President Donald Trump wait until after he returns from the G7 leaders’ summit in late May to announce whether the US will pull out of the Paris climate agreement, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters on Tuesday at a White House briefing, Politico reports. “The president has been meeting with his team for quite a while on this matter,” Spicer said. Spicer had previously said the decision would come before the G-7 summit, notes The Hill. Putting off the decision creates an opening for the leaders of Germany, UK and other G-7 nations to make their case to Trump for staying in the deal, notes Bloomberg. ABC News, The Washington Post and Reuters also cover the announcement. Earlier on Tuesday the European Union urged the US to keep funding U.N. agencies and to stay committed to the Paris deal. “”Climate change is real, and is already impacting on our security environment. Everything is linked. So we continue to hope that the United States will find a way to remain committed to the Paris Agreement,” EU Foreign Policy chief Federica Mogherini told the U.N. Security Council. Meanwhile a schism has emerged among defenders of the Paris Agreement over how to respond to US fears it could face legal action if it chooses to “renegotiate” the deal – widely interpreted to mean a downward revision of its national target, reports Climate Home.

A Chinese delegate in Bonn has raised the prospect of retribution from the US pulling out of the Paris Agreement spilling over into other international forums, such as the upcoming G7 and G20 meetings, Climate Home reports. ““Definitely it will impact on other diplomatic arenas, already on G7 and G20, the Major Economies Forum as well,” said Chai Qimin, director of international cooperation at the Chinese government’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation. Chinese President Xi Jinping told French President-elect Emmanuel Macron in a phone call on Tuesday that he would uphold the Paris Agreement on curbing climate change, Reuters reports separately. China and France should “protect the global governance achievements contained within the Paris Agreement on climate change”, Xi told Macron, the Chinese foreign ministry said. According to Macron’s spokesperson Laurence Haim, Macron spoke to the US president Donald Trump on Tuesday following his victory and told him “he’s going to protect what was made in Paris”, reports Energy Live News.

Global warming could threaten the survival of reptiles by reducing the number of bacteria living in their guts, researchers from the University of Exeter and the University of Toulouse have found. In their experiment, warming of 2-3°C caused a 34 per cent loss of microorganism diversity in the guts of common lizards. Similar effect could be seen in other cold-blooded animals too, the researchers said. “More testing is now needed, and it is highly possible that we will see similar effects in other ectotherms (cold-blooded animals such as reptiles and amphibians which depend on external sources of body heat),” said Dr Elvire Bestion, from the Environment and Sustainability Institute at the University of Exeter, who led the study.

Over 1,200 laws have been adopted around the world to curb climate change, up from about 60 two decades ago, according to a new study from the London School of Economics (LSE). “Most countries have a legal basis on which future action can be built,” said Patricia Espinosa, the UN’s climate change chief, at the ongoing international meeting on climate change in Bonn.

Onshore wind has far higher public approval than the Conservative party’s top priorities for energy: nuclear and fracking, writes Keith Barnham, emeritus professor of physics at Imperial College London, in The Guardian. “These have higher carbon footprints and enjoy higher subsidies than renewables. Their low popularity would doubtless fall further if the surveys asked about local reactors or fracking.” If the expansion of renewable power seen under the Tory-Lib Dem coalition elected in 2010 and by 2015 had continued under the next government, an all-renewable UK electricity supply was achievable by 2025, he adds.

Energy policy is one area where it may be politically easier to find common ground, writes Antony Froggatt, senior research fellow in the Energy, Environment and Resources Department at Chatham House. “Given the amount of existing energy trade between the UK and the EU, particularly for electricity, and further plans for decarbonisation and more interconnection across the European continent, it would be unrealistic to remove the UK completely from the EU energy market.”

The Paris Agreement is not the perfect vehicle for reaching a low-carbon future – and “no-one claims it is” writes Dr Camilla Toulmin, an economist at the International Institute for Environment and Development, in a letter published in The Times. “But it has given every government, business and investor an unequivocal direction of travel.” Toulin’s letter reacts to a Times column by columnist Matt Ridley on Monday which attacked the Paris deal.”

The architects of the Paris climate accord deliberately designed it to be supple, writes Brad Plumer in the New York Times, in an effort to make it adaptable to the differing political and economic environments of the nearly 200 countries that signed it. “The authors were mindful of its predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol, which was roundly rejected by the United States because it set binding emissions targets for wealthy countries while letting most developing nations, including China, off the hook.” On the Paris Agreement, which is largely non-binding, imposing no serious legal restraints on the United States the Trump administration faces a different calculus. “While that makes the treaty a less rigorous plan to fight global warming, it also means there are few compelling reasons to exit.”

The recovery time of coral reefs after a bleaching event is getting slower as a result of the stresses of warming oceans and coastal development, a new study says. Using long-term monitoring data for 47 reefs spread out over the Great Barrier Reefs, researchers found that corals took twice as long to recover in the period 2003-09 than they did before the widespread bleaching event of 2002. The results suggest that recovery times will be increasing at a time when bleaching is predicted to become more frequent and intense.

An increase in volcanic activity between 2003 and 2012 reduced the warming trend in global surface temperatures by 0.08C, a new study finds. Researchers used high-resolution climate models to assess the impact of recent volcanic eruptions on the Earth’s temperature in the early 2000s. The results suggest the overall cooling influence of the eruptions was greater towards the end of the period (2008-2012), was similar in winter and summer, and was stronger in the northern hemisphere than the southern.