevitable release” of CO2 into the atmosphere from peat harvesting and “certainly not in large quantities”.

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg urged German chancellor Angela Merkel “to be brave enough to think long-term” in a meeting yesterday about global warming, reports Reuters. In their 90-minute discussion, Merkel explained her climate policy priorities for Germany’s European Union presidency, the newswire says. Thunberg said she and her fellow activists had asked Merkel to tackle climate change with more urgency, adding: “What it comes down to is that we all start to treat the climate crisis like we treat any other crisis.“ The activists “want politicians – and especially Merkel – to speed up emissions cuts and other climate measures”, says Politico. It adds: “They say that ‘Europe has a responsibility to act’ thanks to the pollution dating back to the Industrial Revolution that caused the bulk of the emissions problem.” The Independent also has the story.

An editorial in the Economist describes the recent decision to allow oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northern Alaska as the “hydroxychloroquine of energy policy”. It says: “The federal study that paved the way for the drilling announcement assumes that oil production in the refuge will last for 70 years. But a government assessment in 2018 has already determined that, without rapid reductions in carbon emissions, warming temperatures will kill thousands of Americans annually.” The Trump administration is “blazing ahead with new development despite the climate implications and polling that shows two-thirds of American voters oppose drilling in the Arctic preserve”, the editorial says. The project “makes neither economic nor environmental sense”, the piece concludes: “As pure politics it does have something in its favour, at least for the president. The push to park drill rigs in the refuge would fulfil his campaign promise to boost domestic energy production, whereas Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, promises net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050, in part by reducing reliance on fossil fuels. The president’s appetite for destruction in the Arctic, in other words, probably has more to do with winning Pennsylvania and other swing states that pit frackers against environmentalists than anything else.”

Last year saw Greenland ice mass loss hit a record annual loss of 532bn tonnes, a new study finds. Using data from the GRACE-FO (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment – Follow On) satellite mission, the researchers find that ice losses in 2017 and 2018 were “lower than in any other two year period between 2003 and 2019”. The study explains that “this reduced ice loss results from two anomalous cold summers in western Greenland, compounded by snow-rich autumn and winter conditions in the east”. Then in 2019, the data “reveals a return to high melt rates leading to a mass loss of 223bn tonnes during the month of July alone”. These results “come at a crucial time”, says a News & Views piece in Nature Climate Change: “The Greenland Ice Sheet has been a major contributor to sea level rise in recent decades.”

New research suggests a “near-global increase in sea level variability with continued warming”. Using climate models from the fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), the study finds “for an upper-ocean warming by 2 C, which is likely to be reached by the end of this century, sea level variability increases by 4 to 10% globally on seasonal-to-interannual timescales because of the nonlinear thermal expansion of seawater”. As the oceans continue to warm, the authors warn that “future ocean temperature oscillations will cause increasingly larger buoyancy-related sea level fluctuations that may alter coastal risks”.