A powerful Category 4 storm is threatening a direct hit as Hawaii’s worst storm in a quarter century, Reuters reports. Government offices and business closed on Thursday while residents stocked up on supplies and boarded up homes as the storm churned towards the main island of Oahu, it adds. Vox has a piece on “what we know about the storm”, noting: “Scientists will have to do careful work to model whether this storm was made bigger and more powerful by climate change. We already know many storms are made wetter by climate change, and the science predicts that bigger and more powerful storms will become more frequent in the future. And this is, indeed, an enormous storm.” Grist meanwhile asks whether the hurricane “a sign of what’s to come”. “In addition to sea-level rise and coral bleaching, hurricanes are increasingly part of Hawaii’s reality,” it says. A Time piece features images captured from space showing the extent of the storm.

Nearly all cruise ships in Europe are still using highly polluting heavy fuel oil, reports the Independent. Testing by German environmental watchdog Nabu of 77 vessels found only one which did not use the fuel. Nabu has called for action from European ports to prevent the ships from harming people in port towns. Parties of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), the UN’s shipping organisation, are considering a ban on using heavy fuel oil in Arctic shipping.

The push for a large-scale fracking operation in England will fuel the global plastic crisis, the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) has said. The charity argues fracking will exacerbate the global plastic binge. A spokesperson for the government said there was “no correlation between shale gas exploration and increased plastics production”. However, the Guardian reported last year that a huge boom in the US shale gas industry has resulted in a £180bn investment in plastic production facilities by fossil fuel giants.

A floating tidal stream turbine off the coast of Orkney has produced 3GWh of renewable electricity during its first year of testing, reports the Independent. The SR2000 turbine supplied the equivalent annual power demand of about 830 households. The amount of green energy is more Scotland’s entire wave and tidal sector produced in the 12 years before it came online, the Independent adds. Andrew Scott, chief executive officer of developers Scotrenewables Tidal Power, said the SR2000’s performance has “set a new benchmark” for the tidal industry. “Its first year of testing has delivered a performance level approaching that of widely deployed mature renewable technologies.”

“All researchers face the risk of being criticised when speaking publicly about their findings,” notes a piece detailing attacks on female climate scientists. “But women in the field describe being attacked based on their gender.” The piece features several female scientists detailing examples of harassment they have experienced. Those who have been harassed say they want more of their colleagues, especially men, to speak out about the problem, the article says.

“My generation, the millennials, will never know a time when climate change wasn’t a grave threat,” writes Eric Holthaus in Grist. “For years, environmental activists have told us that we could make progress by tinkering with the status quo, that a big part of halting warming is buying the right car, clothes, and moisturiser; avoiding the dirty products; and reforming the way consumer goods are made. And still, the world’s emissions keep climbing.” But the aim of climate activism isn’t to erase the sins of the previous generations, says Holthaus, it’s to “ensure that future generations are handed a world that isn’t at the threshold of going to hell”. “That won’t happen in my lifetime without a truly radical remaking of the global economy. And if it doesn’t happen in my lifetime, then it’s very likely future generations won’t get another chance.”

The crisis in Kerala, where more than 350 people have died due to the severe floods, is a “timely reminder” that climate change is expected to increase the frequency and magnitude of severe flooding across the world, write scientists Parsons and Skinner in The Conversation. They write that, “although no single flood can be linked directly to climate change, basic physics attests to the fact that a warmer world and atmosphere will hold more water, which will result in more intense and extreme rainfall”. It is also important to understand how the behaviour of rivers will shift with a changing climate and pattern of rainfall, the authors add. “How quickly rivers change, and how quickly we respond with urban drainage and flood mitigation measures, will play a significant role in our evolving flood risk,” they write.

“Although models of climate and vegetation change are greatly improving, they remain far from perfect,” write academics Lovejoy and Hannah in an editorial for the journal Science Advances. “For example, on the one hand, recent modelling studies indicate that limiting temperature increase to 1.5C will greatly reduce the impact on the ranges of insect, vertebrate, and plant communities. However, we also know that, since these models do not account for critical climate-sensitive relationships among species, their predictions are serious underestimates.” The editorial goes on to discuss how the “essential unpredictability of nature” in its response to climate change runs counter to the language of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which says emissions should be stabilised at a level which ecosystems will be able to “adapt naturally”. “Today, many researchers are concluding that ecological systems around the planet will not be able to tolerate temperature rise much beyond 1.5C,” they add, concluding that: “We still have time to act upon the recognition that our planet is an intricately linked biological and physical system that holds yet-to-be-understood capacity to heal and clean itself.”

Societies with low levels of flood protection tend to resettle away from rivers after damaging flood events, a new study says, whereas settlements with more protective infrastructure tend not to move. Using nighttime light data collected from satellites for 1993-2013, the authors tracked the relationship between long-term changes in human proximity to rivers and the occurrence of catastrophic flood events. The findings provide a basis to “further investigate human response to floods, which is relevant as urbanisation of floodplains continues and puts more people and economic assets at risk”, the authors say.

A new review study “seeks to understand and interpret the place of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) within the science and politics of climate change”. The relationships between climate science and policy “are undergoing fundamental transformation in light of the Paris Agreement”, the authors say, and the IPCC “will need to be nimble and reflexive in meeting new challenges”. “By adopting a mode of ‘responsible assessment’, the IPCC can continue to exercise its world‐making power in a relevant and legitimate fashion,” the study concludes.

The record number of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean in 2005 could be the maximum possible in the present climate, a new study suggests. The 2005 hurricane season produced 28 named tropical cyclones, 15 of which reached hurricane intensity. Using millennia-long climate model simulations, the researchers estimated the average number of tropical cyclones and their possible year-to-year random variability. The results suggest that “the likelihood that the maximum number of storms in the Atlantic could be greater than the number of events observed during the 2005 season is less than 3.5%”.