Donald Trump spent years attempting to persuade the Scottish Government to halt plans to build wind farms off their north coast, newly-published letters reveal. In a series of 16 letters sent to Alex Salmond between 2011 and 2013, Trump argued the wind turbines would have a detrimental affect on Scotland’s landscape – and damage the view from his Aberdeenshire golf course. The correspondence came to light after a Freedom of Information request by the Huffington Post, and has been covered widely in the media. The tone of the letters “swung wildly between coaxing and threatening,” says the Guardian. In one letter, on 19 April 2012, Trump wrote that “Your economy will become a third world wasteland that global investors will avoid,” notes the BBC. Another warns Salmond that he would be known as “Mad Alex – the man who destroyed Scotland” if he went ahead with the planned wind farm, reports the Telegraph. The letters released include just one reply from Mr Salmond, in which he told Trump that renewable energy industry would help create job opportunities in Scotland. The story is also covered by The Hill, the Times and MailOnline.

US scientists are forecasting ice-melting temperatures in the middle of winter for some parts of the Arctic for the second year in a row. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says some parts of the Arctic are expected to get gusts of warm air that are more than 20C hotter than usual over the coming days, taking temperatures over zero degrees. The warmth has led to a later than usual “freeze-up” of ice in the Arctic Ocean, NOAA’s Jeremy Mathis tells the New York Times, which may lead to low ice coverage in the spring and summer. Meanwhile, a quick-fire analysis of recent exceptionally high temperatures in the Arctic shows the warm conditions would have been extremely unlikely without human-caused climate change. The Conversation, Think Progress and Scientific American also cover the research – as does Carbon Brief. Elsewhere, another Guardian piece looks at how cutting emissions of soot could be a “quick win” for slowing Arctic sea ice melt in the short term. And finally on the topic of the Arctic, the MailOnline showcases a proposed new Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker. The craft, named “Leader”, is designed to keep the Northern Sea Route, along the country’s Arctic coast, open all year round. The Mail helpfully includes a picture of the Millennium Falcon as “At first glance, you might mistake [the icebreaker] as a spaceship from one of the Star Wars films.”

Japan is a closing an experimental nuclear reactor that has worked for just 250 days of its 22-year lifespan – at a cost of £7.2bn. The Monju reactor in western Japan’s Fukui city is a “fast breeder” – designed to burn most of its own spent fuel, eliminating the need to deal with the nuclear waste. But it suffered its first problems months after it went live, and has not worked properly since. After being taken offline following the Fukushima disaster in 2011, restarting the Monju reactor would take at least eight years of preparation costing more than £3.7bn, says the Financial Times. The decision means only Russia, France and India will continue to operate fast breeder reactors, notes the FT. The decision “adds to a list of failed attempts around the world to make the [fast breeder] technology commercially viable,” says Reuters.

In the first of four stories concerning Australia, the Guardian reports that the proposed Adani Carmichael coal mine has been covertly funded by the World Bank through a private arm that is supposed to back sustainable development. A report by US-based human rights organisation, Inclusive Development International, says Adani acquired exploration rights for the coal mine in 2010 with a $250m loan from several banks, which was in turn funded by the World Bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation. Meanwhile, the Australian federal resources minister has hit back at ABC news for what he described as one-sided coverage of Adani’s mining plans, says a second Guardian article. Matt Canavan accused ABC over a series of reports around the Adani network, including allegations against the ultimate parent company, Adani Enterprises Limited. Meanwhile, a third article reports that government figures show Australia’s emissions are rising and projected to keep doing so to 2030, meaning the country will fail to meet its 2030 emissions targets. And finally, the paper also reports that BP has finally officially withdrawn its application to drill for oil in the remote waters of the Great Australian Bight.

Dong Energy, the world’s biggest operator of offshore wind farms, has agreed to sell half of a UK project to Australian investment bank Macquarie in a deal worth £1.6bn. The Danish group is selling 50% of Race Bank, which is located about 17 miles off the north Norfolk and Lincolnshire coasts and will produce enough electricity to power more than 400,000 British households once online in 2018. Under the terms of the deal, Macquarie has agreed to take on half the wind farm’s remaining construction costs, including the transmission lines connecting it to the shore, says the Telegraph. The Times also has the story.

Lord Prior of Brampton has been appointed parliamentary under-secretary at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), as part of a surprise government reshuffle that sees Energy Minister Baroness Neville-Rolfe moved to the Treasury. Although Prior’s precise brief at BEIS has yet to be confirmed, the reshuffle suggests responsibility for energy in the new departments could be downgraded from the ministerial position held by Neville-Rolfe. Not much is known about Lord Prior’s position on climate change, says DeSmog UK, but “in the few occasions he did reference climate change, he seemed to acknowledge the potential seriousness of the problem.”

The Washington Post carries an in-depth interview with Gina McCarthy, head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, as she prepares to leave office. McCarthy offers her view on her replacement – Scott Pruitt – (“He is smart enough to know that he’s taking an oath to do a job, that this agency has a good mission and we’re proud of it”), her unease about Donald Trump’s presidency (“I’m concerned, without question, by much of what I’d call political rhetoric”) and the important of underpinning environmental regulations with evidence (“Science is everything. Almost every action we take is bounded by what the science tells us.”).

Barack Obama permanently banning new oil and gas drilling in most US-owned waters in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans is clearly “a poke in the eye for the President-elect,” says the Evening Standard’s City editor, Jim Armitage. But, the oil industry and the new government will clearly fight to overturn the ban, says Armitage, and “Doubtless they’ll eventually succeed”. In the mean time, the curbs aren’t that meaningful, he writes, and onshore drilling and fracking will continue for the foreseeable future: “Trump and his crew will make hay in deregulating those industries, and Obama is powerless to stop him.”

A new study reconstructs climate conditions over the last millennium using annually resolved coral records from the South China Sea. The results suggest that the Medieval Climate Anomaly (AD 900–1300) may not have been a globally uniform change and that the cold “Little Ice Age” period coincides with the Maunder sunspot minimum and is, therefore, associated with low solar activity. In the past, climate changes in the global oceans have remained uncertain because of poor proxy data.