Mini nuclear reactors could be operational in the UK by 2030 if work gets underway soon, according to a new report published by the Energy Technology Institute. In addition, they should be designed so that they can provide heat as well as electricity. The Telegraph adds: “The Government has backed the development of small modular reactors (SMRs), which can be mass-produced in factories, and has previously said the first SMR could be built in UK in the 2020s. It is in the early stages of a competition to choose a design. The ETI said deploying the first SMR by 2030 was viable but set out a tight schedule to achieve that, which would require the chosen design to start preparing for the safety approval process next year.” BusinessGreen adds that the “report suggests the additional cost of making the reactors capable of delivering CHP is small, but future heat revenues could be significant if district heating networks materialise”.

Reuters reports that Oslo’s leftist city government has issued its first “climate budget” aiming to halve greenhouse gas emission within four years “in one of the world’s most radical experiments to slow global warming”. The budget, setting out annual goals to choke off emissions from cars, homes and businesses in the Norwegian capital, adds to a scheme announced last year to ban private cars from the city centre. “We’ll count carbon dioxide the same way as we count money,” vice mayor Robert Steen tells Reuters.

In an unusually stark warning a leading international scientific body says the Arctic climate is changing so fast that researchers are struggling to keep up. The changes happening there, it says, are affecting the weather worldwide. The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) says: “Dramatic and unprecedented warming in the Arctic is driving sea level rise, affecting weather patterns around the world and may trigger even more changes in the climate system. “The rate of change is challenging the current scientific capacity to monitor and predict what is becoming a journey into uncharted territory.” The statement came as the first White House Science Ministerial meeting took place in Washington DC. It was held to develop international collaboration on Arctic science.

The freshly re-elected Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn used his conference speech yesterday in Liverpool to reiterate his commitment to making action on climate change one of his top priorities, sketching out plans to drastically increase investment in low carbon infrastructure. “I am not content with accepting second-class broadband, not content with creaking railways, not content with seeing the US and Germany investing in cutting-edge and green technologies, while Britain lags behind,” he said, adding that Labour’s proposed National Investment Bank would invest to get “our broadband, our railways, our housing and our energy infrastructure up to scratch”.

Climate Home reports that the Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief who recently withdraw from the race to be the next UN secretary general, is to work on a new project called Mission 2020: “Figueres plans to work with cities on standardising emissions data, corporate giants on investing in renewables and says she will target major charities and philanthropies to stump up more cash…Staffed with former UN colleagues and boasting Newton Investment Management chief executive Helena Morrissey as one of five advisory board members, Mission 2020 will be based in London.”

The Washington Post says that a new study, to be published next week in BioScience, will confirm that a “significant volume of greenhouse gas emissions is coming from a little-considered place: manmade reservoirs, held behind some one million dams around the world and created for the purposes of electricity generation, irrigation, and other human needs”. The authors conclude that these reservoirs may be emitting “just shy of a gigaton, or billion tons, of annual carbon dioxide equivalents. That would mean they contributed 1.3 percent of the global total.”

The FT reports that, according to close allies, Theresa May has sufficient support in parliament to drive through the contentious expansion of Heathrow airport if she decides to put it to a vote next month. The government will not make a final decision about how to proceed until an aviation subcommittee — chaired by Mrs May — meets on either October 11 or 18. But according to detailed calculations by ministers, Heathrow would win a vote with a “slam dunk” despite continuing opposition from some senior figures in the Conservative party.

James Lovelock, the pioneering scientist and environmental guru who came up with the Gaia theory of the Earth, believes it could be time for humanity to “save ourselves” – rather than the planet. Writing in a forthcoming collection of essays by leading thinkers, called The Earth and I, Professor Lovelock warns that life on Earth is quite close to coming to an end, at least on a cosmic timescale. As an “elderly biosphere”, the Earth is susceptible to diseases – such as climate change caused by humans.

The New Yorker’s environment writer walks us through the legal twists and turns currently facing Obama’s Clean Power Plan. But, ultimately, she seems hopefully it will survive its attacks: “Even opponents of the plan seem to expect that the Circuit Court will rule in the EPA’s favour, although no one really knows what the decision will be, or when it will be handed down. And whatever the outcome at the Circuit Court level, the case seems destined to be appealed to the Supreme Court, which, it’s assumed, in its current configuration would split 4–4 on the issue. Such a split would leave the lower court’s decision in place.” (The Guardian has more details about the Circuit Court hearing.) Then Kolbert turns to the prospect of a climate sceptic President Trump: “If the next four years are spent rolling back whatever progress has been made on emissions, then almost certainly the temperatures targets that world leaders set last year in Paris will be breached. In fact, even if the next four years are spent making more progress, it’s likely that the targets will be breached. In the case of climate change, to borrow from Dr. King once again, tomorrow really is today.”

The authors of a new paper in Nature Climate Change seek to explain why Antarctic sea ice has been setting daily low records through September coming “hot on the heels of record high sea ice just two years ago”: “The problem we face in Antarctica is that the climate varies hugely from year to year, as typified by the enormous swing in Antarctica sea ice over the past two years. This means 37 years of Antarctic surface measurements are simply not enough to detect the signal of human-caused climate change. Climate models tell us we may need to monitor Antarctica closely until 2100 before we can confidently identify the expected long-term decline of Antarctica’s sea ice…But one piece of the puzzle is clear. Across all lines of evidence a picture of dramatically changing Southern Ocean westerly winds has emerged. Rising greenhouse gases and ozone depletion are forcing the westerlies closer to Antarctica, and robbing southern parts of Australia of vital winter rain.”

The FT’s environment correspondent explains what the prospect of Donald Trump being elected in November as the next US president has helped to fast-track the diplomatic efforts to ratify the Paris Agreement: “The Republican candidate has called global warming a ‘hoax’ and has threatened to unpick the Paris agreement. That would be more complicated if the accord has come into force because it in effect takes four years for a country to withdraw. Some scholars think there are other options, such as pulling the US out of the founding 1992 UN climate convention underpinning the accord. Alternatively, a President Trump could simply add his weight to states and companies already trying to kill Mr Obama’s main climate policy, the clean power plan.” However, Clark adds, “if accelerated ratification is approved [by the EU] on Friday, it would easily push the deal over the line, perhaps in time for the Marrakesh meeting and well before a new US president is sworn in.”

Adow, who is a senior climate advisor at Christian Aid, looks ahead to next month’s Meeting of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol in Kigali, Rwanda, where nations need to set a date for phasing down the production and consumption of HFCs: “The most ambitious countries, including more than 100 countries from the Africa Group, Pacific Island Group, 14 Latin American countries, the EU and some other developed countries are pushing for this to be as early as possible around 2021 but others want to dawdle and are lobbying for later freeze dates, with India calling for 2031. Fifteen more years of HFCs use would be a disaster and undermine other efforts to curb climate change…The fight to reduce carbon dioxide emissions gets most of the attention, but we can’t let ourselves get so engrossed in the carbon wars we take our eye off other battlegrounds.”

A new study investigates how the magnitude of the CO2 fertilisation effect relates to the seasonal cycle of CO2, which sees global atmospheric CO2 rise and fall with the shift in seasons in the northern hemisphere. Using CO2 measurements from Point Barrow in Alaska and Cape Kumukahi in Hawaii, the researchers find that the increase in amplitude of the CO2 seasonal cycle is consistent with increasing plant growth driven in part by climate warming. Overall, for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations, the researchers estimate an increase in plant growth of 37% and 32% for high-latitude ecosystems and extratropical ecosystems, respectively.

Climate change could cause an “immense” increase in risk in epidemics of the infectious disease dengue in Tanzania, a new study suggests. Researchers modelled the potential changes in distribution of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is currently highly localised in coastal areas. By 2050, the habitat suitability of dengue-infected Aedes aegypti is projected to spread into central and north-eastern regions, the researchers say, with an intensification in areas around all of Tanzania’s major lakes. Coastal regions would remain at high risk for dengue epidemic by 2050 as well, the study notes.