Hurricane Katrina, which wreaked destruction on the southern
US 10 years ago this month, went on to become a focus for arguments
about the link between climate change and (individual) extreme
weather events. Carbon Brief has spoken to some scientists in the
field to find out what has and hasn’t been learned since
2005.

The UN’s carbon credits scheme could have caused emissions
to rise by 600 million tonnes, due to weak regulation and “perverse
incentives”, says a new study. Russia and Ukraine in particular
come under fire for creating more waste in order to destroy it,
earning tradable carbon credits in the process.

Iran intends to accelerate crude production and exports as
soon as international sanctions are lifted, putting focus on a
worsening oil rout and Opec’s strategy to combat low prices. Bijan
Zanganeh, Iran’s oil minister, said yesterday that the country
would increase output by 500,000 barrels a day as soon as
restrictions are removed. While the fight for market share between
Opec members and non-members is well under way, a tussle within the
group is also intensifying, the Financial Times
writes.

Former European commissioner for climate action Connie
Hedegaard has urged countries to acknowledge the cost of reducing
emissions to fight climate change, and called on politicians to
shift away from short-term thinking. “It’s extremely important to
acknowledge it’s not for free to make this sort of change. But
neither is continuing business as usual,” she said. Speaking at the
City of Sydney’s CityTalks 2015 yesterday, Hedegaard agreed with
Tony Abbott that wind turbines are not “beautiful”, but called
power plants “visually awful”.

The oil industry is selling a “highly destructive” product,
California’s Governor Jerry Brown said this week as he pushes a
bill that would cut the state’s oil consumption in half by 2030.
The state Senate has already passed the bill, and members of the
Assembly are considering it during a session set to end next
month.

A court in the Netherlands has ordered Russia to pay
compensation for seizing the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise during
a protest against an offshore oil platform two years ago, Reuters
reports. Moscow has dismissed the ruling as lacking legal
authority.

Scientists have used high-resolution computing techniques to
calculate the future of the West Antarctic ice sheet – the
fastest-warming place on earth – over the next couple of centuries.
The precision mapping of melting glaciers can help predict
potentially calamitous effects on sea levels, the scientists say.
An estimated 80,000 cubic kilometres of ice could flow into the sea
by 2100, rising to 200,000 cubic kilometres by 2200.

Several environmental groups are planning a major climate
rally that will draw hundreds of thousands to the Mall on September
24, the day Pope Francis speaks to Congress. It is as yet unclear
whether Francis will focus on climate change during any of his
public remarks.

Calls for an unscheduled OPEC meeting to address spiralling
prices are now more a sign of growing friction within the group
than a leading indicator of policy action, write Rania El Gamal and
Alex Lawler of Reuters. While Algeria and Iran have suggested the
prospect of an emergency meeting, there is no word from Saudi oil
officials, and “no one” is willing to cut output, says an OPEC
delegate.

To evaluate the “slim chance” that the 97% expert consensus
on human-caused global warming are wrong, a new paper by Nuccitelli
and others examines a selection of contrarian climate science
research and attempts to replicate their results. The idea is that
accurate scientific research should be replicable. The study
uncovered some common shared characteristics in the contrarian
papers: cherry picking, disregarding known physics, ignoring
inconvenient data and ‘curve fitting’ – taking several different
variables, and stretching them out until the combination fits a
given curve.

The Philippines’ government is ignoring the people hardest
hit by global warming with unambitious and insincere national
pledge, argues Renee Karunungan, Advocacy Director of Dakila. The
Philippines, one of the most vulnerable countries to climate
change, opened its consultation on its INDC to civil society on
July 24. However “the process of the consultation remains to be
questionable”, she writes, and at this point the INDC is “clearly
unambitious, insincere, not transparent, and
non-inclusive.”

The northernmost embayment of the Baltic Sea, the Bothnian
Bay, remained partially ice-free for the first time in the winter
of 2014/15, according to newly published data. The researchers
found a natural climate cycle known as the North Atlantic
Oscillation was in an extremely positive phase that year, resulting
in winds vigorously pushing the sea ice to the northeastern end of
the bay. However, They also found that sea ice conditions for the
period 1985-2015 were unusual compared to any other preceding
thirty-winter period since 1720. Based on climate projections, the
scientists say they expect a partially ice-free Bothnian Bay will
go from being an extremely rare event to a “new
normal”.