While scientists say that they haven’t determined yet whether Hurricane Harvey was made worse by climate change, as this involves intricate calculations that can take weeks or months to complete, they have said that warmer air and water mean wetter and possibly more intense hurricanes in the future, the Associated Press reports. “This is the kind of thing we are going to get more of”, said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientists at Princeton University. This is because warmer air holds more water – with every 1C of warming, the atmosphere can hold and release an extra 7% of water, scientists tell AP. “While Harvey wasn’t caused by climate change, warmer air and water temperatures contributed to up to 75cm rainfall, and resulting flooding, in the area”, New Scientist writes. Elsewhere the US Environmental Protection Agency has rejected the suggestion by scientists that the historic rainfall from the hurricane was linked to global warming, labelling it “an attempt to politicize an ongoing tragedy”, Reuters reports. Myron Ebell, who headed the EPA’s transition team when Trump became president, said the last decade has been a period of ‘low hurricane activity’, the Guardian reports. The storm has shut down nearly a fifth of the US’ total oil refining capacity, with at least 3.6 million barrels per day offline in Texas and Louisiana, “triggering worries about a gasoline supply crunch”, according to a separate Reuters article. Experts say that this raises questions about the area’s role as a hub for such crucial and environmentally sensitive industries, the New York Times writes. “Over the long term, the [US] energy sector will have to consider the costs of additional hardening of the infrastructure on the Gulf Coast versus moving to a different location like the Eastern Seaboard”, Michael E Webber, deputy director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, told the NY Times. Bloomberg has a photo essay on the “havoc” wreaked by the hurricane across Texas. Inside Climate News, the Washington Post, Climate Home and the Hill also have the story while the Guardian has written a Q&A on climate change and the hurricane. The Financial Times looks at the reverberations the storm could have on the world’s energy market.

Hundreds of people are believed to have been killed and thousand displaced in severe flooding across much of the South Asian subcontinent, as the culmination of “unusually severe monsoon rains”, the Financial Times reports. “As well as water infrastructure shortcomings”, the FT writes, “the recent flooding reflects rainfall of a volume unusual even by the standards of the South Asian monsoon, adding to concerns that climate change is raising the frequency of extreme weather events in the region.” Grist also carries the story.

The US secretary of state Rex Tillerson has informed Congress that America will no longer appoint a special envoy for climate change, the official that leads the US delegation to the UN climate talks, Climate Home reports. Tillerson’s letter outlined plans to abolish 36 out of 66 special envoy positions.

Water levels in the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water have dropped a total of 1.5m from 1996 to 2015. A new study has linked this increased evaporation primarily to raised surface air temperatures, likely due to climate change. According to the research, published in Geophysical Research Letters, the decline will likely continue as the planet warms, and could threaten shallow spawning grounds for unique species.

A last-ditch legal challenge has been brought by anti-fracking protesters, to be heard today and tomorrow, that seeks to overturn planning consent that was granted to Cuadrilla to frack in Lancashire. Cuadrilla began drilling at its Preston New Road site this month and said it expects to frack at the end of the year, the Guardian reports.

In a comment piece for BusinessGreen, Matthew Rivers, who is special advisor on forestry and sustainability at Drax, responds to criticism of biomass, arguing that the technology acts as a guarantee of reliable supply as the UK grid goes low-carbon. “No matter how much they are capable of generating, [renewables] cannot provide all of the power required, exactly when it’s demanded. We have to have a mix of technologies on the system if we are to keep the lights on and costs down”, Rivers argues. “Biomass is accused of being polluting. But the data shows that as well as being a low carbon alternative to coal, using biomass leads to a reduction in other harmful emissions”, he continues. Carbon Brief has previously taken a detailed look into whether burning biomass helps to solve climate change.

An interactive data visualisation in the New York Times challenges the reader to find a way of staying within our remaining carbon budget for staying under 2C of warming, by exploring “more than 8,100 climate scenarios”, and adjusting them for the world’s major emitters. The feature notes that the US has “played an outsize role here, responsible for about 20% of emissions despite having just 4.4% of the world’s population”, and that “overall, countries in the developed world account for 19% of the world’s population but are responsible for more than half of all emissions to date.”

“Though the links [to climate change] are clear and obvious, most reports on Hurricane Harvey have made no mention of the human contribution to it” writes George Monbiot in the Guardian. “Our greatest predicament, the issue that will define our lives, has been blotted from the public’s mind”, he says. But “by failing to make the obvious link and talk about climate breakdown, media organisations ensure our greatest challenge goes unanswered. They help push the world towards catastrophe”, Monbiot warns. Elsewhere Vernon Loeb, managing editor of the Houston Chronicle, brings a local perspective to the debate, writing in the Washington Post. He argues that “Harvey should be the turning point in fighting climate change”. “It may not be too late to save the planet if we heed Harvey’s hard lesson here in Texas, a proud state that doesn’t like to be messed with”, Loeb concludes.

Coastal cities are at risk of flooding from multiple sources – including extreme coastal high tide, storm surges, and high river flows – yet flood hazard assessments often only include one of these drivers, a new study says. The researchers propose a new assessment approach that accounts for compound flooding from river flow and coastal water level. Their results show that future sea level rise increases the flood risk by itself, but also exacerbates the compounding effects of other flood drivers.

The risk of heat and drought-induced stress on forests will increase significantly as the climate warms, a new study suggests, but will be partially offset by rising humidity and atmospheric CO2. Using a dynamic soil–plant–atmosphere model, researchers assessed mortality risks for 13 types of temperate and tropical forest across the world. The increase in mortality risk is expected to be higher for needleleaf forests than for broadleaf forests, the study finds.