There is extensive media coverage of President Trump’s visit to the Vatican yesterday in which the Pope gave him his encyclical on environmental stewardship, with its hard focus on climate change, as a gift. The Mail describes the 184-page gift as some “light reading”, whereas many other publications note the pointed, timely message being sent by the Pope. The Mirror says its shows that the Pope is “actually kind of badass”. The Hill notes that Trump – not known for his love of books, according to Climate Home – said he would read it. BBC News has even devoted its “Reality Check” feature to explaining “what’s in document Pope gave as gift to Trump?” Carbon Brief covered the papal encyclical in detail when it was first published in mid-2015, including an in-depth feature about the document’s underlying science. Meanwhile, with Trump now in Brussels and soon set to travel to Scilly for this weekend’s G7 summit, many publications focus on Trump’s final decision on the US’s participation in the Paris Agreement, which he has promised will be made at the meeting. The Independent reports that “Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and other world leaders – but not, apparently, Theresa May – will try to convince Donald Trump that the US should remain part” of the deal. The Financial Times says the European leaders will “mount a last-minute effort” to persuade Trump to stick to the deal. Reuters carry the overnight quotes of Rex Tillerson who told reporters of Air Force One that Trump still hasn’t made a final decision on the Paris deal. Back in the US, the Hill reports that 40 Senate Democrats have sent Trump a letter telling him not to pull the US out of the deal, stressing it would be a “historic misstep”. Politico reports the views of California governor Jerry Brown who believes that Trump is a political “realist” who who will likely listen to what Pope Francis, China and other world leaders are saying on the key issue – and that progress under his administration may be “not as disastrous as we thought a few months ago”. In his blog on the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit website, Richard Black observes that this week “it’s certain that Donald Trump has never before had such an extended and pluralistic dip in a markedly non-American pool, with such a rich cast of characters. It’ll be intriguing to see how he emerges, and how he views the Paris Agreement at the end of it.”

Jim Ratcliffe, the petrochemicals billionaire, has stepped up his expansion into the oil and gas industry with a deal worth up to $1.3bn for Dong Energy’s North Sea operations. Dong Energy, the world’s biggest offshore wind farm developer, decided last year to offload its fossil fuels division to focus on renewable energy. Ineos has agreed to acquire the Danish company’s entire oil and gas business, which owns production of about 100,000 barrels a day in Norwegian, Danish and UK waters. The Guardian says that Ineos is “sanguine” about the relatively low oil price of about $50 a barrel, as it would keep costs low. “We’re of the opinion that hydrocarbons, and gas in particular, are still a significant part of the energy equation for the world for many years to come,” says Ineos’s Geir Tuft. Around 440 Dong staff will transfer to Ineos. The Telegraph and Financial Times also report the story, with the FT’s Lex column adding the Ineos is less tolerant of “the green policy vacillations to which Dong is inherently subject”. However, “scrubbed up nicely as a pure renewables play, [Dong] can nevertheless hope for a higher forward earning multiple than 12 times currently.”

The central aim of the Australian government’s plan to protect the Great Barrier Reef is no longer achievable due to the dramatic impacts of climate change, experts have told the government’s advisory committees for the plan. Environmental lawyers said the revelation could mean the Great Barrier Reef might finally be listed as a “world heritage site in danger”, a move the federal and Queensland governments have strenuously fought. A meeting of the Reef 2050 advisory committee, whose role is to provide advice to ministers on implementing the plan, two experts from government science agencies said improving the natural heritage values of the reef was no longer possible. The Guardian adds: “With climate change causing unprecedented back-to-back mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, killing almost half of the coral, and with the risk of those events set to increase in the coming years, loss of coral cover and biodiversity was virtually assured.”

A powerful industrial lobby group in the US has moved to withdraw from a landmark climate change lawsuit brought against the federal government by 21 young people, arguing that it trusts the Trump administration to fight the case. The Washington Post says: “In a surprise reversal, the National Association of Manufacturers filed court documents on Monday saying it no longer wanted to fight alongside the federal government in the children’s lawsuit. The lawsuit argues that young people have been harmed by the failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming…But activists suggested the group’s request to withdraw was a sign that industry was feeling uneasy about landing up on the opposite of the children who brought the lawsuit — as well as sweeping requests for information from their lawyers.”

Federal officials in the US have launched an investigation into whether the government should impose tariffs on certain imported solar panel technology. The investigation, announced by the International Trade Commission (ITC), responds to a petition filed last month by bankrupt solar manufacturer Suniva Inc. The company accused China and other Asian nations of “flooding” the US with solar cells and modules and called for emergency tariffs and price floors for four years, the maximum allowable time. The ITC said that it would formally investigate and consider whether to recommend that President Trump impose such trade “safeguards”.

In a “sign of growing tensions between scientists and the Trump administration”, reports the Washington Post, researchers have published a scientific paper that was conceived and written as an explicit refutation to an assertion by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt about climate change. The study, in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, sets up a direct test of a claim by Pruitt, made in written Senate comments following his confirmation hearing, that “over the past two decades satellite data indicates there has been a levelling off of warming.” After reviewing temperature trends contained in three satellite data sets going back to 1979, the paper concludes that the data sets show a global warming trend — and that Pruitt was incorrect.

The number of frost-free days in the northern US has increased by more than 13 days in the past 100 years, according to new research published in Nature Communications. The other main areas of the mainland US also saw significant increases in the number of days without frost, essentially the growing season – 10.7 days in the west, 8.6 in a central region and 7.7 days in the south. Global warming was one of the reasons for the trend, but the researchers also found changes to local cloud cover and atmospheric circulation patterns played a part.

Participants in Europe’s carbon market expect EU carbon prices to be lower than predicted in the next decade, making it less attractive to invest in the technology needed to help hit emissions targets. Average carbon prices are likely to be almost 9% lower than forecast last year, shows a survey of 135 companies published by the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA). “Once again IETA members have highlighted the yawning gap between current prices and what’s needed to achieve the Paris objectives,” says Jonathan Grant, a director at PwC. Reuters says that respondents anticipate an average EU carbon price of 16.28 euros ($18.31) per tonne in the fourth phase of the ETS, which runs from 2021 to 2030, some 1.55 euros below expectations made for the phase last year. The expected average price is less than half the 40 euros per tonne that respondents said last year is needed to help incentivise investments to help the bloc meet goals set under the Paris Agreement.

Hedegaard, the former European commissioner for climate action and current chair of the KR Foundation, notes that countries are meeting soon to discuss the rules that will govern the international aviation emissions agreement reached last year. “Without transparency, there is a risk that emission reductions credited to the aviation sector could be double-counted in the Paris Agreement, weakening overall climate ambition,” she warns. “Transparency can be achieved if each airline is required to disclose its total emissions each year, and document that it is meeting its goals under the agreement. All programs that supply emission reductions to the airlines must provide assurances that these reductions aren’t being claimed by anyone else.”

Bloomberg’s feature focuses on the researcher of Justin Ritchie, a Ph.D. candidate in resources and the environment at the University of British Columbia, who has published a paper in the journal Energy Economics. Ritchie and his co-author found that “there may not be enough accessible coal to fuel the worst-case scenario of global warming”. The paper looks at “all geologically identified coal, not the fraction it may be possible to dig out”. Bloomberg adds: “To get to the dark future of [the IPCC’s] RCP 8.5 [worst-case emissions scenario], Ritchie found, you’d have to burn more coal than anyone should expect to be dug up. This pathway for future warming, often considered a business-as-usual scenario, wasn’t likely. The discovery that there’s a whole lot less coal to burn would seem a gift to skeptics of climate change and opponents of climate policy. But Ritchie’s paper is a double-edged sword. The same finding that shrinks CO2 emissions may also lower the cost of dealing with global warming, making the Paris Agreement that addresses climate change easier to achieve.”

The FT’s Alphaville column carries a guest post by Kate Mackenzie, a former FT journalist now with the Climate Institute, who notes a recent Twitter meme highlighting how “consistently terrible” the International Energy Agency (IEA) is at showing how clean energy might play in any of its scenarios. She says: “the IEA doesn’t help its “not forecasts” cause by frequently also using the word “projections” – for example, when describing what its World Energy Model does. Another problem might be that not many people are familiar with “scenarios”, in their correct sense. Predictions and forecasts are far more marketable, if you are in the business of selling people advice. It’s hard to know for sure how big those factors are. But if both the New Policy and the Current Policy scenarios keep getting it wrong on renewables – and consistently wrong in the same way — then perhaps some reflection is due.”

Liebreich begins by saying that “for years, the most common question asked by outsiders of those in the clean energy industry was ‘when will renewable energy be grid-competitive'”. But things are changing quickly, he notes: “We are approaching a twilight zone in which, while large-scale renewable power itself no longer needs subsidies, it seems to need other technologies to be subsidized or offered protected markets in order to enable its continued growth…All this, of course, provides fertile grounds for pushback from opponents of renewable energy, who have been quietly shifting their focus from grid competitiveness to overall system costs. In the UK this takes the form of a campaign to demand mythically precise “integration costs” be identified for renewable energy projects (but not conventional projects) and charged to their owners.” He has six ideas to challenge this.

A new satellite study of 1689 high-elevation wetlands in the Bolivian Cordillera Real over the last 30 years demonstrates how pristine mountain environments can act as ‘ecosystem sentinels’ for climate change. The three-decades of data appear to show the wetlands are highly sensitive to glacier melting, resulting in a increase in the total wetland area but a tendency for wetlands in non-glaciated catchments to dry out. The authors suggest satellite-based monitoring of ecosystem sentinels could help fill in information gaps, especially in less-developed countries.

Countries hit hardest by weather-related disasters do not necessarily spend more on commercial weather and climate information services than less vulnerable countries, says a new study. An examination of private and public spending in over 180 countries between 2010 and 2015 revealed no relationship between those most affected by weather events and spending per capita. The biggest spender was East Asia and the Pacific at $16.5 billion in 2014-2015, whereas Sub-Saharan Africa spent less than $1.4 billion in the same time period. Improving the design and delivery of weather and climate services in the most affected locations could ultimately save lives, protect infrastructure, and move people out of poverty, the paper concludes.