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Joe Romm’s new book details the sticky messaging tactics successfully employed by Trump and others

Scientists like me – and really, everyone – can learn from President Donald Trump’s mastery of viral messaging.

True, he has turned the United States into a pariah nation, one reviled for ripping immigrant children from their parents and from withdrawing from our only real chance at stabilizing the climate, the Paris Accord.

I wrote this book because I have met so many frustrated scientists and environmentalists who want to get their message out, but don’t know how to be heard above the Niagara Falls of noise gushing from the internet and cable news. As an MIT-trained physicist who has been blogging for 12 years, I’ve learned a lot of the secrets of viral storytelling and messaging. But I’ve also had to unlearn a lot of things I was taught on the road to my Ph.D. So, I wrote this handbook for anyone who wants to learn the lessons from the world’s greatest viral communicators.

The main message is that if you want to grab and keep people’s attention – if you want to be as clicky and sticky as possible – you need to create an emotionally compelling and memorable message using a few basic rules. And rule number one is to tell a story with the simple And-But-Therefore formula used by Hollywood screenwriters and viral superstars like Oprah.

Climate change represents perhaps the greatest challenge we have ever faced as a civilization. But those seeking to communicate the scientific evidence have found themselves subject to concerted attacks by fossil fuel interests who find the implications of the science to be a threat to their bottom line.

Few have had both the courage to do battle with the forces of denial and the skill to communicate the science and its implications with clarity and vision. My friend Joe Romm is such an individual.

Wood Buffalo national park also faces danger from oil and gas development and hydroelectric projects, government report says

The world’s second-largest national park is under threat from a destructive combination of climate change, oil and gas development and hydroelectric projects, according to a new report from the Canadian government.

Related: Canada's National Parks: from Hollywood beauties to beautiful beasts – in pictures

Related: Half of Canada's monitored wildlife is in decline, major study finds

Sea level rises are not some distant threat; for many Americans they are very real. In an extract from her chilling new book, Rising, Elizabeth Rush details how the US coastline will be radically transformed in the coming years

In 1890, just over six thousand people lived in the damp lowlands of south Florida. Since then the wetlands that covered half the state have been largely drained, strip malls have replaced Seminole camps, and the population has increased a thousandfold. Over roughly the same amount of time the number of black college degree holders in the United States also increased a thousandfold, as did the speed at which we fly, the combined carbon emissions of the Middle East, and the entire population of Thailand.

About 60 of the region’s more than 6 million residents have gathered in the Cox Science Building at the University of Miami on a sunny Saturday morning in 2016 to hear Harold Wanless, or Hal, chair of the geology department, speak about sea level rise. “Only 7% of the heat being trapped by greenhouse gases is stored in the atmosphere,” Hal begins. “Do you know where the other 93% lives?”

Related: Coral reefs ‘will be overwhelmed by rising oceans’

Production and disposal of paper bags has greater climate impact than plastic, says Environment Agency

Experts have criticised Morrisons’ decision to switch from plastic to paper bags for fruit and vegetables, branding it a retrograde step for efforts to tackle climate change.

This week the supermarket ditched transparent plastic bags in favour of recyclable paper ones, in a move it said was prompted by customers’ worries over pollution. But the step is likely to have unintended consequences and trade one environmental challenge for another.

Related: Supermarkets under pressure to reveal amount of plastic they create

Why is plastic being demonised?

Related: Now Waitrose is being shamed for food waste. Yet shoppers are to blame | Rachel McCormack