The White House is “fiercely divided” over president Trump’s pledge to withdraw from the Paris climate deal, reports the New York Times. Steve Bannon is urging Trump to pull out, but is being opposed by secretary of state Rex Tillerson, the president’s daughter Ivanka and a “slew of foreign policy advisers and career diplomats”. These people “fear the move could have broad and damaging diplomatic ramifications”, the Times says.

The White House is targeting climate change programmes in a budget proposal that would cut funds for the US Environmental Protection Agency by a quarter, reports Reuters. It adds that an EPA scheme on cutting emissions from methane would be cut by 70% under the plans. The Trump administration wants to “zero out” many climate schemes, says a Climate Central report on the plans. EPA administrator Scott Pruitt has defended some of the programmes targeted for cuts, reports the Hill, but his comments “did not address…climate change funding”. Former EPA officials are appealing for continued efforts to protect the environment, reports InsideClimate News. Meanwhile the senate has confirmed Rick Perry as secretary of energy, reports the Hill. Perry is the former governor of Texas, a state that expanded both gas and wind during his tenure, notes Bloomberg. Perry famously vowed to abolish the department he will now lead, says Vox. Now he is in post, we will find out whether he believes in a role for government energy R&D, Vox adds. Separately, the US EPA has withdrawn a request for methane information from oil and gas companies, reports Reuters. The request for extensive information about equipment and methane emissions was part of a last-ditch Obama administration climate initiative, says the Washington Post.

New research shows Spring is arriving earlier than ever across the Northern Hemisphere. The Woodland Trust also reported Spring was “well and truly on its way” in the UK on 3 February with snowdrops and hazel catkins recorded across the country. “Such tangible signs of global warming are potentially dangerous as natural rhythms that have existed for thousands of years are getting out of sync,” writes Ian Johnson in the Independent. Meanwhile, In some parts of the US, the season just breezed in three weeks ahead of schedule, writes Amy McDermott in Grist.

Current frontrunner in the French election Emmanuel Macron has criticised the environmental policies of President Trump. “Mr Trump would be making a grave mistake by going back on his predecessor’s commitments towards the climate,” Macron said, speaking after he announced his election manifesto. the Independent also has the story.

In an effort to assess confidence in climate models, Ronald Stouffer and Sykuro Manabe evaluate projections of rises in surface temperature from over 25 years ago with observations made during the past half century. They find it is “broadly in qualitative agreement with that of observed change.” They write “[T]he projections shown here were made before the observations confirmed them as being correct, striking at the heart of the argument that modellers tune their models to yield the correct climate change results.” Carbon Brief interviewed Manabe in 2015, following its survey of climate scientists which showed a 1967 paper he co-authored was considered the most influentialof all time.

An Editorial in Nature Climate Change argues it is the public rather than politicians who need to be engaged to protect science-based policymaking. It argues cultural institutions and the arts can help to connect climate change data to people’s lives. “Museums and galleries provide impartial platforms to disseminate climate and science messages beyond the echo chamber, but scientists can contribute by thinking about new ways to make their data accessible and personally meaningful.” The new issue also several comment pieces in the same edition on communicating climate change, including on the role of museums in engaging the public on climate change and the role of community-orientated social movement organisation.

Regulation of nuclear energy post-Brexit is emerging as one of the most difficult and pressing issues to resolve, write Andrew Ward and Alex Barker in the Financial Times, quoting one senior negotiator simply who called it “a nightmare”. This is because the government insists the UK’s departure from the EU will require it to withdraw from Euratom, the pan-European body that regulates the use of nuclear energy and oversees Britain’s plutonium stockpile.

Chris Goodall puts forward a detailed argument for why the UK should link its gas and electricity markets by using power-to-gas technologies on a wide scale. He writes: “Although we can make huge progress in adjusting electricity use to varying supply, ‘demand response’ will never be enough to deal with weeks of low wind speed and little sun in northern countries. I want to put forward the view that there is only one way to deal with this problem. When power is in surplus, it needs to be turned into natural gas.”

Between 2001-2013, the positive phase of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation produced a cooling effect that overwhelmed the warming coming from increased greenhouse gases, says a new study. The IPO turned negative again in 2014, however, triggering a period of accelerated global warming that now appears to be underway. The world experienced record high global mean surface temperature in 2014, 2015, and 2016, the study notes.

In a model experiment simulating the effect of solar radiation management, researchers found that despite geoengineering offsetting part of the rise in global temperature, the northern North Atlantic still warmed. This is to do with the behaviour of a major ocean circulation pattern, known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, say the researchers, who add that transporting warm water northwards could have consequences for the Greenland icea sheet, Arctic sea ice and permafrost.

A study investigating the impact of the El Niño Southern Oscillation on hydroelectric power generation around the world finds that more than a third of dams suffer anomalies in their annual production when exposed to El Niño and La Niña in model simulations. The scientists modelled the effect on 1593 dams, representing more than half of the world’s hydropower capacity. Though they found biggest impacts on production in the Northwest Unites States, South America, Central America, the Iberian Peninsula, Southeast Asia and Australia the positive and negative effects cancel each other out at a global level, leading to a weak and statistically insignificant net trend overall.