Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions have risen by 7% since 2015 despite policies designed to reduce them. This means that the country is “likely to face multimillion-euro fines for failing to meet EU 2020 targets or will have to spend similar amounts buying credits from member states who overachieve on their targets”, the Times writes. The increases, caused by an expanding economy, were found in the agriculture, transport and energy sectors, and have undone all progress made since 2009. “We need to adopt a greater sense of urgency about reducing our dependence on fossil fuels while radically improving energy efficiency. Ireland must optimise agricultural production to ensure long-term environmental integrity and sustainability”, said Eimear Cotter, of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Sustainability.

Time Inc was sold on Sunday to its rival Meredith Corporation in a $1.8bn deal that was backed by the rightwing billionaire Koch brothers, the Guardian reports. Employees of the company, which owns some of the world’s most famous magazine brands, have expressed “grave concerns” about the involvement of the brothers, who have previously funded groups denying climate change and attacking workers’ rights. The Koch brothers have said they will take no role at the merged media company, but their involvement in the deal “has raised questions about whether their interest is political”, the Guardian says. Charles Alexander, former editor of Time magazine said that the purchase was like seeing his “life’s work go down the drain”.

The Keystone XL pipeline, one of Canada’s main crude oil export routes linking Alberta’s oil fields to US refineries, will restart at a reduced pressure today, nearly two weeks after it was forced to close when it leaked 5,000 barrels of oil on rural South Dakota. The spills, which together with others have “exceeded the amount predicted by its developer before the pipeline began operating”, the Hillreports, is still being cleaned up and investigated by owner TransCanada. The pipeline is capable of exporting up to 590,000 barrels a day, but TransCanada did not specify when the pipeline would be returning to full capacity, but said that running at reduced pressure would “ensure a safe and gradual increase in the volume of crude oil moving through the system”.

GFG Alliance, one of Britain’s largest steel companies, has said it aims to increase its UK steel-making capacity to 5m tonnes a year from the current 1.1m tonnes, the Telegraph writes. The group says that tis plan would contribute to the “clean growth” initiatives laid out in the UK government’s latest Industrial Strategy, which was unveiled yesterday. They plan use electric arc furnaces part-powered by renewable energy to melt scrap steel so it can be reused – a more environmentally friendly method than primary steel-making.

South 32 has become the latest mining group to indicate that it intends to leave the South African thermal coal business, the Telegraph reports. “Thermal coal becomes more of a focus [for investors] when you think about climate change,” Graham Kerr, chief executive of South 32, said. “We’re making a strategical call on energy coal – it’s hard to price in the medium to long term.” South32 will seek to sell down its holding completely, as it does not wish to hold minority stakes in mines it operates.

“Rather than treating emotions as simple levers to be pulled to promote desired outcomes,” the climate change communication community “should adopt a more nuanced, evidence-based understanding of the multiple and sometimes counterintuitive ways that emotion, communication and issue engagement are intertwined”, says a comment piece in the journal Nature Climate Change. The piece discusses emotions “as part of a feedback system”, and notes that “the immediate responses and longer-term consequences of an emotionally evocative event may or may not be aligned, and may even differ dramatically.”

The United States Global Change Research Program recently released “readily understandable, and accessible” a report on the science of climate change and its causes. In a feature for the Guardian John Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences, summarises the contents of the report which discusses “how likely certain events are to happen if we continue on our business-as-usual path”. The report shows “that the biggest uncertainty in future climate change is us”, Abraham writes, continuing: “If we take strong actions to reduce greenhouse gases, we may be able to limit global warming by 2100 to 3.5°F (2°C) above pre-industrial temperatures.” “The more time we waste, the more expensive this problem will be in both lives and dollars”, he concludes.

Although the addition of an aspirational goal at the Paris climate conference of limiting global warming to 1.5C was an “important progressive step”, the implementation of this “extraordinarily ambitious target could, paradoxically, lead to a weakening of climate policy in the long term”, argue Oliver Geden and Andreas Loeschel, in a comment piece for the journal Nature Geoscience. Focusing on a temperature goal that is “highly unlikely to be met without a temporary period of overshoot”, produces a risk that temperature targets will “no longer be seen as strict upper limits”, they say. Therefore, scientists must define clear limits for overshoot magnitude, duration and timing, to ensure accountability and “avoid a ‘slippery slope’ affect”.

CO2 emissions from wildfires in tropical forests are around 133% higher during and after El Niño events as compared with La Niña, a new study says. The researchers use satellite data to create a record of burned area and fire-related emissions, based on six El Niño and six La Niña events during 1997–2016. Wildfires typically peak in equatorial Asia when El Niño is strengthening (Aug–Oct), the study finds, before moving to southeast Asia and northern South America (Jan–Apr), Central America (Mar–May) and the southern Amazon (Jul–Oct) during the following year. The results “help to explain why the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 increases during El Niño”, the researchers conclude.

A slowing down of the thermohaline circulation as a result of human-caused warming could see the deep oceans acidify more quickly than previously thought, a new study suggests. The research shows that mixing between the surface and deep layers of the Sea of Japan has reduced, increasing the time for organic material to decompose and reducing the pH of the water. As a result, the acidification rate near the bottom of the Sea of Japan is 27% higher than the rate at the surface, the authors say, providing “an insight into how future warming might alter the deep-ocean acidification”.