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The new data is a welcome sign of progress in the battle against global warming but many challenges remain, including methane from cattle

Global emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide remained static in 2016, a welcome sign that the world is making at least some progress in the battle against global warming by halting the long-term rising trend.

All of the world’s biggest emitting nations, except India, saw falling or static carbon emissions due to less coal burning and increasing renewable energy, according to data published on Thursday by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (NEAA). However other mainly developing nations, including Indonesia, still have rising rates of CO2 emissions.

Related: China's coal peak hailed as turning point in climate change battle

‘I wanted to capture the beauty and horror of the fire. But then these golfers turned up and got in the way of my picture’

I noticed the Eagle Creek fire when I was 14,000 feet in the air above Oregon in early September. I was preparing for my third skydive of the day and, through the plane door, I spotted a vertical plume of smoke that hadn’t been there on my previous jump. A lot of fires pop up at this time of year, so it wasn’t surprising – but I didn’t realise how big it would become or that it was Eagle Creek, which is one of my favourite trails to hike.

A couple of days later, after the fire had spread, I went to take photos. I ended up being redirected and found myself in the parking lot of a golf course that I didn’t know existed. I completely stumbled on this scene.

Related: Massive Oregon wildfire started by teen with fireworks, police say

As usual, conservative media outlets distorted a climate science paper to advance the denialist agenda

Last week, Nature Geoscience published a study suggesting that we have a bigger remaining carbon budget than previously thought to keep global warming below the 1.5°C aggressive Paris climate target. Many scientists quickly commented that the paper’s conclusion was based on some questionable assumptions, and this single study shouldn’t be blindly accepted as gospel truth.

Conservative media outlets did even worse than that. They took one part of the paper’s analysis out of context and grossly distorted its conclusions to advance their anti-climate agenda.

Headline claim from carbon budget paper that warming is 0.9ºC from pre-I is unsupported. Using globally complete estimates ~1.2ºC (in 2015) pic.twitter.com/B4iImGzeDE

We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.

Claim of a substantial gap between model projections for global temperature & observations is not true (updated with 2017 estimate): pic.twitter.com/YHzzXtbhs9

I think some press reporting is misleading as our paper did not assess climate impacts or climate model performance. Rather, our paper confirms the need for much increased urgent action from around the world if society stands a chance of limiting warming to 1.5C.

the IPCC specifically assessed that temperatures in the 2020s would be 0.9-1.3C warmer than pre-industrial, the lower end of which is already looking conservative. Anyone who had troubled to read our paper would have found this “IPCC AR5 Ch11 projection” helpfully labelled on two of our figures, and clearly consistent with our new results.

Without action to tackle global warming, deadly summer temperatures of 40C in Europe could be normal by 2050

The scorching temperatures across Europe’s Mediterranean nations this summer were made at least 10 times more likely by climate change, according to scientists.

Furthermore, without action to tackle global warming, such summer heatwaves with temperatures soaring over 40C will become normal by 2050.

Related: If you care about identity politics your priority has to be saving the planet | Matthew Todd

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