"NOAA’s leader, Jane Lubchenco, announced [Wednesday] morning she is leaving the agency at the end of February (2013)."

"As scrutiny increases over the relationship between oil and gas industry funding and academic research, universities are likely to take a second look at their conflict-of-interest guidelines."

"A blue-ribbon panel of scientific and technology advisers to President Obama warns that the nation risks losing its longstanding supremacy in food production because research in agriculture has not kept up with new challenges like climate change, depleted land and water resources and emerging pests, pathogens and invasive plants."

"The University of Texas said today that it has accepted the findings of a damning independent review of the preparation of a report on potential impacts of shale gas drilling by the school’s Energy Institute. The school said it will undertake six recommended actions, the most significant being the withdrawal of papers from the Energy Institute’s Web site related to the report until they are submitted for fresh expert review."

"Checking 20 years' of projections by the foremost global climate science panel against reality finds that the group has consistently underestimated the pace and impacts of climate change – with severe consequences for the public it is tasked to inform."

Don't believe everything you read in the news media. A new study of 13,950 peer-reviewed scientific articles published between 1 January 1991 and 9 November 2012 reports that only 24 of them, or 0.17% rejected the idea that human activity was causing global warming. It was self-published by geologist-blogger James Lawrence Powell.

"Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), a skeptic of man-made global warming, is set to take over the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology in the 113th Congress."

"JUNGFRAUJOCH, Switzerland -- On a clear day at the Sphinx, a legendary atmospheric observatory 11,000 feet up in the snowed-in peaks of the Bernese Alps, the blue sky runs down green hills and white glaciers toward seemingly all of Europe beyond. On a lucky day here, though, there's only gray. There are only clouds."

"Most people try to avoid ticks. But not Tom Mather. The University of Rhode Island researcher goes out of his way to find them."

"For drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, the 17-page article in the New England Journal of Medicine represented a coup. The 2006 report described a trial that compared three diabetes drugs and concluded that Avandia, the company’s new drug, performed best. ... What only careful readers of the article would have gleaned is the extent of the financial connections between the drugmaker and the research."

"Pennsylvania's environmental protection chief is defending his agency's controversial system for testing water wells near Marcellus Shale operations by saying other states work the same way. But regulators in those states say that's not true."

"Remember that questionable study put out by the State University at Buffalo earlier this year, the one that claimed Pennsylvania was doing a good job at regulating the fracking industry? This week SUNY Buffalo's president announced his decision to shutter its publisher, the school's own Shale Resources and Society Institute (SRSI)."

"With the U.S. intelligence budget shrinking, the CIA has quietly shut down its Center on Climate Change and National Security -- a project that was launched with the support of Leon Panetta when he led the agency, but that drew sharp criticism from some Republicans in Congress."

"BP and the U.S. government portrayed in public a united front as a runaway well spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. But they privately sought to withhold potentially critical information from each other, possibly slowing efforts to solve the crisis, according to new testimony."

The Conservative Harper government is discouraging Environment Canada scientists from talking to news media about their published findings on pollution from oilsands.