Many publications preview today’s UN climate summit in New York, where dozens of heads of state and business leaders are due to make speeches and announce fresh commitments to tackle climate change. The Guardian carries the comments of UN secretary general António Guterres who has said that the world may have hit a hopeful “turning point”, not least because of the youth climate movement. “I see a new momentum,” he is reported saying. “I believe in these last few months [there has been] a turning point. Six months ago, I must tell you, I was quite pessimistic about everything…Now I see a lot of movement and we need to boost that movement.” Reuters reports that “almost 90 big companies in sectors from food to cement to telecommunications are pledging to slash their greenhouse gas emissions in a new campaign to steer multi-nationals towards a low-carbon future”. We Mean Business, which launched the coalition earlier this year, says 87 companies are now involved, with total market capitalisation of more than $2.3tn. Separately, BusinessGreen says that “more than 130 global banks collectively holding $47tn in assets have pledged to align their businesses with the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals as part of a new UN initiative to scale-up the financial industry’s contribution to climate action worldwide”.

Meanwhile, there is widespread coverage in the UK media of Boris Johnson’s announcement that the UK government is unveiling a £1.2bn fund which will be aimed at tackling both climate change and endangered species. The Guardian says: “While at the UN general assembly, the prime minister will use a speech to announce £1bn in aid money for UK inventors to seek funding for high-tech initiatives connected to areas such as renewable energy and lower levels of pollutants. He will separately announce a £220m fund to tackle the erosion of biodiversity, focusing on desperately endangered species such as the black rhino and Sumatran tiger.” But the paper also reports that Greenpeace has issued a “withering” response describing the announcement as a “flop” in terms of global leadership and that it “fell well short of the vision required”. The Times says Johnson will “announce a new Ayrton Fund, worth up to £1bn, named after the scientist Hertha Ayrton, to exploit British expertise in clean energy and other technology that mitigates damaging emissions”. It adds: “Rules on spending aid mean that ministers cannot set aside cash from the Ayrton Fund specifically for British projects. It must be available to all applicants, regardless of their nationality. Officials said, however, that it would focus on areas of research in which the UK is among world leaders. These include new technologies in generating and storing electricity as well as affordable cooking equipment to replace firewood. Electric transport and less-polluting air conditioning are other priorities.” The Daily Mail describes it as a “significant move” ahead of the UN climate summit, but adds: “Downing Street said the project would count towards the controversial target of spending 0.7% of Britain’s income on foreign aid. Sources insisted it was in line with international rules on aid spending, despite the fact that much of the cash could be spent with British universities and firms. No 10 said scientists from other countries would also be able to bid for the cash, but suggested the UK’s strength in the area could see it receive the lion’s share.”

Friday’s global climate strikes have been extensively reported all around the world. The report on the front page of Saturday’s edition of the Guardian begins: “Millions of people demonstrated across the world yesterday demanding urgent action to tackle global heating, as they united across timezones and cultures to take part in the biggest climate protest in history. In an explosion of the youth movement started by the Swedish school striker Greta Thunberg just over 12 months ago, people protested from the Pacific islands, through Australia, across-south east Asia and Africa into Europe and onwards to the Americas. For the first time since the school strikes for climate began last year, young people called on adults to join them – and they were heard.” The Guardian also published a liveblog of the global protests. The Times – which also features the strikes in its front page image – says it was the “largest-ever protest about climate change” with millions around the world striking and marching across 150 countries. It quotes Thunberg, saying she was “astonished” at how the protests had grown. “I would never have predicted or believed that this was going to happen someday and so fast.” Vox reports that organisers estimate that four million people around the world took part: “The exact number of participants worldwide will be hard to get. But the event was truly global and astonishingly well organised.”

Meanwhile, BBC News reports that 10 Extinction Rebellion protesters were arrested on Saturday for gluing themselves to a road near the port of Dover in Kent: “Four of them, including men aged in their 80s and 90s, staged a sit in at the Eastern Docks Roundabout. Extinction Rebellion campaigners are legally occupying part of the A20, off the roundabout, and near the port. The campaign group said the ‘No Food on a Dying Planet’ protest centred around the potential for food shortages as climate change develops.”

There is extensive coverage of the German coalition government’s announcement on Friday that it has agreed a new package of climate policies. Climate Home News says it “has agreed to a carbon pricing system in the transport and construction sectors by 2021 as part of a new climate package, amid record climate protests in the country”. It adds: “The so-called ‘2030 climate protection programme’…aims to help the country meet its 2030 national target of slashing CO2 emissions by 55% from 1990 levels. At present the country has achieved almost 30%. Under the new emissions trading system, the government will issue emissions rights for €10 per tonne in 2021, with prices rising every year to €35 until 2025. From 2026 onwards, a cap will be placed on emissions, shrinking every year.” ITV News describes the measures as a “£48bn carbon cutting package to reduce its emissions by 55% over the next decade”. The Financial Times says it took 15 hours of negotiations between the coalition partners that lasted through the night to secure the deal and that “political leaders in Berlin hope the measures and commitments will burnish Germany’s increasingly tarnished credentials”. Politico says the measures were “quickly criticised by campaigners and industry as too weak”. Patrick Graichen of the thinktank Agora Energiewende has called the German climate package “shockingly toothless and cowardly”, reports Politico, and criticised the proposed CO2 price “as a bad joke: €10 per tonne won’t have an impact”. Julian Wettengel at Clean Energy Wire has produced a Q&A on the package. Reuters reports that “Germany’s Greens said on Sunday they planned to use their strength in the upper house of parliament to sharpen a government climate protection package that disappointed many activists”. Separately, Reuters reports that “Germany’s Deutsche Bahn expects the government’s €50bn climate change package to generate the railway company’s biggest growth spurt in its 180-year history”.

Meanwhile, EurActiv covers a new report by NGO Carbon Market Watch which concludes that “unused carbon pollution permits are slowly building up in the EU’s Emissions Trading System, creating a ‘coal bubble’ that could send carbon prices crashing”.

Several UK publications report the publication on Friday of the results of the latest government auction for low-carbon electricity. The Guardian says the result show how the “UK’s next wave of offshore wind farms will generate clean electricity at no extra cost to consumers after record low-subsidy deals fell below the market price for the first time”. It adds: “New offshore wind projects will power millions of British homes under ‘zero-subsidy’ support contracts within the next four years, following a record-breaking government subsidy auction…The results of the auction showed offshore wind costs had tumbled by a third to about £40 per megawatt hour, which is less than the price of electricity in the wholesale energy market. This means households will not face extra costs to support the new projects, which may even help to bring down energy bills.” BBC News reports that the new projects will power more than 7m homes at a lower-than-expected cost and that the government says the windfarms represent a “breakthrough”, typically generating electricity without subsidy. It quotes John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace, saying: “Today’s news makes arguing for the massive public subsidies nuclear power requires a much harder task.” Bloomberg headlines its own coverage: “The world’s biggest offshore windfarm will be as cheap as coal.” It adds: “The plunge highlights how offshore wind, which only a few years ago was a niche technology more expensive than nuclear reactors, is changing the economics of energy around the world.” Carbon Brief’s own analysis shows how the “prices are so low that the windfarms could generate electricity more cheaply than existing gas-fired power stations as early as 2023”.

The Times joins other publications in covering a new report published by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which concludes that the period from 2015 to the end of 2019 is likely to be the warmest five-year period on record globally. Sea-level rise, ice loss, extreme weather and other effects of climate change are all increasing, according to the WMO. Timed to coincide with the UN climate summit in New York, the report says, according to the Times, that the “global average temperature had increased by 1.1C since the pre-industrial period and by 0.2C compared with 2011-15”, adding that there is “still no sign of a peak in global emissions”. The Press Association, via Metro, notes that the report says “CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere rose at a higher rate than in 2011-2015 and are on track to hit a record high this year”. BBC News says the report highlights how the “signs and impacts of global heating are speeding up”, adding that “perhaps most worrying of all is the data on sea-level rise”.

Meanwhile, the Guardian reports on a United in Science report, which has been coordinated to time with the WMO report, which says that commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions must be at least tripled and increased by up to fivefold if the world is to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The United in Science report, which is also backed by the United Nations Environment Programme and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, estimates global emissions are not likely to peak before 2030 on the current trajectory.

Several papers have published editorials responding to last Friday’s global climate strikes as well as looking ahead to today’s UN climate summit in New York. Monday’s Financial Times says: “The protesters make a serious point: despite more than 30 years of international efforts to stem the greenhouse gases driving global warming, emissions have accelerated. Signs of a political response have begun to emerge in the form of climate emergency declarations and targets to cut the net emission of greenhouse gases to zero. Yet leaders are only beginning to understand the sweeping, economy-wide policies required to meet these bolder goals. They need to grasp the enormity of the climate change challenge – and put it at the centre of all policymaking.” In Saturday’s edition of the Times, the editorial says: “The sensible thing for politicians around the world to do is heed these protests and set about taking measures and buying insurance policies. That means accelerating the reduction in fossil fuels and finding new and cleaner methods of generating energy…The risk in Britain is that environmentalism could be co-opted by the left. Theresa May was right in her last days as prime minister to commit Britain to a goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Now the government needs to come up with the policies to deliver this pledge. It should not be afraid to do so. Conservatism and conservation are natural allies.” The Independent’s editorial on Saturday says: “We owe an enormous debt to Greta Thunberg. Reviled though she may be in some quarters, her message carries an extraordinary power and resonance, much of it down to its sheer earnestness.” An editorial in the Scottish Sun says: “Skipping double maths on a Friday afternoon won’t save the planet and it might not do their education any good but they are right and what’s the point of working hard for the future if there isn’t any future to work for?” However, the Daily Telegraph adopts a very different tone in its editorial on Saturday: “[The protestors’] Luddite war on capitalism would raise prices, see workers sacked, lead to power shortages in the West, and destroy the incentive to innovate. It would also condemn people in poorer countries to subsistence farming. Eco-socialism amounts to rich people insisting that the Third World remains stuck in the past – because it looks prettier to the Western eye…The government has to push back. Hitherto, the Tories have happily followed the green agenda but not really brought their own direction to it, which has left them validating Left-wing arguments rather than developing a proper, conservative narrative of their own.” An editorial in the Sunday Times says that “the [naive] protesters are getting a sympathetic hearing. But sympathy should not mean support”. The Guardian’s editorial uses the climate protests to focus on transport emissions: “Climate action must never be reduced to individual choices, and the onus is on politicians of all parties, starting with government ministers, to be brave. Momentum following this week’s demonstrations must not give way to drift. Big steps to reduce transport emissions would be one good way to keep moving.” (The Times also has a related editorial about the need for better public transport links.)

Meanwhile, various columnists also have their say. Bryony Gordon in the Daily Telegraph says “be as cynical as you like, but we ignore the concerns of children at our peril”. Ross Clark in the Sun argues that the protests are “really the anti-capitalist movement — the lot who used to demand an end to globalisation — in green disguise”.

The New York Times carries a long opinion article by Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s vice president and Nobel peace prize winner, who argues that “next year’s [US] election is the crucial test of the nation’s commitment to addressing this crisis”. He adds: “It is worth remembering that on the day after the 2020 election, the terms of the Paris climate accord will permit the United States to withdraw from it. We cannot allow that to happen. Political will is a renewable resource and must be summoned in this fight. The American people are sovereign, and I am hopeful that they are preparing to issue a command on the climate to those who purport to represent them: ‘Lead, follow, or get out of the way.’” Meanwhile, the Washington Post has published an opinion piece by John Kerry, Barack Obama’s secretary of state, on why India and China “must step up on climate change”. he says: “The US will be back at the table after 2020, but in this aberrational period of shortsightedness, now is the time for China, India and other countries to prove just what we are missing.”

The “unprecedented extreme temperatures” recorded in South Korea in the summer of 2018 “will become increasingly normal if global average temperature is allowed to increase by 3C”, a new study says. Using three regional climate models, the researchers find that the “abnormally high temperatures” observed over “the entire territory of South Korea” in July and August 2018 largely match the distribution pattern expected under 3C of global warming. The study adds: “More importantly, the extreme heat stress measured by the wet-bulb globe temperature is projected to intensify the risks to a level never before seen in contemporary climate.”

Cool sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the tropical Pacific Ocean have contributed to human-caused melting of sea ice in the Arctic, a new study suggests. Using observations and model simulations, the researchers show that a “Pacific-Arctic teleconnection”, called “PARC”, partly drives natural variations in sea ice by causing “significant warm episodes” in the Arctic. This mode “has contributed to accelerated warming and Arctic sea ice loss from 2007 to 2012”, the study says, “followed by slower declines in recent years”.