When asked on Air Force One if the two recent hurricanes, Harvey and Irma, to strike the US have changed his view on climate change, Trump told reporters yesterday: “We’ve had bigger storms than this.” He went on to talk about bigger storms that he said occurred in the 1930s and 1940s. The Post quotes the response of Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That’s just not correct,” he says. The Post explains that it depends what metrics you use to judge the storms: “Because he brought up the 1930s, Trump perhaps had in mind the infamous 1935 Labor Day hurricane that, like Irma, devastated the Florida Keys. That storm was recorded as having the lowest air pressure of any hurricane on record in the US. But there are other statistics by which hurricanes can set records. Indeed, Hurricane Harvey went down in storm annals for having more rainfall than any other hurricane in the continental US. And Hurricane Irma maintained category 5 wind speeds for longer than any other hurricane for which scientists have satellite data.” Politicoreports the views of Republican Florida governor Rick Scott who is “weathering criticism over global warming in the wake of Hurricane Irma, and won’t say if he believes man-made climate change is real”. Scott is quoted as saying: “Clearly our environment changes all the time, and whether that’s cycles we’re going through or whether that’s manmade, I wouldn’t be able to tell you which one it is.” Earlier this week, Carbon Brief published a round up of all the reaction to Irma and the connections to climate change. Meanwhile, Reuters reports that the cost of fighting US wildfires has already topped $2bn this year, according to the US agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue. “Forest Service spending on fire suppression in recent years has gone from 15% of the budget to 55% – or maybe even more – which means we have to keep borrowing from funds that are intended for forest management,” he said. In western US this year, at the peak of the region’s fire season, there were three times as many large blazes burning out of control compared to the five-year average and almost three times as many personnel assigned to fight them, according to US fire managers.

A new member of the Commons committee meant to ensure Government decisions are based on sound scientific evidence is, reports the Independent, “also a trustee of an organisation that promotes climate change denial”. Referring to the climate sceptic Labour MP Graham Stringer, the paper says the “appointment comes almost two years after the Labour MP joined Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) think tank, which has a lobbying wing dedicated to opposing policies that limit greenhouse gas emissions”. Rebecca Newsom, senior political adviser at Greenpeace, tells the paper that the appointment is “odd” and risks the committee “wasting valuable time having more discussions about whether climate change is real”. She adds: “You would think that a broad alignment with mainstream science would be a basic requirement for any MP sitting on the Science and Technology Committee. So it’s rather odd that out of hundreds of possible Labour MPs, one with climate sceptic affiliations should have made it onto the committee.” Meanwhile, in the US, Scientific American reports that climate sceptics may soon join a key science advisory panel to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): “At least one nominee hopes to use a position on the board to challenge the science undergirding many environmental regulations. One has said in a statement that the world must ‘abandon this suicidal Global Warming crusade’. Another compared people concerned about climate change to ‘Aztecs who believed they could make rain by cutting out beating hearts’. EPA has submitted 132 names for public comment as possible members of the panel. About a dozen of them have made comments rejecting mainstream climate science. Many have connections to the fossil fuel industry or conservative think tanks, and some have received funding to attack the findings of mainstream scientists that humans are warming the globe at an unprecedented pace through the burning of fossil fuels.” It adds that the Heartland Institute – a notoriously climate sceptic Chicago-based rightwing thinktank that has courted much controversy in the past – nominated many of the current prospects.

Tesla is likely to unveil its electric articulated lorry in October, chief executive Elon Musk said yesterday. The firm has previously said the vehicle would be released next month. The entrepreneur has excited the trucking industry with the prospect of a battery-powered, heavy duty vehicle that can compete with conventional diesels. Musk said an “unveil and test ride” for the Tesla Semi truck was tentatively scheduled for 26 October in Hawthorne, California. “Worth seeing this beast in person. It’s unreal,” he said in a tweet. Bloomberg reports that Daimler has unveiled its new Fuso eCanter, an electric light-duty truck produced under the Mitsubishi Fuso brand: “The hauler has a range of 60 to 80 miles (97 to 129 kilometers) between charges, depending on body, load and usage…Daimler is supplying a fleet to several New York City non-profits and United Parcel Service Inc. has signed on as the first commercial customer in the US.” Meanwhile, the Scottish edition of the Times reports that “Nicola Sturgeon’s plans to phase out all new petrol and diesel cars in 15 years’ time have been branded unachievable and potentially damaging by a leading engineering expert”. It adds that Prof Jack Ponton, senior honorary professorial fellow of engineering at the University of Edinburgh, said “the plan begged the simple question: where is the electricity to run them to come from? According to Professor Ponton, if all Britain’s cars were electric, the country would need another five nuclear power stations — at a cost of at least £100bn — just to cope with demand.” Carbon Brief recently published a factcheck about such claims.

New York City is imposing restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from existing buildings. The new pollution standards, announced by the city’s Democrat Mayor Bill de Blasio yesterday, would require owners of large buildings to take steps to meet new fossil fuel caps, including upgrading boilers, water heaters, roofs and windows, and accelerating replacement or refinancing plans for their buildings. The targets aim to help the city cut its overall greenhouse gas emissions by 7% by 2035. The Hill provides further context: “The building standards come as New York attempts to abide by the Paris climate deal, which aims to reduce climate change-causing greenhouse gas emissions around the world. Shortly after President Trump announced that he would pull the United States from the agreement, de Blasio signed an executive order affirming the deal and committing the city to its goals.” Reuters also carries the story.

Motorists could face confusion on fuel forecourts after ministers gave the go-ahead to new “green petrol” that will be incompatible with older cars and could increase prices at the pump, reports the Times. The paper explains: “The Department for Transport yesterday proposed targets for the use of renewable biofuels that it expects to lead to the introduction of a so-called ‘E10’ petrol, blended with almost 10% bioethanol, within three years. The plans, which come weeks after the government pledged to end the sale of new petrol and diesel cars altogether by 2040, are designed to reduce carbon emissions, helping to tackle climate change. However, motoring groups warned that the biofuel plans could cause confusion, while environmental groups said they could actually cause more harm than good.” Elsewhere in the Times, it reports that car dealers have “mislead” diesel buyers over cleaner fumes.

USA Today uses its editorial to chide US Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt: “This is no time to discuss climate change and deadly hurricanes, [Pruitt] argued to CNN last week. Such a conversation would be “insensitive” to hurricane victims, he explained. Actually, this is precisely the time to have that discussion. In the wake of devastating Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, Americans hunger to know whether global warming — something they once regarded as a distant threat involving polar bears and melting glaciers — is a here-and-now part of their daily lives…The reality is that there is almost certainly a connection between a warming planet and the growing severity of storms. The only question is to what degree. Climate change doesn’t create hurricanes, but scientists largely agree it makes them worse.”

Yesterday, the site formally known as Energydesk relaunched as Unearthed, as Damian Kayha, its editor, explains: “We are still Greenpeace’s editorially-independent, award-winning environmental news and investigations team. We’ve just moved to a new home that suits us a little better. Energydesk started in 2012 as a specialist UK energy blog, mostly publishing in-depth analysis of government bills, or factchecking inaccurate news stories about climate change. We still do both those things, but since expanding our remit to the environment as a whole and adding our stellar investigations unit, you’re now just as likely to find an exclusive on the chemical giants trying to discredit scientists over bee-killing pesticides, an interactive map of the illegally polluted roads near Britain’s nurseries and schools, or an investigation into the protected US landscapes that could be opened for fossil fuel extraction.”

Two papers published yesterday investigate possible future changes in tropical cyclones under a warming climate. The first, in Journal of Climate, projects that the global frequency of cyclones reduces by 23% with climate change, but the ratio of intense cyclones increases by 7% and the rate of rainfall within 100km of the cyclone’s centre increases by 12%. The second paper, published in Geophysical Research Letters, also projects that the global number of tropical cyclones decreases – this time by 33% with 4C of warming. The second study suggests that the number of category 4 and 5 cyclones could actually decrease, although their maximum surface wind speeds and rainfall rate would strengthen, and the area that very intense cyclones could strike would broaden to include the south of Japan and south of Madagascar.