AAAS: “Global destocking of extensive livestock: An overlooked trend with Earth system consequences.” A full one-quarter of the terrestrial land on our planet that is neither permafrost nor snow/ice-covered is used for ‘managed grazing.’

AAAS: “Politics and war complicate global effort to study changes to Earth’s poles.” As part of the fifth International Polar Year (IPY-5), a global push to study the planet’s most remote regions, “Norway will fan out across the Arctic Ocean from Svalbard to the North Pole.”

CanaryMedia: “Offshore wind showed up big during the East Coast’s brutal cold.” Energy experts have forecast that ‘offshore wind could deliver substantial amounts of power to densely populated, land-constrained communities along America’s East Coast.’

AAAS: “Pre-Incans collected seabird poop from remote islands to use as fertilizer.” In the 19th century Spain + Peru went to war over guano from a small archipelago off the coast of Peru.

U.S. Drought Monitor: “Map released: February 12, 2026.” May seem odd to be concerned about drought almost smack dab in the middle of our northern hemispheric winter. The color key developed by the National Drought Mitigation Center lies near the bottom.

AAAS: “NASA greenlights two earth science missions, to researchers’ relief.” The photo shows the sort of phenomenon we desperately need to study.

AAAS: “Snapping shrimp use headgear to protect their brains from shock waves.” The undersea world is ‘full of claws, sharp teeth and stingers.’

Techradar.com: “World’s first EV with a sodium-ion battery has landed—and it beats traditional lithium batteries in one key way.” Cheaper sodium-ion batteries are rapidly becoming a reality.

CanaryMedia: “Chart: Surprise—batteries got cheaper again last year.” Back in 2016, when batteries were more than triple the cost they are today, electric vehicles accounted for less than 1% of new car sales worldwide.

AAAS: “Battery reactions give clues to fighting forever chemicals.” It is widely known + bemoaned that the cancer-causing industrial compounds used in Teflon™ cookware + other nonstick technology can persist almost indefinitely in the environment.

CleanTechnica: “New Pumped Hydro Energy Storage System Needs No Mountains.” President loudly proclaims fossil fuel love, but also used excuse of bogus “energy emergency” fortunately embraces hydropower along with biofuels + geothermal , 3 domestic resources that can compete with fossil fuels.

AAAS: “Serious side effects dim hopes for the first chikungunya vaccine.” Last time I posted about this pesky virus was in May of 2025. It was last March that the chikungunya epidemic was accelerating across Réunion in the western Indian Ocean.

CanaryMedia: “A rare plant species thrives amid solar panels in the Nevada desert.” Ostensibly barren Mojave Desert is actually teeming with plants + animals, including a rare species known as threecorner milkvetch, in the pea family which splays across the ground instead of climbing up a trellis.

AAAS: “As the world warms, freezing rain shifts to the U.S. South.” Zong-Liang Yang, an earth systems scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, stated, “Compared to those big natural disasters, [freezing rain is] relatively understudied.”

CanaryMedia: “Sunrise Wind can proceed, ending Trump’s offshore wind ban—for now.” Ørsted A/S is the Danish multinational energy company building Sunrise Wind, and they said in a statement that it will ​“restart impacted activities immediately.”

AAAS: "Snakes on a train? Deadly reptiles may be hopping railcars in India." Dikansh Parmar, source of most of this article, is based at the University of Bonn + also at the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change.

Couple of points this morning. First, I am currently working on two manuscripts, one with a deadline, so this daily blog is going to be more like 2-3 times a week for a stretch. Second, just yesterday I received notice of an award for my last published book, CLOUD DRAGON.

AAAS: “Earthquake sensors buried in the quietest spot on Earth.” In early January, researchers finished drilling two 2.5-km-deep holes in the South Pole’s ice using jetted hot water.

CarbonBrief: “Guest post: China and India account for 87% of new coal-power capacity so far in [August] 2025.” There is a growing global divide between many countries phasing out coal power and a handful continuing to expand new capacity, are revealed in latest Global Coal Plant Tracker results.

CanaryMedia: “A rare step forward for a US pumped hydro project.”Long before lithium-ion batteries reshaped the power sector, utilities stored electricity by pumping water uphill when energy was abundant and later letting it descend, turning turbines to generate power when needed.

AAAS: “Bee-hunting beetles are the first animals known to fake the smell of flowers.” This investigation of parasitic blister beetles demonstrated a novel form of chemical trickery. “Deception is everywhere,” says May Berenbaum, an entomologist at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.

AAAS: "As Greenland loses ice, global sea levels will rise—and its own will fall." My wife + I returned last nite from a week's vacation on our own coast, in northern Oregon + southern Washington. But it is Greenland that is experiencing "glacial isotactic adjustment."

CleanEnergyCanada: “Europe enjoys 21 EVs selling for less than $40,000 Canadian. Only one is available in Canada: report.” To start, loonies to dollars: €40,000 = $28,787.

ClimateCentral: “2025 in Review: U.S. Temperatures.” Climate Matters analyses are based on open-access data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—which, not incidentally, just had its funding protected by Congress.

CanaryMedia: “EPA plans to give 11 coal plants a free pass on toxic ash disposal.” I’ve been a little hard on the EPA recently, but they deserve it. Here’s another reason: “The Environmental Protection Agency plans to let 11 coal plants dump toxic coal ash into unlined pits until 2031.”

NatureGeoscience: "Deglaciation of the Prudhoe Dome in northwestern Greenland in response to Holocene warming." Gorgeous photo of Greenland’s Prudhoe Ice Dome [at top].

AAAS: “Jellyfish sleep a lot like us—and for the same reasons.” Jellies are not fish, instead, technically, cnidarians. “Despite lacking a central nervous system, jellyfish + sea anemones have sleep patterns remarkably similar to those of humans, researchers report today in Nature Communications.”

LinkedIn: “A climate reality check from Bill McKibben.” This is from a guest post on Katharine Hayhoe’s LI site. Hayhoe is a certified climate scientist, and McKibben is a prolific writer on nature + climate.

CleanTechnica: “EPA Rejects Colorado’s Regional Haze Plan, Including Coal Plant Retirement Dates.” The Colorado’s Regional Haze State Implementation Plan was broadly supported by the state, utilities, industry, and environmental groups.

AAAS: “Paratyphoid fever and relapsing fever in 1812 Napoleon’s devastated army.” In the autumn of 1812, ‘Napoleon + his Grande Armée of over 500,000 soldiers retreated from Moscow with few supplies and in the face of winter.’

AAAS: “The real da Vinci Code..” In 2024, microbial geneticist Norberto Gonzalez-Juarbe gently took swab samples of a centuries-old red chalk drawing on paper entitled Holy Child. La

AAAS: “Against all odds, a curious sea creature survived the dino-killing asteroid.” It was some 66 M yrs ago that a 14-km asteroid struck near the Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico.

CleanTechnica: “How Long Until China Is At 90% Plugin Vehicle Sales?” More than half of China’s new vehicle sales are plugins—54% across the first 11 months of 2025 (33% BEVs alone, rest are PHEVs).

AAAS: “Deep-sea earthquakes fuel huge plankton blooms in Antarctica.” Several tectonic plates underlie Antarctica; their boundaries create the Australian Antarctic Ridge + toward the east the Pacific Antarctic Ridge, associated with hydrothermal vents + heightened earthquake activity.

AAAS: “Chemicals in million-year-old fossils reveal animals’ lives in detail.” Some 2.4 M yrs ago, “a large + now-extinct elephant meandered along the grassy shores of Lake Malawi in East Africa…scientists know it was a juvenile that munched wormwood bark + mulberry leaves.”

AAAS: “Signal Transduction Scaling a new limb .” I’d never thought that salamanders had mythical power before, but perhaps I should reconsider. “Salamanders may be slow, but they have a superpower.”

CanaryMedia: “Chart: US steelmaking is slowly getting cleaner.” We badly need technological progress, partly in terms of pollution reduction—global estimate of deaths from air pollution 7 M per yr according to WHO—but also for the other critical goal of electrification of heavy industry.

TheCoolDown: “Experts sound alarm as ‘unprecedented’ phenomenon unfolds across US: ‘We’re closer to the edge … than we realize.’” Snow droughts in Utah could impact how much water is available in 2026.

TheHill: “Trump is repurposing clean energy funds to revive coal power.” The Energy Department has been dipping their fingers into the till, in order to roll out $625 M in coal-focused programs aimed at recommissioning and modernizing coal facilities.

Oilprice[.]com: "The Permian Is Drowning in Its Own Wastewater." An issue with excess wastewater in Texas is a challenge to an industry that is pumping almost half the nation’s oil.

Grist: “The EPA website got the basics of climate science right. Until last week.” What took them so long? The Trump administration purged 80 pages of factual information about the deteriorating climate—including the concept that humans are responsible.Fa

CanaryMedia: “Nuclear power’s loud-but-quiet year.” In terms of press releases, huge American governmental support, + pledges to build new nuclear power—2025 was a gangbusters year.

CanaryMedia: “Chart: EVs are ascendant — and gas cars are past their prime.” Many Americans suffer from a misapprehension about the surging success of electric vehicles globally.

AAAS: “Two ancient humans, including famed ‘Iceman,’ had cancer-causing virus.” A warrior’s tale: ‘Some 5000 years ago, the corpse of a man known as Ötzi, “the Iceman,” froze in the Alps along what’s now the Austrian-Italian border.’

Oilprice.com: “Why Christmas Is the Most Stressful Week for the Diesel Market.” Santa runs on diesel, not reindeer. “Every year, the global holiday economy depends on a short, unforgiving surge in distillate consumption that powers trucks, ports, warehouses, refrigeration, + backup generation.” its

AAAS: “Watch these raindrops turn into rolling ‘sandballs’” Serendipity whispered: “Research began when scientists hiking in the Swiss Alps made a chance observation as they walked in the rain: tiny balls rolling down a steep slope of soil—intrigued—they filmed the balls with a phone.”

EnvironmentalResearchLetters: “The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions.” This post is more for citizens of developed economies.

CanaryMedia: “Chart: Clean energy remains dominant in the US — despite Trump.” For those who have assumed the president has successfully squashed renewable energy in this country, this may prove interesting.

Wikipedia: “Saint George and the Dragon.” There are a couple of reasons for this post. First + foremost, today, December 23rd, is the date memorializing this legend. Second, there have been many “Georges” in my own lineage, + I am one of them—though I am usually recognized by my nickname “Sandy.”

CleanTechnica: "Oilfield Binge & Purge: Another Reason To Ditch Fossil Fuels." The state of Oklahoma "has done a good job of exploiting its wind energy resources, but its deep roots in the oil + gas industry keep popping up to haunt its people with polluted air, water, + soil."