"WASHINGTON, DC -- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scientist who first revealed the dangers of toxic dust at the World Trade Center disaster site has received a second notice of proposed removal from her job more than a year after a federal civil service court ordered her returned to work."

"Pavillion, Wyo., is a tiny community of fewer than 300 people, nearly 2,000 miles from Washington, D.C., in a deeply Republican state that President Obama never had any chance of winning. But Obama's top aide on energy issues, Heather Zichal, took a significant interest in the community's water supply in late 2011 and early 2012."

"Publishers producing high school biology textbooks that could be used in classrooms across Texas are being pressured to water down lessons on evolution and climate change, a progressive watchdog group said Monday."

"This month, the world will get a new report from a United Nations panel about the science of climate change. Scientists will soon meet in Stockholm to put the finishing touches on the document, and behind the scenes, two big fights are brewing."

"WASHINGTON -- House Republicans scouring for evidence of overreaching environmental regulations are taking aim at a two-decade-old, taxpayer-funded scientific study by Harvard researchers that linked air pollution to disease and death."

"Scientists used to be well represented among the nearly half of Americans who voted Republican. But that's changed over the years, and one poll found that just 6 percent of scientists call themselves part of the GOP now."

"Scientists probing the mystery of the so-called 'global warming hiatus' may have made a breakthrough. According to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, a persistent area of unusually cool sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean could explain why, despite ever-increasing amounts of manmade greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, global average surface temperatures have increased at a slower rate during the past 15 years."

"Three months ago, the Obama administration made a little-noticed but potentially pivotal move in the stepped-up fight against climate change: it boosted the U.S. government's official estimate of the future economic damage caused by carbon pollution."

"Despite the fact that more people now acknowledge that climate change represents a significant threat to human well-being, this has yet to translate into any meaningful action. Psychologists may have an answer as to why this is."

"OSLO -- Climate scientists are surer than ever that human activity is causing global warming, according to leaked drafts of a major UN report, but they are finding it harder than expected to predict the impact in specific regions in coming decades."
 

"The University of California at Berkeley cut laboratory financing this week for a professor who has complained for years about corporate-led retaliation for his association of health risks with a widely used herbicide."  The herbicide is atrazine.

"NASA is getting ready to turn its scientific instruments toward our home planet with a trio of Earth-observing missions set to launch in 2014."

"Here comes more bad PR for climate change–denying politicians.

"A year ago, the Fish and Wildlife Service was poised to use a scientifically flawed range map for the American burying beetle during a preliminary assessment of the Keystone XL pipeline's effect on the endangered insect."

"The weather is one of those topics that is fairly easy for people to agree on. Climate, however, is something else. Most of the scientists who study the Earth say our climate is changing and humans are part of what's making that happen. But to a lot of nonscientists it's still murky. This week, two of the nation's most venerable scientific institutions tried to explain it better."