Two tropical storms are wreaking havoc on lives and livelihoods after making landfall on opposite ends of the earth over the weekend: Tropical storm Florence has battered the Carolinas with persistent rain and dangerous flooding, while Typhoon Mangkhut slammed the northern Philippines and Hong Kong before moving into mainland China. Mangkhut, which had been the equivalent of a Category 5 hurricane, made landfall on the the Philippines’ largest island, Luzon, in the early hours of Saturday, reports the New York Times. Maximum sustained wind speeds slowed to about 120 miles per hour (mph), but were still gusting to 200mph. The Washington Post says the death toll has risen to at least 69 with dozens missing. Nearly 100 gold miners are feared dead after a landslide in province of Bengue, reports the Philippine Star. In China, state media reported that at least four people had died in the coastal province Guangdong. The meteorological administration said Mangkhut was one of the 10 biggest storms to hit southeast China since records began in 1949, reports Reuters. The storm also left a swath of damaged buildings and scores of injuries in Hong Kong and Macau, says another Reuters piece. Water levels surged 3.5 metres in some places and waves swamped roads, washing into some residential blocks and a mall in the eastern Heng Fa Chuen district. Meanwhile, Florence made landfall in North Carolina on Friday as a tropical storm, bringing over 30 inches of rain in some areas, says Reuters. That is a new record, says Vox. At least 16 people have died in North and South Carolina, while more than 900 people were rescued from rising floodwaters and 15,000 remained in shelters in the state. The Hill reports that nearly one million people lost power and also that President Trump approved a disaster declaration for North Carolina on Saturday. Florence has now weakened to a tropical depression, says Reuters. Speaking to 17 meteorologists and scientists who study climate change or hurricanes, the Associated Press find that “a few experts remain cautious about attributing global warming to a single event, but most of the scientists clearly see the hand of humans in Florence”. Bloomberg says “Yes, you can blame bad storms on climate change”, while the South China Morning Post looks at how climate change could cause more “mega-storms” like Mangkhut and Florence. The two destructive tropical storms raise questions about the influence of human-caused global warming, resilience to disaster and environmental justice, reports Climate Homes News. Yeb Saño, director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia, said Typhoon Mangkhut brought further evidence of the need to hold the fossil fuel industry to account for climate damages. “Every super storm will have the fingerprints of climate change. As such, every life lost, every acre of crops destroyed, every house blown away, every bit of culture forever gone, is partly because of the injustice of climate change,” he said.

NASA has launched a new satellite into orbit to measure the condition of Earth’s ice cover. The mission, called ICESat-2, should provide more precise information on how he ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica in particular contribute to sea level rise. The mission is a successor to the original Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite that operated from 2003 to 2009, says the Daily TelegraphSince then the agency’s Operation IceBridge has continued to carry out measurements with airborne instruments. The new satellite will collect more than 250 times as many measurements as the first ICESat. It was provide “a phenomenal picture” of changes in the planet’s ice sheets and water, Tom Neumann, deputy project scientist for the new satellite, told the New York Times: “It’s going to enable science discoveries in the cryosphere and polar research for years to come”. The new satellite launches just as a container ship has become the first to navigate an Arctic sea route “that Russia hopes will slash sea transport times from Asia to Europe”, reports the Times. Meanwhile, the Guardian reports that California is set to launch its own satellite to track greenhouse gases. On the last day of a week-long summit in San Francisco, California governor Jerry Brown said the state would launch “our own satellite, our own damn satellite, to figure out where the pollution is”. The data collected, including on CO2 emissions and methane leaks from oil and gas operations, could be made public as part of a partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund. Reuters, the Hill and the San Francisco Chronicle also have the story.

Environment secretary Michael Gove has stressed the need for the UK to reduce its carbon emissions, linking the summer’s extreme weather with climate change. Speaking on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday, Gove said the country has “a lot more we need to do” to tackle the issue. “Everyone will have been aware that the weather events of this summer reinforce the nature of climate change and it poses a challenge to us all,” he said. “Not only do we need to make sure that we produce less carbon into our atmosphere, that greenhouse gas emissions drop, we also need to take steps to deal with that change in our climate.”

Europe’s animal farming sector has exceeded safe bounds for greenhouse gas emissions, nutrient flows and biodiversity loss, and urgently needs to be scaled back, according to a new report. The study, from the Rural Investment Support For Europe (RISE), endorses a Greenpeace call for halving meat and dairy production by 2050. The report calls for the European commission to set up a formal inquiry to propose measures – including taxes and subsidies – that “discourage livestock products harmful to health, climate or the environment”. Launching the report, the EU’s former environment commissioner Janez Potocnik said: “Unless policymakers face up to this now, livestock farmers will pay the price of their inactivity. ‘Protecting the status quo’ is providing a disservice to the sector”, reports the Independent.

At the close of last week’s Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, cities, states and business from around the world called on national governments to redouble their efforts to fight climate change. The ‘call to action’ asks nations to update their pledges to the Paris Agreement at a meeting hosted by UN secretary general Antonio Guterres in one year’s time in New York. The gathering, which was organised by California governor Jerry Brown, saw a host of announcements, including jurisdictions and companies representing more than 122 million people announcing zero-emissions vehicle targets, and Wales and 9 states, cities and territories joining a global alliance to end coal power. California and the European Union also agreed to step up their cooperation on carbon markets, says BusinessGreen, striking an agreement to pursue closer collaboration on carbon pricing, climate investment incentives, and measures to maximise public benefits from carbon revenues. Elsewhere, Quartz summarises the progress made at the summit, and Brad Plumer in the New York Times asks “Now what?” now California has had its own climate summit.

The Dutch bank ING will start assessing its $600bn lending portfolio based on climate change impacts, a first step in shifting the entire portfolio to align with the emissions reductions required by the Paris climate agreement. The policy, the first of its kind for a big bank, will include putting pressure on clients whose businesses do not conform with the climate goals of the agreement. “We will try to look at the entire portfolio and make sure that over time it aligns with Paris,” Isabel Fernandez, head of wholesale banking, told the FT. With the new climate assessment, the bank will “support and influence clients to make them more aligned with the climate agreement”, she added. “We can engage with those companies that need more help.”

“As if this past summer of merciless heat waves, droughts and megafires were not warning enough, in the past several days the elements sounded another alarm about the state of a world made warmer by the burning of fossil fuels,” says the New York Times in an editorial. Yet “to no one’s surprise, this linkage went unacknowledged in President Trump’s Washington”. The article lists the retreat from Obama-era policies to limit US greenhouse gas emissions, including a “just plain dumb” weakening of rules aimed at reducing leaks of methane from oil and gas operations. These changes “pretty much completes the demolition job on Mr Obama’s climate strategy”. An editorial in the Chicago Sun Timesreferences President Trump’s tweet last week on the “incredible, unsung success” of the response to Hurricane Maria last year. “It is beyond offensive for President Donald Trump to claim that his administration did a great job helping Puerto Rico recover from the overwhelming devastation of Hurricane Maria in September 2017,” the article argues. Elsewhere, writing in the Guardian, Michael Mann – professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University – describes Hurricane Florence as a “a climatologically-amplified triple threat” of stronger wind speeds, higher storm surges and more severe flooding. “Some headlines have reported that Florence is a warning of what is to come. But in reality, it is a warning of what has already arrived. Far worse is to come if we don’t get serious, in a hurry, about acting on climate change,” he concludes. Also in the Guardian, author and columnist Jeff Nesbit says we might need a category 6 in the classification scale for tropical storms. “This combination of warmer oceans and more water in the Earth’s atmosphere…is now starting to create storms with conditions that look precisely what a category 6 hurricane would look like,” he writes.

The economic losses caused by tropical storms in China is expected to be seven times higher than current levels if the world warms by 2C above pre-industrial temperatures, research finds. However, if warming is limited to 1.5C – which is the aspirational target of the Paris Agreement – economic losses are expected to be only four times higher than present levels, according to the results. The research, which uses regional climate models, also suggests that China will be impacted by larger and more severe tropical storms if warming reaches 2C rather than 1.5C.