Many publications in the UK cover a new report by the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), which warns that, according to BBC News, “England’s coastal communities haven’t faced up to the reality of rising seas through climate change”. BBC News adds: “An increase of at least 1m is almost certain at some point in the future, the government’s advisors predict. The CCC warns this huge rise may happen over the next 80 years – within the lifetimes of today’s children. A government spokesman said the public would be protected from the impacts of climate change. But the CCC says current shoreline management plans are unfunded and hopelessly optimistic.” The Guardian says the CCC warns that “existing government plans to ‘hold the line’ in many places – building defences to keep shores in their current position – were unaffordable for a third of [England’s] coast.” The Press Association, via ITV News, says that “as many as 1.5m properties in England will be in areas at significant risk of coastal flooding by the 2080s as sea levels rise”. It adds: “Hundreds of miles of major roads and railway lines, 92 railway stations and even 55 historic landfill sites will be at risk of coastal flooding or erosion by 2100 – raising the risk of old rubbish tips collapsing onto beaches.” The Financial Times notes that the CCC says “it would be uneconomical to protect about 1,600km of coast — or 29% of the English coastline — if sea levels rose by an expected 1 metre by the end of this century”. The Times, New Statesman, Daily Mail, iNews and Daily Telegraph are among the other outlets covering the story. Carbon Brief has also taken an in-depth look at the report.

Reuters reports that Brazil’s presidential front-runner, the far-right Congressman Jair Bolsonaro, said yesterday that he was not now set on leaving the Paris Agreement if elected, going back on a prior pledge to follow Donald Trump’s proposed US withdrawal. Reuters adds: “[His] decision marks a surprising about-face for a candidate who enjoys strong support from Brazil’s powerful agribusiness lobby and has called conservation efforts a threat to Brazilian sovereignty.” Bloomberg also reports the news, saying: “Bolsonaro said he wants guarantees ensuring Brazilian sovereignty over indigenous land and the so-called ‘triple A’ region – a strip of land that runs from the Andes to the Atlantic, passing through the Amazon rain forest. The candidate defended that might exist discussions in the ‘backstage’ of this deal around those regions. ‘Could we run the risk of losing our Amazon in the Paris Accord? You have the answer,’ he said.” Carbon Brief has recently updated its in-depth profile of Brazil ahead of this weekend’s decisive presidential run-off.

Reuters reports that European Union lawmakers voted yesterday to press EU countries and the European Commission to harden their stance on environmental action ahead of UN climate talks in Poland in December. Reuters says: “The bloc’s environment ministers earlier this month agreed a common position that the EU was ready to ‘communicate or update’ its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), the target reduction of greenhouse gases by each country, by 2020. EU lawmakers, in a non-binding resolution, called for concrete targets, recommending countries set an NDC of at least 55% by 2030 to help limit the Earth’s long-term temperature rise to 1.5C…Raising the NDC would require the approval of all 28 EU nations.” Meanwhile, Euractiv reports that the “pro-coal position of Poland’s energy ministry has thrown sand into the country’s climate diplomacy as COP24 president-designate Michał Kurtyka intensifies his diplomatic tour ahead of the UN’s annual climate meeting later this year in Katowice”.

The Times reports that “America’s most valuable car manufacturer has said the hugely successful, cheaper model of its electric car should be coming to the UK by the middle of next year as the chief executive added that it will soon launch a rival to Uber”. Tesla’s Elon Musk says the Model 3 should be taking to Europe’s roads by the middle of 2019. The news comes after the company announced on Wednesday that it had recorded its first quarterly profit in two years, delivering a surplus of $312m in the three months to the end of September, and $881m in free cashflow. This caused Tesla shares to jump 8%, says the Daily Express. Meanwhile, Reuters says that General Motors wants the Trump administration to back a nationwide program to boost the sale of zero-emission vehicles, such as electric cars. And the Guardian reports that “Shell has stepped up its move into electric vehicle infrastructure with the installation of its first ultrafast charging points in western Europe – but they are so powerful that no car currently on sale today would be able to fully exploit them”.

The Times reports that the International Energy Agency (IEA) is warning in a new report that oil-dependent nations, such as Saudi Arabia, face “unprecedented challenges” and it is more essential than ever that they diversify their economy. The rise of shale oil, the growth of electric cars and population growth threaten to erode the finances of countries that rely on income from exporting oil, says the IEA. Carbon Brief has also covered the IEA report in detail.

BBC News’s “Reality Check” team casts its eye on a claim made by Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP, and concludes that she was right to say that energy generated from onshore wind is cheaper than other forms of renewable energy. “The government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has published projections on costs for projects starting in 2020. These include a breakdown of how much it could cost to generate a megawatt hour (MWh) of electricity according to different energy types. The estimates by BEIS show that it will cost £63 to generate a megawatt hour of electricity using onshore wind energy, reinforcing Caroline Lucas’s claim. It’s the cheapest renewable power source listed, in comparison with £106 for offshore wind.” Carbon Brief’s Simon Evans also pointed out on Twitter that it’s “not just the cheapest form of green electricity – it’s the cheapest form of electricity full stop”.

In a feature for E&E News, Scott Waldman takes a closer look at the advice on climate science that the Trump White House has been receiving since late 2016 during the transition: “Though Trump’s comments on climate change are mostly dismissive, they reflect a slight shift in rhetoric, observers say. It might provide clues into the types of research that have reached the president’s attention, whether through a presentation or, more likely, from friends, family or advisers, according to George David Banks, a former White House adviser under Trump…His newest assertions suggest that the president has picked up some new talking points, said Pat Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science at the conservative Cato Institute. He said Trump appears to have been briefed on the contents of his 2016 book, ‘Lukewarming’. He’s glad that Trump no longer calls climate change a “hoax” and doesn’t explicitly reject the role of humans on warming, even if the extent of people’s contribution is unknown, as Michaels sees it. Michaels thinks the president has absorbed the lukewarm argument, which is a line of thinking among skeptical conservatives that claims humans have some effect on climate but are not the primary cause of rising temperatures.” Carbon Brief analysis published last year shows why that view is incorrect and “why scientists think 100% of global warming is due to humans”.

The FT’s US energy editor looks at the civil suit filed this week against Exxon by New York new state’s attorney-general Barbara Underwood: “The attorney-general has built a very different case, which focuses on what the company told its investors about its planning for the risks that curbs on greenhouse gas emissions posed to its business…Even if Exxon finally prevails in court, it will have been a long and bruising experience…It will encourage every other company to think very carefully about what they say about the risks associated with climate change.”

Linden, the author of “Winds of Change: Climate, Weather and the Destruction of Civilizations”, slams the decision by the Nobel committee to jointly award this year’s economics prize to William Nordhaus: “Nordhaus was recognised for his work developing a model to guide policymakers on how best to address the costs and benefits of limiting greenhouse gases. That’s a noble goal, but Nordhaus’ work has no more helped to defuse the threat of global warming than Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Germany prevented World War II. Rather, Nordhaus’ low-ball estimates of the costs of future climate change and high-ball estimates of the costs of containing the threat contributed to a lost decade in the fight against climate change, lending intellectual legitimacy to denial and delay.”

Stern, who served at the US special envoy for climate change from 2009 until 2016, says the “solutions we need are at hand” to tackle climate change: “We can be defeated by the greed of those who know better but can’t walk away from the next dollar; by apathy; by the demagogues whose only objective is to score points, get ratings, get paid. Or we can recognise the stakes, we can learn and discuss, we can vote, and march, and rise to meet this challenge.

This paper calculates the climatic effects of explosive volcanic eruptions between 1979 and 2015 using a more complex climate model simulation than has been used previously. They find that the most powerful eruptions between 1979 and 2015 had a substantial climatic impact, but their effect on climate is about 20% weaker than previous estimates used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is mainly a result of the volcanic aerosol particles affecting ice clouds, making these clouds less transparent. They also find that eruptions of small‐to‐moderate size occur frequently and decrease the transparency of the stratosphere by as much as all non‐volcanic sources of aerosol particles combined. These small‐sized volcanic eruptions therefore cause a small but noticeable surface cooling and so should be included in climate model simulations, which is rarely done.

Estimating climate change impacts on water resources in West Africa has been challenging due to limited available data. This study uses multi-model ensembles of the most recent global and regional climate models outputs to simulate the hydrologic impacts of climate change in five major river basins (i.e. Senegal, Gambia, Volta, Niger and Chad) that comprise most of West Africa. Under Representative Concentration Pathways 4.5 and 8.5, the results consistently project substantial decreases (10 to 40%) in water availability across the five major river basins. In a business-as-usual world, reduced water availability combined with the region’s rapidly growing population will have West Africa facing an unprecedented water deficit during the second half of the twenty-first century. However, greenhouse gas mitigation can help reduce this deficit.