The New York Times reports that the White House confirmed yesterday that the Trump administration will promote coal, natural gas and nuclear energy as an answer to climate change at a presentation during the UN’s annual climate talks starting next week in Bonn, Germany. The NYT says: “The program is billed as a discussion of how American energy resources, particularly fossil fuels, can help poor countries meet electricity needs and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Entitled ‘The Role of Cleaner and More Efficient Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Power in Climate Mitigation,’ it will feature speakers from Peabody Energy, a coal company; NuScale Power, a nuclear engineering firm; and Tellurian, a liquefied natural gas exporter.” The paper says the event “is likely to provoke strong reactions” at the conference. Barry K Worthington, executive director of the United States Energy Association, who will speak at the event, said he hoped to deliver a “dose of reality about the future of fossil fuels”. He told the paper: “The reality of it is the world is going to continue to use fossil fuels and if I can throw myself on the hand grenade to help people realise that, I’m willing to do it.” Meanwhile, Climate Home carries a report under the headline: “India prepares for clashes with developed world at UN climate talks.” It sets out what some of the key developing countries, such as Indian, will be demanding at the talks. One of the “first stick points” will be the “pre-2020 agenda” (climate action before 2020, whereas the Paris Agreement deals with the post-2020 period) which developing countries have complained was left off the agenda (although it was added yesterday).

US energy secretary Rick Perry has attracted criticism for his remarks that he thinks using fossil fuels can help prevent sexual assault. Perry said yesterday that using fossil fuels to power electricity can help villages in Africa and other developing regions. Speaking at an event sponsored by Axios and NBC News, Perry said electricity also was important “from the standpoint of sexual assault. When the lights are on, when you have light that shines the righteousness, if you will, on those types of acts.” Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, the nation’s largest environmental group, called Perry’s comments offensive. “It is not only blatantly untrue, it is an inexcusable attempt to minimise a serious and pervasive issue. Women, and particularly women of colour, are among the most severely impacted by the climate crisis, and it is these same communities that are most at risk of sexual assault.” Many other publications carry the story, including the Guardian and Reuters. By last night, the Hill was reporting that Perry had sought to further “clarify” his comments. In other US news, Nature News reports that Lamar Smith, the “controversial chairman of US House science committee” is to retire and will not run for re-election in 2018. Smith is best known for his climate scepticism and repeated attacks and probes on climate scientists. “It is a relief,” says Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Buzzfeed and the Hill also carry the story. USA Today and NPR both report on the publication today in the US of the 600-plus-page Climate Science Special Report, which is part of an even larger scientific review known as the fourth National Climate Assessment. In an attempt to undermine the report, the Wall Street Journal has run an op-ed by critic Steven E Koonin. Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports another new report which says that 10 million Americans will be “substantially affected” by climate change by 2075, causing government disaster spending to jump. It is published by the US Congressional Budget Office. Finally, the Hill reports that EPA plans “coal-country hearing on Obama climate rule repeal”. Separately, the Hill reports that Sam Clovis, Trump’s pick to be the chief scientist at the US Agriculture Department, has withdrawn due to the on-going Russia probe by Robert Mueller. Clovis was noted for his scepticism of climate science.

More countries than ever before have hit the expected peak of their planet-warming emissions – laying the groundwork to reduce them – but much more needs to be done, and fast, to curb emissions, reports Reuters: “More than 55 countries – which together produce 60 percent of global emissions – have already peaked or are committed to peaking their emissions by 2030, a crucial step to curbing global warming, experts at the World Resources Institute (WRI) said. Although this is encouraging, global emissions must peak by 2020 to keep global warming within safe levels, they said.” Carbon Brief explains the results in a detailed article, which includes an interactive chart allowing you to explore the data.

Hundreds of millions of urban dwellers around the world face their cities being inundated by rising seawaters if latest UN warnings that the world is on course for 3C of global warming come true, according to a Guardian data analysis. The paper says: “Data from the Climate Central group of scientists analysed by Guardian journalists shows that 3C of global warming would ultimately lock in irreversible sea-level rises of perhaps two metres. Cities from Shanghai to Alexandria, and Rio to Osaka are among the worst affected. Miami would be inundated – as would the entire bottom third of the US state of Florida. The Guardian has found, however, that local preparations for a 3C world are as patchy as international efforts to prevent it from happening.”

Public support in the UK for renewables remains at a record high, according to official figures released today, while backing for shale gas has hit its lowest ever level, reports BusinessGreen: “The latest results from the government’s quarterly Wave Tracker survey, which questioned over 2,000 households between September and October, found 82% of people support renewable energy, up from 77% earlier this year and 79% the same time last year. Opposition to renewable energy remains very low, at just 3%…Although 48% of respondents said they neither support or oppose fracking, of those that did offer an opinion 36% of people opposed it and only 13% supported it. Just one per cent of respondents said they strongly support shale gas extraction, compared to a figure of 35% for solar energy. It represents a serious nosedive in public support over the last few years, from a high of just under 30% of the public backing the sector in 2014.”

The Economist carries a feature on how “activists who think too little is being done to meet [the 2C] goal are turning to the courts”. It says: “Cases where the negative effects of carbon emissions are central, not tagged on to more direct environmental damage, such as oil spills or the release of noxious chemicals, are on the rise. Joana Setzer of the Grantham Institute, a think-tank in London, has found 64 such cases in countries other than America in the past 15 years. Twenty-one were lodged since 2015. In litigious America around 20 are now filed each year, up from a couple in 2002…The legal obstacles are formidable…Even so, the occasional case succeeds…Scientists are increasingly confident that they know roughly what shares of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were emitted by individual countries, and even by the biggest corporate polluters.” In September, Carbon Brief published a guest post about climate litigation.

Recent scientific advances make it possible to assign extreme events to human-induced climate change and historical emissions, say the authors of this new commentary. These developments allow losses and damage associated with such events to be assigned country-level responsibility. They say: “the fact that it is possible to provide such quantifications will greatly advance the possibility of an informed discussion on whether such information is useful, necessary, and should be included in multi-national agreements. Furthermore, the possibility of assigning contributions of individual regions to damage could have the potential to reshape environmental litigation.” Earlier this year, Carbon Brief published a detailed explainer about loss and damage.

Our knowledge of climate variability in the densely populated Northeastern United States has been limited to the instrumental data of the last century. A new tree-ring-based temperature reconstruction was developed using Atlantic white cedar. These trees showed a positive and significant annual growth relationships with local and regional temperatures. Chronologies constructed from northern sites yield skillful reconstructions of temperature that reproduce centennial, multidecadal, and interannual variability in the instrumental record, providing a novel paleotemperature record for New England.

Biases in climate model simulations introduce biases in subsequent regional impact simulations. Bias correction methods are used to post-process regional climate projections. A new paper demonstrates that a that the proper vs. improper use of bias correction is difficult to identify. Several examples show the limited ability of bias correction to correct and to downscale variability, and demonstrate that bias correction can cause implausible climate change signals. Bias correction cannot overcome major model errors, and naive application might result in ill-informed adaptation decisions.

Global temperatures have undergone periods of enhanced warming and pauses over the last century due in part to internal variability of the climate system. An investigation of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) in decadal temperature trends in the Northern Hemisphere finds that it more than halved the winter warming over the non-tropical Northern Hemisphere extratropics from 1920–1971 and accounts for 45% of the warming there from 1963–1995. Over the 1989–2013 period the NAO reduced NH winter warming to around one quarter of what it would have been. Results imply that the long-term NAO trends over the 20th century alternately masked or enhanced anthropogenic warming, and will continue to temporarily offset or enhance its effects in the future.