European carbon prices could rise to more than eight Eurosper tonne, according to new figures from market analysts ThompsonReuters Point Carbon. It anticipates a price rise to follow the EUpassing a new measure to withhold millions of permits from themarket, with further reform to come.

England and Wales have endured the wettest winter since atleast 1766, according to new Met Office data. The news comes afterparts of the UK suffered months of flooding, with 14 flood warningsstill in place.

Energydesk takes a closer look at what Europe’s top tenpower companies – EdF, RWE, E.ON, Enel, GdF Suez, Vattenfall,Iberdrola, CEZ, EnBW and PGE. Energydesk’s analysis shows profitsdeclining as energy demand falls and more renewables comeonline.

Dana Nuccitelli looks at the issue of false balance in mediacoverage of climate change after the BBC defended itself forinterviewing climate skeptic former chancellor Nigel Lawson on thesubject.

By pitting badly-informed climate sceptics against climatescientists in media interviews, the BBC is failing its audience,writes scientist Simon Lewis in the journal Nature. There is a needfor strong, well-informed media coverage that can help peopleunderstand climate change and its effects, but in booking NigelLawson to talk about climate, the BBC isn’t providingit.

A University of Edinburgh professor looks at what hedescribes as the “painfully slow” development of carbon capture andstorage (CCS) technology. “Whether CCS emerges from pilot projectsto widely deployed industrial reality depends on the politicalpriorities, courage and credibility of this government, and thenext”, he says.

With the slow-down in surface warming since the late 1990s,what causes surface temperatures to fluctuate over periods of adecade or so has become a focus of attention for assessing climatechange and its impacts. And rightly so, it is of criticalimportance, says a commentary by a leading expert in oceanvariability.

One of the Nature Geoscience special issue papers on thesurface warming slowdown shows how accounting for errors involcanic and solar variations, uncertainty about airborne particlesknown as aerosols and the El Nino cycle can mostly explain whymodels projected stronger warming than we’ve seen in the last 15years.

As climate scientists try to pin down the causes, we mustnot forget that average surface temperatures are only one indicatorof climate change, says the editorial of a new special issue ofNature Geoscience. Sister journal, Nature Climate Change, hada collectionof papers on Wednesdaylooking at communication of the so called ‘pause’ in surfacewarming.