Britain’s low carbon energy revolution is actually saving money for households, a report says. Households make a net saving of £11 a month, according to analysis from the Committee on Climate Change. The BBC adds that it calculates that subsidies to wind and solar are adding £9 a month to the average bill, but that rules promoting energy efficiency save £20 a month. The BBC adds that the “finding will be challenged by groups which say the UK spends too much on renewable energy”, but it also quotes Iain Wright MP, chair of the Commons Business and Energy Committee: “The big energy companies are too quick to blame green policies from government for unjustifiable price increases. There are enormous opportunities in the UK moving to a low carbon economy.” The CCC report is covered widely elsewhere, with papers choosing contrasting headlines. The Times says, “‘Cheap’ green policies will cost households £200 year by 2030”. The Guardian says, “UK climate targets ‘will raise household energy bills by £100 in a decade’.” However, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Press Association, Independent, Reuters and BusinessGreen all focus on how the UK’s climate policies have not pushed up energy bills. Carbon Brief has also covered the CCC report’s findings in depth.

The survival of the Great Barrier Reef hinges on urgent moves to cut global warming because nothing else will protect coral from the coming cycle of mass bleaching events, new research has found. The study – which is widely reported by the world’s media today – of three mass bleaching events on Australian reefs in 1998, 2002 and 2016 found coral was damaged by underwater heatwaves regardless of any local improvements to water quality or fishing controls. The research, authored by 46 scientists and published in Nature, raises serious questions about Australia’s long-term conservation plan for its famous reef. The Washington Post says the findings are “sobering”. Prof Terry Hughes, on of the authors, says: “I’m confident that we’ll still have coral reefs if we can keep below 2C. I don’t think we’ll keep below 1.5C… We’re running out of time.” The New York Times has another quote from Hughes: “We didn’t expect to see this level of destruction to the Great Barrier Reef for another 30 years.” The Financial Times, Inside Climate News, Reuters, Associated Press and Time are among the others carrying the story. Carbon Brief also covers the paper’s findings.

Scientists on both sides of the Atlantic have become embroiled in a war of words over energy from trees, says BBC News. A recent Chatham House report claimed that burning wood for electricity is worse for the climate than using coal. (See Carbon Brief‘s coverage at the time.) It sparked a backlash from a group of 125 academics in the field who said the research was deeply flawed. Now supporters of the original study have hit back, saying that to avoid dangerous warming the world needs to plant more trees, not burn them. A group of 125 academics, from Europe and the US, have attacked the Chatham House study saying it “gives an inaccurate interpretation of the impact of harvesting on forest carbon stock”. It presumes that forests would continue to grow if no biomass was used for bio-energy which is “unrealistic”. But now another group of more than 50 scientists involved in this field have written in support of the original study.

An £8m fund to help restore Scotland’s peatlands has been launched by the Scottish government. The restoration work will help reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by locking carbon into the environment. It is estimated there are 1.7m hectares of peatland in Scotland, much of which is eroding. The funding will double the amount already restored from almost 10,000 hectares to 20,000. A significant increase in peatland restoration forms part of Scotland’s draft Climate Plan, which is currently going through parliament.

President Trump’s administration has been contacting US energy companies to ask them about their views on the Paris Agreement, according to two sources with knowledge of the effort. Reuters says it’s “a sign Trump is reconsidering his 2016 campaign pledge to back out of the deal”. The sources said many of the companies reached by the administration had said they would prefer the US remains in the pact, but would also support reducing US commitments in the deal. Reuters adds that one of its sources said the companies were “publicly traded fossil fuel companies” and added the White House would consider their input in making a decision on the Paris accord shortly. The source said the White House has been leading the discussions with the fossil fuel companies and the State Department, which represents the US in climate negotiations, had not taken part.

Three independent energy suppliers with more than a million customers between them have backed calls to cap the difference between companies’ most expensive and cheapest deals, reports the Times. Ovo Energy, Utility Warehouse and Octopus Energy have thrown their weight behind the proposal by John Penrose, MP, a former Tory minister, to introduce a “relative price cap” on energy bills. The move is due to be debated in parliament today as more than 50 cross-party MPs back a motion calling for immediate action to tackle rip-off energy prices, amid anger over recent increases to big suppliers’ standard tariffs. The Daily Telegraph says energy companies are “braced for a sharp political backlash” at today’s Commons debate. The Financial Times interviews Iain Conn, chief executive of Centrica, who says a “cap would almost certainly remove choice from the market”.

Climate change played a major role in the extreme air pollution events suffered recently by China and is likely to make such “airpocalypses” more common, new research published in the journal Science Advances has revealed. The fast-melting ice in the Arctic and an increase in snowfalls in Siberia, both the result of global warming, are changing winter weather patterns over east China, scientists found. Periods of stagnant air are becoming more common, trapping pollution and leading to the build up of extreme levels of toxic air. The work is the latest to show that changes in the rapidly warming Arctic are already leading to severe impacts for hundreds of millions of people across North America, Europe and Asia. The US has also seen a rise in episodes of stagnant air, which may be leading to higher air pollution there.

Public concern about climate change in the U.S. is at an all-time high, according to a new Gallup survey. Forty-five percent of the poll’s respondents say they worry about global warming “a great deal,” while 62% believe its effects are already occurring. Overall, 68% of participants — the highest level reported yet — said they believe climate change is driven by human activities, while 29% attribute it to natural causes and 3% had no opinion. The Washington Post says these findings are up from a previous high in 2007, when a similar poll found that 41% of respondents worried greatly about climate change. The Washington Post also covers the new poll, under the headline: “Don’t look now, but reality is winning the climate debate”.

Official data from the EU and the UK government have this week “underlined the growing strength of the continent’s renewables industry”, confirming renewable energy delivered almost 17 per cent of the EU’s energy during 2015, reports BusinessGreen. The EU’s statistics agency Eurostat released an update detailing how the bloc is on track to meet its target to source 20% of energy from renewable sources by 2020, with 11 member states having already met their national targets for the end of the decade. Sweden led the way, comfortably beating its national target with more than 50% of its energy coming from renewables in 2015. The UK also has a lot of ground to make up with its 2015 performance falling 6.8 percentage points short of its 15% renewables share target. The UK government released its annual update to its energy and emissions projections yesterday, confirming that it expects low carbon energy to play an increasingly dominant role in the UK energy mix.

In the first of a series of new posts, Warren Pearce, a research fellow at the University of Sheffield, introduces the “Making Climate Social” academic project. It seeks to “get under the skin of the social media revolution and what it means for climate change communication”. Questions that will be addressed include: “How do climate change experts negotiate a social media landscape that is said to substitute quality of information for quantity? Are there explanations for polarisation in climate change communication that go beyond questions of cultural values and political affiliation?”

Forbes has published a feature by Ethan Siegel, an astrophysicist and science writer, looking back at a seminal paper published 50 years ago by Syukuro Manabe and Richard T Wetherald, which modelled the world’s climate. “They got almost everything exactly right,” says Siegel. He adds: “The big advance of Manabe and Wetherald’s work was to model not just the feedbacks but the interrelationships between the different components that contribute to the Earth’s temperature. As the atmospheric contents change, so do both the absolute and relative humidity, which impacts cloud cover, water vapour content and cycling/convection of the atmosphere. What they found is that if you start with a stable initial state – roughly what Earth experienced for thousands of years prior to the start of the industrial revolution – you can tinker with one component (like CO2) and model how everything else evolves.” In 2015, Carbon Brief interviewed Manabe. In a separate Carbon Brief article, his paper was voted by fellow climate scientists as the “most influential climate paper of all time”.

One of China’s worst winter haze events on record wasn’t just down to air pollution, but it was also a consequence of human-caused climate change, a new study says. In January 2013, the East China Plains suffered from unprecedented large-scale haze lasting almost an entire month – the so-called “airpocalypse.” The extended haze was partly down to changing wind patterns caused by declining Arctic sea ice in autumn and an unusually large amount of recent snow in the early winter. If sea ice continues to melt, similar poor ventilation conditions may occur more frequently in eastern China winters, the study says, which provides “a strong incentive for greenhouse gas emission reduction.”

Observations unequivocally show that Iran has been rapidly warming over recent decades, a new study says, triggering a wide range of climatic impacts. Using daily records for ground-based weather stations across Iran, the researchers find that Iran has warmed by nearly 1.3C between 1951 and 2013. As a result, Iran has seen an increase in the frequency of heat extremes and a decrease in cold extremes. In addition, the study finds that annual rainfall has declined by 8 mm per decade, causing an expansion of Iran’s dry zones.

Blending conventional fuel with biofuel could reduce particle emissions from aircraft engines at cruise conditions by 50-70%, a new study suggests. Researchers flew test flights of a NASA DC‐8 aircraft using conventional fuel and a 50:50 blend with biofuel derived from Camelina oil. Aerosols released by aircraft engines contribute to the formation of clouds high up in the atmosphere, which have an overall warming effect on the climate, the authors note.