The energy secretary Amber Rudd yesterday unveiled plans to overhaul a crucial subsidy scheme, known as the “capacity market”, that is designed to maintain secure electricity supplies, in an effort to allay fears of a coming electricity supply crunch by bringing forward the reforms. Under the scheme, energy firms are paid subsidies to guarantee that their power plants are running. The annual energy bill levy to prevent blackouts could rise from £10 to £20 to fund higher subsidies for coal, gas and nuclear power plants, the Telegraph reports. The reforms are, on balance, “good news”, but the government lacks a long-term plan, commented James Murray of BusinessGreen. The reforms belatedly address “the seriousness of the UK’s energy crunch”, Scottish Energy Minister Fergus Ewing told Energy Live News. The Guardian and the Financial Times also have the story.

The planet was 0.83C warmer than the long-term average in February, as estimated by weather satellites, its highest level on record. The reading rose almost 0.3C from the warmest level in January on record, established last month, the Washington Post reports.

Osama bin Laden had hoped Americans would work with President Obama to fight climate change and “save humanity,” according to a series of documents released yesterday, the Hill reports. In an undated letter that Reuters was told came from the late al Qaeda leader, Bin Laden hoped Americans would undertake “a great revolution” to free Obama from the influences of lobbyists. Bin Laden contended that the world would be better off fighting climate change than waging what he claimed was a war against Islam, Reuters reports. “This is a struggle between two of the largest cultures on Earth, and it is in the shadow of catastrophic climate conditions”, he wrote. The messages came from a host of documents discovered during the 2011 raid on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. Bin Laden’s preoccupation with climate change also emerged as a theme in the first series of documents from the raid that was declassified in May 2015.

The stamp duty paid on energy efficient homes should be up to £5,000 less than on leaky ones, according to a new report by the thinktank Policy Exchange. The report says that the government is doing far too little to cut energy waste, having cut back energy efficiency programmes, and estimates that such a change would lead to 270,000 households a year improving their energy efficiency. “Improving home energy efficiency can save households money, as well as substantially reducing their carbon emissions,” Richard Howard, author of the report, told the Guardian.

Parts of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef face permanent destruction if the current El Nino, one of the strongest in two decades, does not ease this month, scientists told Reuters today. El Nino causes warming in the western Pacific, ideal conditions for coral bleaching, where coral expels living algae, causing it to calcify. “Bleaching is a clear signal that living corals are under physiological stress. If that stress is bad enough for long enough, the corals can die”, Dr Russell Reichelt, chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, told Reuters.

The FT’s environment correspondent Pilita Clark joins Norway’s climate and environment minister, Vidar Helgesen, on a trip to to see if he can convince Jakarta to do more to limit deforestation and cut the resulting greenhouse gas emissions. In 2010, Norway’s government offered Indonesia a billion dollars to save its rainforests – but progress has been so slow that it only handed over $60m. “We would obviously have hoped things would have progressed more quickly,” Mr Helgesen says. “We haven’t seen actual progress in reducing deforestation.” This raises questions about whether “even the most magnanimous efforts at stopping deforestation can succeed”, Clark writes.

The signing of the Paris Agreement has shifted the political focus to more stringent mitigation of climate change, and so the scientific community has been asked to work out what that means on a tight timeline. “It is worth diverting some attention to the tasks mapped out in Paris”, says an editorial in Nature Geoscience. Studies that help us to understand a 1.5C world “deserve to benefit from all the ingenuity that the climate science community can muster”, it says.

In reality, the danger of much-feared widespread or prolonged blackouts is remote, writes Fiona Harvey in the Guardian. But the UK’s energy sector is in disarray nevertheless, with failure to build new gas-fired plants, doubts over plans for new nuclear, and the damages inflicted on the renewable energy sector by abrupt policy reversals.

Economist Guy Michaels mulls over his recent research into why flood-prone locations are overpopulated. “Rising sea levels and a changing climate are putting more cities’ residents at risk”, he says, and new homes are still being built in flood-prone areas because “private developers do not bear the full social cost of building on cheap land on flood plains”. “We need better policies to ensure that we do not mistakenly subsidise new construction on the flood plains”, he writes.

Rising sea surface temperatures could cause an increase in lightning in the Mediterranean region, a new study suggests. Researchers analysed lightning activity over the Mediterranean between 2005 and 2014. They identified major hotspots of lightning strikes and found activity was more likely when sea surface temperatures were at their warmest in autumn. Human-caused warming is likely to enhance conditions for lightning in future, the researchers say.

A new study investigates that feasibility of reducing carbon emissions from tropical deforestation by half within five years. The researchers outline two scenarios for achieving the target, both of which emphasise the critical role of Brazil and the need to reverse the trends of increasing deforestation in many other tropical countries. While Brazil has made the largest reduction in deforestation emissions between 2001 and 2013, it is still the largest emitter, the researchers find.

Global warming over recent decades is now large enough that regional climate change is emerging above the noise of natural variability, a new study says. Researchers analysed seasonal average temperatures for both summer and winter in many regions around the globe. They identified a shift to warmer temperatures, particularly in the summer for mid-latitude regions and all year round in low latitude regions.