The US government has raised doubts about the science of climate change in confidential comments on a major forthcoming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says Climate Home News, which adds that it has seen the nine-page document. The IPCC’s special report, looking at the implications of 1.5C warming and ways it could be avoided, is due to be published next week. Before then, the report summary will be subject to line-by-line approval by government representatives from around the world, meeting with the IPCC authors in South Korea this week. Comments from the US include: “The SPM [summary for policymakers] narrative fails to communicate the scale of the global technological and economic challenge to meet the 1.5C objective,” and also: “There is no discussion – or a summary thereof – in the SPM regarding the credibility of models (or methodologies) used in the report to project future impacts.” The comments are among some 42,000 received by the authors during the process of drafting the report, Climate Home News notes.

New research in Nature Communications suggests that the summer fire season in Mediterranean Europe is going to get worse, says an article in the Conversation. Under 3C of warming, the area that is currently burned each year could double, the research suggests, with a 40% increase even if warming is limited to 1.5C. Separately, Agence-France Presse reports from Los Angeles that severe drought, insect infestation and poor forest management have combined to kill millions of trees in the American West, providing fuel for huge wildfires. “Tree mortality is mainly the result of a vicious cycle involving climate change, which ravages vegetation through repeated episodes of drought,” it explains. Meanwhile, the first part of a new series from Guardian Australia looks at “how climate change is making droughts [in the country] worse”. It explains how coverage of drought frequently fails to make the connection to climate change: “In this drought series, we are going to cut through the same old coverage and tell you something you hear less often. First, we will give you the latest data on the changing climate. We will take you through the current drought conditions, and then put them in historical context with other severe droughts in Australia. We’ll take a look at what effect climate change will have on drought in the future.” Further parts in the series will report from drought-affected areas, look at the history of drought policy and consider new ways to manage the problem.

The Danish government has proposed a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030, with hybrids being banned from 2035, reports Reuters. The plan requires parliamentary approval, it adds. A second Reuters story reports that Mazda is aiming for all its vehicles to incorporate electrification by 2030, though most will be hybrids. A third Reuters piece explains how electric cars are casting a “growing shadow on profits” for carmarkers. It explains: “Consumers resist paying more for electrified vehicles – forcing carmakers to sell them at a bigger loss to meet emissions goals.”

President Trump’s planned tariffs on $250bn of Chinese imports, as well as on metals from Europe, could raise the cost of wind power in the US by as much as 10%, say the head of the American Wind Energy Association and three turbine maker executives, reports Bloomberg. Higher steel prices will be a key part of this, it says. Nevertheless, strong growth in US wind power capacity is expected in 2019 and 2020 “as developers scramble to qualify for the [soon-to-expire tax credit] subsidy,” the article adds. Separately, the Hill reports warnings from US electric car maker Tesla, which says Trump’s tariffs will make it harder to sell cars in China. Meanwhile, BusinessGreen picks up news reported yesterday by the Financial Times, suggesting China’s government will not renew curbs on coal power and steel production this year, as it responds to economic headwinds due to the trade war with the US.

In the New York Times, a feature by Trip Gabriel looks at the role of climate change as a policy issue in the upcoming US midterm elections. It begins with the story of one candidate whose company’s mission is to hasten “our country’s important transition to clean energy”, yet who brings a “much more muted” environmental message to the campaign trail [though the candidate does campaign on solar jobs as a “less divisive way to impart an environmental message”, the paper notes] . The feature continues: “In an election year that has included alarming portents of global warming – record wildfires in the West, 500-year floods in the East, a president walking away from a global climate accord – the one place that climate change rarely appears at all is in the campaigns of candidates for the House and Senate.” It adds: “The vast majority of Democrats and Republicans running for federal office do not mention the threat of global warming in digital or TV ads, in their campaign literature or on social media.” In a comment piece for CNN, Jay Inslee, governor of Washington State writes: “If we don’t start electing people – from city council to governor – who are willing to confront climate change, we’re all going to pay dearly.” The piece is headlined: “How to show Trump you care about climate change.”

In the Guardian, climate activist Bill McKibben decries recent moves from the Trump administration to scrap car fuel efficiency standards and to move detained migrant children to a camp near the Mexican border. McKibben writes: “The news in that statement [on car standards] is that administration officials serenely contemplate that 4C [temperature] rise (twice the last-ditch target set at the Paris climate talks). Were the world to actually warm that much, it would be a literal hell, unable to maintain civilizations as we have known them.” He also links the migrant camp to climate change: “Most of those migrants are from Central America and Mexico, and they might as easily be described as refugees fleeing gang violence (much of it rooted originally in the US) and a changing climate.”

A lengthy feature for the Wall Street Journal – part of a series under the heading “Price of Climate” – looks at how the insurance industry is “at the vanguard of a movement to put a value today on the unpredictable future of a warming planet”. It quotes one insurance executive explaining: “We don’t discuss the question anymore of, ‘Is there climate change’…For us, it’s a question now for our own underwriting.”

The Financial Times has launched the fourth of six instalments from its new guide to the “energy transition” – the long-term restructuring of the energy system away from fossil fuels and towards renewables. The fourth part focuses on “manufacturing and building” and includes features on firms “push[ing] for greener buildings despite Trump” and on mining companies “seek[ing] green power options”.

At Unearthed, Zach Boren writes that the European Commission has reportedly given up on plans to raise the EU’s 2030 carbon target, with critics blaming the German government for “torpedoing” the move. Boren writes: “The EU posturing is just the latest in a series of actions taken by Germany to stifle higher climate ambition where it threatens key industries, including pushing for weaker car emission standards and renewable energy targets. And then there’s Hambach forest, where the energy ministry has backed coal giant RWE in its attempt to clear ancient woodland to make room for the expansion of the country’s biggest lignite mine.” Boren adds that, behind the scenes, the German government has been “quietly taking a number of positions at odds with the country’s Energiewende-inspired green rhetoric”.

The thickening of plant leaves as atmospheric CO2 levels rise could reduce how much carbon vegetation takes up, a new study suggests. Leaves can thicken by as much as a third under elevated CO2 concentrations, the researchers say, making them less efficient in sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. Model simulations using high CO2 levels projected towards the end of the century show a reduced “carbon sink” from plants of around 6.4m tonnes of carbon per year. Reduced evapotranspiration and albedo in the thicker leaves could also cause an additional average warming at the Earth’s surface of 0.3C, the authors note.

Rising global temperatures could see the area burned by summer wildfires in the Mediterranean increase by as much as 100%, a new study suggests. The researchers analysed how warmer and drier conditions in southern Europe would affect wildfires under 1.5C, 2C and 3C above pre-industrial levels. The findings suggest that the “higher the warming level is, the larger is the increase of burned area”, with increases ranging from around 40% to 100% across 1.5C to 3C.