Australia can build new coal plants without leaving the Paris climate deal because it “doesn’t actually bind us to anything in particular”, resources minister Matt Canavan has said, reports the Guardian. A second Guardian article says Australia’s authority in the Pacific is “being eroded” by its lack of action on climate change, according to a “top climate scientist”. The Sydney Morning Herald reports how Pacific leaders have left “no doubt” over their differences with Australia on climate. Separately, Reuters reports that Pacific island nations are seeking a US recommitment to the Paris deal. Writing at the Thomason Reuters Foundation, Christian Aid climate campaigner Mohamed Adow asks if wealthy countries are hiding behind US inaction with attempts to weaken the Paris Agreement. Meanwhile, Climate Home News reports that there will be an early start to the COP24 talks in December, where the Paris “rulebook” implementing the deal is supposed to be finalised. The talks will begin on 2 December, it says, one day earlier than planned.

Installing large numbers of wind and solar farms in the Sahara desert would change the region’s rainfall, vegetation and temperatures, according to new research covered by BBC News and others. “The authors say their work reinforces the view that large-scale renewables could transform the region,” BBC News says. The change in weather patterns – with rainfall potentially doubling around the renewable installations – could encourage plant growth, reports Mail Online. The Independent also has the story.

The US shale oil industry is slowing down due to issues including labour costs and lack of pipeline capacity, reports the Financial Times, citing chief executives of some of the largest production and oilfield services companies. “Evidence is accumulating that the boom in the industry that began two years ago is cooling off,” the paper adds. It says industry executives are debating whether the recent slowdown is a pause or a longer-term end to that rapid growth.

A rare and extreme tsunami generating waves as much as 200 metres high three years ago was caused by a landslide linked to glacier melt, reports the Washington Post. The paper quotes the authors of a new study, who write: “More such landslides are likely to occur as mountain glaciers continue to shrink and alpine permafrost thaws.” The Independent also has the story.

Deep decarbonisation of the electricity system is likely to be cheaper if it uses a mixture of renewable and other low-carbon technologies, according to new research covered by Axios and MIT Technology Review. The study argues that the least-cost approach includes not only cheap wind and solar but also “one or more firm low-carbon resources [such as nuclear, carbon capture and storage, biomass, geothermal or large hydro]”, reports Axios. Excluding these options would raise the cost of a zero-carbon power system by 10-62%, the study suggests.

UK energy regulator Ofgem has proposed to cap home gas and electricity bills at a combined £1,136 a year, the Press Association and others report. The regulator says the cap will save more than 11m households a combined £1bn a year, it adds – around £75 per household on average. The Times, Reuters, Telegraph and BBC News among others also have the story. Ofgem says utilities will earn less profit as a result, reports a second Reuters article. An editorial in the Sun welcomes the move while the leading article in the Times says “energy price caps don’t work…[and] will lead to higher prices overall”.

The US Congress should be wary of legislating to grant oil companies immunity from environmental lawsuits as part of a bill calling for carbon taxes, writes Amy Myers Jaffe for the Financial Times. “Although liability caps for climate change lawsuits sound superficially similar to the one that was eventually crafted for the tobacco industry over smoking, this plan is a raw deal for the public,” she writes. “Tobacco damage claims were limited to the healthcare sector: a fifth of the US population in 2005 smoked. But energy is a critical input to almost all economic activity, and fossil fuels have been relatively ubiquitous especially in transport. The potential liability claims against energy companies found negligent would far exceed the total faced by cigarette makers.”

Efforts to ramp up climate action depend on trust, “an increasingly uncommon resource,” writes former UN climate chief Yvo de Boer, in a comment piece for Climate Home News. “Willingness to raise the level of ambition will depend significantly on confidence that a variety of promises are being kept,” de Boer writes. “As the process to take stock of the Paris agreement and the adequacy of commitments begins, it is critical to examine why we have failed to generate trust between parties so we can learn from the past. It is my firm belief that we have an impressive array of tools at our disposal. Tools that we have failed to put to good use, mainly because of a lack of willingness to show leadership at the highest levels.”

“Climate change represents the biggest challenge and danger to mankind since the Cuban missile crisis [and] we in Ireland are failing woefully in our obligation, as part of the wider global community, to meet emissions targets,” says an editorial in the Irish edition of the Times. It is the latest in a string of editorials on the topic this year. The leader says the idea of an Irish citizens’ climate body with the power to sue the government over inaction on climate change is “intriguing”. It adds: “The government will only play a full role in alleviating global warming if the public decides that it is willing to endure painful reforms.”

Current climate models are too coarse to resolve many of the atmosphere’s most important processes. Traditionally, these subgrid processes are approximated in so-called “parameterisations”. However, imperfections in these parameterisations, especially for clouds, have impeded progress toward more accurate climate predictions for decades. Cloud-resolving models alleviate many of the gravest issues of their coarse counterparts but will remain too computationally demanding for climate change predictions for the foreseeable future. This study uses deep learning to leverage the power of short-term cloud-resolving simulations for climate modeling. Their data-driven model is fast and accurate, thereby showing the potential of machine-learning–based approaches to climate model development.

The oxidizing capacity of the troposphere is controlled primarily by the abundance of hydroxyl radical (OH). The global mean concentration of tropospheric OH has remained relatively constant during the past several decades despite rising levels of methane that should have led to a decline. This study finds that H2O, NOx, overhead O3, and tropical expansion are large enough to counter almost all of the expected decrease in OH due to rising methane over the period 1980 to 2015, while variations in temperature contribute almost no trend in OH.

Glacial retreat in recent decades has exposed unstable slopes and allowed deep water to extend beneath some of those slopes. Slope failure at the terminus of Tyndall Glacier on 17 October 2015 sent 180 million tons of rock into Taan Fiord, Alaska. The resulting tsunami reached elevations as high as 193 m, one of the highest tsunamis ever documented worldwide. Their authors studied the causes of the tsunami, and suggest that an indirect effect of climate change is an increasing frequency and magnitude of natural hazards near glacial mountains.