The Pope has warned major oil company heads that there is “no time to lose” to address climate change, urging them to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels, report the Financial Times and many others. The Pope’s comments came at a closed-door summit of energy leaders at the Vatican, where he hosted chief executives from firms including BP, Shell and ExxonMobil. He told the meeting that climate change could “destroy civilisation”, reports the Hill. Describing climate change as a challenge of “epochal proportions”, the Pope said: “Civilisation requires energy, but energy use must not destroy civilisation,” according to BBC News. Reuters carries lengthy excerpts from the Pope’s closed-door speech including: “We know that the challenges facing us are interconnected. If we are to eliminate poverty and hunger … the more than one billion people without electricity today need to gain access to it…Our desire to ensure energy for all must not lead to the undesired effect of a spiral of extreme climate changes due to a catastrophic rise in global temperatures, harsher environments and increased levels of poverty.” Environmentalists and aid agencies urged oil firms to heed the Pope’s warnings, reports another Reutersarticle. Al Jazeera, the Telegraph, Huffington Post, Climate Home News and Politico also cover the story. The meeting comes three years after the Pope’s encyclical calling for swift action on climate change, notes the New York Times. See Carbon Brief‘s coverage of the encyclical for more details.

Legal & General, Europe’s second-largest fund manager, is to step up its shareholder activism over climate change, reports the Financial Times. The manager will vote against the reappointment of eight company chairs in protest over their slow progress in moving to a greener economy, as well as selling its shareholdings in the firms, the paper adds. Reuters also reports the news, describing Legal & General as Britain’s biggest asset manager. It says the firm has been “among the most vocal asset managers on the topic”. BBC News also has the story. The European Commission is proposing “rigorous rules to prevent climate change from causing catastrophic economic damage,” according to a second Financial Times story. The proposals “will impose extra costs on asset managers”, the paper says.

Building an extra five gigawatts of onshore windfarms over the next five years would save consumers £1.6bn over 15 years, according to an industry report covered by the Times. The study was commissioned by Scottish Power Renewables and others. Separately, the Guardian reports comments from Lord Deben, the chair of the Committee on Climate Change, saying government opposition to onshore windfarms will mean higher energy bills for consumers. He tells the Guardian: “If you don’t build onshore wind, the government has to say how much of an extra cost this is to the public.” He adds that there is no logical argument against building more onshore windfarms in parts of the UK that want them.

Downpours from storms are dumping more water across the US than ever before, reports the Weather Channel, adding that this trend “will only get worse in the coming years, thanks to global warming, scientists say”. It links the increase directly to “human-caused climate change”, explaining that a warmer plant increases evaporation and precipitation, intensifying the hydrologic cycle.

The G7 summit has ended in acrimony after US President Donald Trump retracted his endorsement of a joint statement agreed at the meeting, reports BBC News. It adds that the statement already included an “agreement to disagree” on climate change, with the US refusing to sign a pledge to implement the Paris climate accord. European leaders, Japan and Canada backed carbon pricing and a “just transition” to clean energy in the section that the US refused to endorse, explains Climate Home News. The US asserted its position in a separate paragraph prioritising economic growth and energy security. Trump refused to even attend the formal G7 talks on climate change, report InsideClimate News, BusinessGreen, DeSmog Blog and Think Progress. Germany and France criticised Trump’s decision to withdraw support for the G7 communiqué, reports Reuters, with both countries reiterating their continued support for the text. Reuters carries the text of the statement in full, including the section on climate change, which says: “Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the European Union reaffirm their strong commitment to implement the Paris Agreement, through ambitious climate action, in particular through reducing emissions while stimulating innovation, enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening and financing resilience and reducing vulnerability, as well as ensuring a just transition, including increasing efforts to mobilise climate finance from a wide variety of sources. We discussed the key role of energy transitions through the development of market based clean energy technologies and the importance of carbon pricing, technology collaboration and innovation to continue advancing economic growth and protect the environment as part of sustainable, resilient and low-carbon energy systems, as well as financing adaptive capacity. We reaffirm the commitment that we have made to our citizens to reduce air and water pollution and our greenhouse gas emissions to reach a global carbon-neutral economy over the course of the second half of the century.”

“It’s about this beautiful, messy, funny, tragic planet and the terrible, wonderful humans who live here,” writes climate scientists Kate Marvel, introducing her new regular column in Scientific American. Marvel explains that many of the basics of human-caused global warming have been understood for decades or centuries, adding: “We—the scientific community—don’t know everything. But we don’t know nothing.” She gives this example: “The answer to this basic question—how hot will it get?—is both certain and terrifyingly unknown. We’re sure it’s not zero; the planet has already warmed by two degrees Fahrenheit in response to human activities. We’re sure that if our greenhouse emissions continue unabated, the temperature will continue to skyrocket. But we’re not sure exactly what’s in store.”

Donald Trump is the first US president since 1941 not to name a science adviser, notes the New York Times’ reporter Coral Davenport in a lengthy feature. This is “one example of a significant change in the Trump administration: the marginalisation of science in shaping US policy”, she says, adding: “There is no chief scientist at the State Department, where science is central to foreign policy matters such as cybersecurity and global warming…Government-funded scientists said in interviews that they were seeing signs that their work was being suppressed…the administration’s excising of science is particularly evident at the Environmental Protection Agency…[EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s] more enduring legacy may be in diminishing the role of academic, peer-reviewed science at the agency.”

“The models that inform climate policymaking are fatally flawed,” writes David Roberts at Vox, noting how one such climate-economy “Integrated Assessment Model” (IAM) suggests 6C of warming would only dent global GDP by 10%. Roberts describes two recent papers suggesting climate policy models “are systematically underestimating climate change’s economic impacts and overstating the costs of mitigating it.”

Forecasts of sea ice extent for specific regions of the Arctic could be possible as much as a year in advance, a new study suggests. There is still a “substantial skill gap” between operational seasonal predictions of sea ice and what would be possible with a “perfect” model, the researchers say. Regional winter sea ice extent is potentially predictable at lead times beyond 12 months, the study says, although the “spring predictability barrier” limits the potential forecast skill of summer sea ice.