Tropical cyclones, which include hurricanes, have grown more sluggish in the past 70 years, research shows, which could bring danger to those residing in their path. A study published in Nature focuses on what is known as translation speed, which measures how quickly a storm is moving over an area. Between 1949 and 2016, tropical cyclone forward speed fell by 10% across the world. The Washington Post notes that the study points directly to Hurricane Harvey, whose unprecedented deluge was enabled by the storm’s “stalling” over Houston. Slower-moving storms will rain more over a given area, batter that area longer with their winds and pile up more water ahead of them as they approach shorelines, said Prof James Kossin, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the study’s author. The Independent reports that the slowing effect has been particularly pronounced in the northern hemisphere. Carbon Brief also has the story.

The new Socialist prime minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez – who has been in office for less than a week – has told Brussels of his plans to step up his country’s commitment to tackling climate change, according to El Pais. Sources within the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and the European Union told the newspaper that Spanish authorities have been in touch with the European Council, which sets the EU’s policy agenda, to discuss Spain’s new approach to climate issues. “We are going to change the narrative,” said a source in Sánchez’s team. “The energy transition is not a whimsical issue.” Climate Home News reports that Spain intends to join a group of seven EU countries, including Germany, France and Portugal, that is calling for the EU to increase its greenhouse gas emissions targets to be in line with the Paris Agreement. Newly-appointed minister Teresa Ribera told Climate Home News: “We intend to increase, to raise ambition on climate and the speed of the energy transition. So to join forces with the progressive countries will be the key.”

The former US president Barack Obama convinced India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi to commit to the Paris Agreement by talking about his heritage as an African-American, according to a new book on the Obama era. “When we got to Paris, the main holdout was India,” Obama’s then top foreign policy and national security aide Ben Rhodes writes in his book The World at It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House. “Obama went through arguments about a solar initiative we were building, the market shifts that would lower the price of clean energy,” writes Rhodes in his book. “But he still hadn’t addressed a lingering sense of unfairness, the fact that nations like the United States had developed with coal, and were now demanding that India avoid doing the same thing. ‘Look’, Obama finally said, ‘I get that it’s unfair. I’m African-American’.”

The frequency of coastal flooding from high tides has doubled in the US in just 30 year, according to new analysis from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA warned communities near shorelines warned that the next two years are set to be punctuated by particularly severe flooding as sea levels continue to rise. InsideClimate News reports that while some of the flooding coincided with hurricanes, much of it was driven by sea level rise fuelled by climate change. “Though year‐to‐year and regional variability exist, the underlying trend is quite clear,” the NOAA report says. “Due to sea level rise, the national average frequency of high tide flooding is double what it was 30 years ago.”

An influential government thinktank has said that China should consider increasing its ambition to tackle climate change and meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, Climate Home News reports. On Sunday, the National Centre for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation (NCSC) said China had “the potential and conditions for improving” its Paris commitment, known as a ‘nationally determined contribution’. The NCSC recommended the government “evaluate and demonstrate the options for updating the 2030 nationally determined contributions in 2020”.

“I love data journalism and I love a good map, and the folks at Carbon Brief have just released a doozy of a visual that combines both,” writes David Roberts of Vox, referring to Carbon Brief’s recently released infographic detailing the location of every coal map in the world from 2000 to future planned power stations. “It’s endlessly fascinating. You can search by zip code, rotate, even zoom in super close and get a satellite view,” he writes.

“The decision to help to bankroll Japan’s troubled nuclear industry seems like an odd way to prove that the government can be trusted as a shrewd steward of public money,” writes Robin Pagnamenta, deputy business editor of the Times. Pagnamenta refers to government plans to invest in a pair of giant nuclear reactors at Wylfa, on Anglesey, with Japanese conglomerate Hitachi. “The decision to pump state resources into nuclear power seems especially odd when viewed in the context of what is happening elsewhere in the energy industry. While the cost of nuclear power seems to climb inexorably higher, the cost of viable renewable alternatives continues to plunge.”

Cities generate the majority of carbon emissions, but the carbon footprints of many individual cities have previously not been estimated. This paper provides the Gridded Global Model of City Footprints (GGMCF), a 250m gridded model using data on population, purchasing power, and existing subnational carbon footprint studies. Carbon footprints are highly concentrated by income, with the top decile of earners driving 30-45% of emissions. Emissions are similarly concentrated in a small number of cities; the highest emitting 100 urban areas account for 18% of the global carbon footprint, and nearly one quarter of the top cities are in countries with relatively low emissions. In these cities population and affluence combine to drive footprints at a scale similar to those of cities in high-income countries.

A new study finds that global temperatures since 1891 can be successfully estimated from a combination of natural and human forcing factors, including internal climate variability, by using a multiple regression technique. The relative contributions of the various forcing factors to temperature changes vary in time, but most of the warming since 1891 is found to be attributable to the net influence of increasing greenhouse gases and anthropogenic aerosols. The only serious disagreements between the reconstructions and observations occur during the Second World War in the period 1944–1945, when observed near-worldwide sea surface temperatures may be significantly warm-biased. The generally high reconstruction accuracy shows that known external and internal forcing factors explain all the main variations in temperatures between 1891 and 2015.